I don’t get up till 4.30 in the afternoon.
With only about twenty minutes before the bus arrives, I need to get my shit together. I need to wake up. I boil the kettle while I shower.
I’m not joking when I say the first coffee of the morning — or, in this case, the afternoon — is something I think about every night before going to sleep, and it’s the first thing to come into my head when I wake.
It’s my one unshakable bourgeois habit, ever since a young doctor in training named Mason Lonnergan introduced me to the French press. Before then I’d never had a coffee where there was undissolved gunk leftover after making the drink; I’d certainly never had a coffee bought from a shop. Yet I still thought I was a cut above, given at home we drank Nescafé when a lot of other people were drinking International Roast and Maxwell House. During senior high school I moved on to Moccona instant. I believed I had reached the pinnacle of the coffee experience. I looked down at the commoners and their inferior blends.
Then I got to the big smoke and found a whole other world of coffee appreciation. I dived more readily into learning about coffee than I did learning about medicine.
These days, I like my beans freshly ground just before brewing on either an aeropress or French press. The beans should be a light–medium roast so that you’re not burning away the oils and leaving an ashtray flavour more suited to stouts (for which ashtray is de rigueur). My preference is single-origin Central American or northern South American Arabica beans grown above twelve hundred metres. They should be roasted as close to consumption as possible. And, yes, I’m aware I sound like a wanker, but I don’t care.
I love coffee, I live for coffee, yet I’m back to drinking Moccona instant. The only saving grace is cream, which can mellow and improve the shittiest flavours. I’ve always had cream in my coffee. One of our neighbours was an old Slav named Merv Sulich. He’d retired from farming but still ran a couple of dairy cows and kept bees; it earned him a few bucks and kept his mind and body active. In fact, last I heard, Merv is still alive and still keeping bees and he’s somewhere in his eighties, so I’d say he’s got the right idea. Anyway, once a week we’d go over and get a bucket of fresh cow’s milk from Merv, then we’d boil it up on the stove and a nice layer of yellow cream would congeal on top. That cream is so different in taste, consistency and colour to what normally passes as cream that it doesn’t deserve to share the name. It’s magnificent stuff. Sometimes when we hadn’t decanted the milk into a jug and I was pouring it straight into my tea from the pot, a little bit of cream would slop in. It tasted good, and soon enough I was scooping cream into my tea; then, when I started drinking coffee, I put it in my coffee. The beauty of cream is that it is low in lactose and doesn’t overwhelm the palette with sweetness, while at the same time the lipids elevate all flavours, much like salt in food, as well as adding a mouthfeel equivalent to a rich espresso. Unbeatable.
I scoop a spoonful of coffee granules into a cup and add near-boiling water. I open the bar fridge and grab out the carton of cream. You’ve got to be kidding — I can tell just by the weight that it’s empty, the last little dribble of liquid having set solid.
Fuck! Why didn’t I buy more cream?
I feel a surge of anger, and I know I shouldn’t, I know it’s just a stupid drink, but it really pisses me off. Am I meant to go to work without having had coffee?
I pick up my cup of black coffee and look at it like I’m staring at dog turd. I feel actual hatred for that cup of coffee. I part my snarl and blow then take a ginger sip. Yep, tastes like dog turd. I put the cup down next to my nearly empty bottle of whisky. I look at the two. I’ve never had a black Irish coffee. It could work. The sour burn of alcohol might just fool my brain into thinking it’s detecting the odd citric tang of an Indonesia-grown Robusta bean. That, or at least I’ll be tasting dog turd and whisky. I open the bottle and pour a dash into my coffee. I take a sip. Yep, tastes like whisky in instant coffee. The two flavours really don’t merge at all. I drink it anyway.
The funny thing about booze is that even when it tastes like shit, it triggers something in the head that convinces you it’s a good idea to have more. I’m very nearly on autopilot as I make another coffee and put it in my travel cup and add a splash of whisky. I put the bottle down and screw the lid back on, but there’s so little left it seems pathetic leaving it. I drizzle the last of it into my cup. I’m still angry at the coffee. I feel like this is my way of saying, “Fuck you, coffee.” I also know that that makes no sense. I don’t care. It makes me feel better.