Coffee and Mellow

Today I hiked six miles in the rain with Sadie Rose, her son Asher and my dog. We went all over Table Mountain, to places I had never been before, and we got dumped on nearly the entire time. It was a beautiful hike with wild flowers and so much water everywhere. Little channels of water rushed all around us and cut deep grooves in the mud. The greens were all magnified, it was a beautiful day. At home, I'm working on moving out, extracting myself from the mountain of stuff I don't want anymore, all these relics from a life that is long-closed and collecting dust now are making my allergies worse. 

Coffee is an amazing elixir given to us by God to fuel connectivity, art, and revolutions. I have had years of adventure in coffee and I think coffee will be some part of my life and profession for maybe ever. I don't know, these things are hard to predict. I worked in coffee because I love coffee, and maybe even more than that, I love what coffee does to people: it opens our minds, literally in the circulatory systems sense, and figuratively in the rituals of togetherness it has always fueled. 

I don't sell coffee and make money on it directly like I used to, and so we've started over in a way, me and coffee. Our relationship is back to basics. And now I'm older and wiser and more sensitive to both of our needs. This happens I think for any tradesperson who's given a lot to a trade. These periods of reset and reevaluation, to test your love of a thing. Well I still love coffee, with or without a coffee paycheck.  

I have an admission that will turn the nose of any coffee geek roaster who insists on inserting 4 temperature probes in the twenty five thousand dollar roaster so they can track every nuance of the roast's movement. I have tracked roasts in an expensive roaster, and it is key to achieving the best results consistently. But I'm a cook, have been a cook since I was a teenager, and sometimes, most of the time, I just want to cook. To be a cook, you connect with the behavior of what you're cooking in a process that is based on the five senses, and a number of extra sensory perceptions. There's that space of just doing, letting go of control and letting the thing you're cooking tell you how to do it,  rather than a recipe or a graph. So here's my admission: I've been drinking coffee that I've been roasting on an old cast iron pan. 

That's it. I use a cast iron pan, a lid and a wisk. Like roasting almonds or sesame seeds, I keep it moving until the coffee is how I want it. I just roasted some Brazilian and Papau New Guinea coffees until about 20 seconds into second crack and then blended them into my last little TupperWear container. The coffee is just what I wanted, an educated yet mindless exercise of culinary art, like kneading bread until the gluten is just right, or cooking pinto beans until the skins still hold the bean together but the beans aren't mealy. Just now I wanted coffee that was a little darker with that thick buttery feel on the tongue, and the carmamel sweetness of a rainy day hike. 

Coffee is so full of magical properties that it's easy to forget that, despite all its flavor complexities and nuance, it is still a seed, a culinary commodity like rice or wheat. And it is truly wonderful in the mouth, and I think even more wonderful in our minds, but it's just another thing to attempt to cook deliciously, if you care about doing simple things well and making your life better and more deliberate. 

So get some green coffee and roast it in a pan how you want it. Play with it. Cook it. Keep it moving until it looks like how you like it and cool it off as quick as you can. Then take your overripe bananas and make some muffins with some walnuts in there, and enjoy your Sunday.