Coffee post 14,000,506
Today, my dad would have been 81 years old. Today, my brother and sister in-law have been married 14 years. May 1 is a big family day, so today I'm going to write about pour over coffee.
1989-1990. Senior year of high school. I had signed up for a classical guitar class as an elective because... just because. I was the only one who signed up for the class so it was canceled. I was put into the photography class instead. Best administrative mishap to ever happen to me. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life. A whole other story for a later date.
I had quit swimming a year earlier. Again, another story for another day. I was focusing really hard on school and developing a relatively normal social life for the first time in my life. Senior year was a breeze. I had a light course load. German 2 for a semester. Journalism. AP English and Government. And... photography.
I'd never taken a first period class before. They started at 7:25a, which, if you're a year round competitive swimmer is problematic for several reasons.
A) You're up at 4am to get ready to do weights or swim 2 miles or so at 5am. B) You're getting home around 7am. C) You reek of chlorine. D) You're STARVING! E) You're kinda tired and sore.
These are not conditions amenable to being at school at 7:25am and in good shape for learning.
Senior year, these were not my concerns, so photography at 7:25am it was! My only real concern was being tired from going to shows or staying out late with friends, even on weeknights. My parents didn't care about the schedule I kept as long as my grades were good. They trusted me and I will always be grateful for that.
I would spend my evenings after homework hanging out with Chris, Pat, Charger, Andy, Greg, and Craig. We would generally go out into the world and see concerts or basically be weird at anything within view.
Random bystander in San Jose in 1990... "Is that a Toyota pickup full of teenagers wearing 70s clothes and football helmets?"
Me driving the Toyota pickup full of teenagers wearing 70s clothes and football helmets..."Let's go bowling!"
It was a fun time with great friends.
All this weirdness and late night rock shows on weeknights made 7:25am a challenging time of day.
Enter coffee.
Prior to senior year, I had the occasional cup of coffee, mocha, latte, or espresso. Usually at bookstores or at jazz shows. I didn't smoke, drink, or consume any drugs at this point... that comes later! I wasn't straight edge. I just didn't consume any illegal or illicit substances at this point in my life. A residual effect of my spartan swimming days.
7:25am came earlier and earlier every day, so my giant mug from one of the local convenience stores transformed into a coffee vessel. It's days of containing and keeping cool stupid quantities of soda were over. It had graduated to the high octane stuff.
We had a coffee maker at home. Some Mr. Coffee percolator piece of garbage. It did the trick though. I'd blindly pour whatever generic brand coffee beans mom would buy at the local grocery store into the machine, pour in the water, hit the button, wait 10 minutes, and then pour the sour, bitter garbage water into my giant cup and walk the 6 blocks to Leigh High School for Photography with Mr. Sweeney at 7:25am.
I liked coffee. I liked the caffeine rush. After 30 years of habitual coffee consumption, I miss that. It takes a fairly ginormous amount of coffee to get me to that point now, and at 47 years old, I fear it might kill me.
Over the year, I developed my coffee palette. I enjoyed espresso. I was given an espresso maker as a graduation present. I never really got the hang of making a really proper espresso, but I could make something drinkable and loaded with caffeine.
1990. September. UC Santa Cruz. Kresge College. Building R8. The Zoo. It's not a dormitory. It's an apartment complex full of the craziest residents on the entire UCSC campus. I have my own garbage coffee maker, my espresso machine, and a French press because I thought it made fancier coffee. For a while these contraptions met my needs. I was a broke first year college student, so it was Folgers or its Safeway brand generic equivalent for the garbage coffee machine and the cheapest whole beans I could find for the French press and espresso maker. Caffeine, not taste was the most important consideration at this point in my life.
Lower Street in Kresge had a little cafe that would change everything. They brewed their coffee with beans from the Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, SCCRC for short. All the sophomores told us fledgling Banana Slugs that this is where we had to get coffee on campus and that the Indian Malabar roast was the best.
Ok, they were right. Indian Malabar was fantastic. Rich with bright notes and a caffeine punch you could really get behind. I was sold. But they had other roasts as well. Santa Cruz Dark, Beethoven Blend, Blues Breaker, and my personal favorite... ZOOOM! Yes. All caps with three Os! You can imagine what it was like simply from the name! This was my new favorite thing.
In exploring Santa Cruz, a place I had visited many times growing up, but mostly the beaches and the boardwalk, I learned about the two physical SCCRC locations. One was "the annex" at the metro station and the other was the official cafe on Pacific Avenue downtown. Over the next 5 years, I would spend a lot of time at both of these locations. The cafe was a common social gathering point. The annex is where you grabbed a cup before you hopped a bus somewhere.
Neither of these places was a simple order and go establishment. Here, they did pour-over coffee. Here, people ordered drip coffee like your average Seattleite orders fancy drinks at a Starbucks.
Here's how it worked.
Me: I'd like an extra hot, double scoop, slow pour ZOOOM. (That's fancy speak for I want your most highly caffeinated cup of drip coffee)
Barista (a term I wouldn't learn until I moved to Seattle): You'll be under the Natural Bridges. (they marked your pour over with a postcard so you could keep track of it as they whizzed by in the background)
Then, the following would happen.
The barista would place a #4 cone filter into an open slot in the "brew bar"
Pour some hot water through the filter and let it filter through as they grabbed the fresh grounds
Place a 16oz cup under the slot in the brew bar
Pour in the coffee grounds
Level the grounds
Poke a divot into the grounds
Pour just enough water over the grounds to cover them
Walk away and do 8 other things
Return and pour just enough water over the grounds to cover them
Repeat 8 and 9 another 3-4 times
Once the cup was full, you pull the cup and go
This usually took anywhere from 5-6 minutes. If you were with friends, you'd wait patiently and talk about the great new place you found to to take mushrooms or acid and then pick up your coffee and go. And the coffee was perfect every single time. Infinitely superior to a percolator. I preferred it to French press, though I am a fan of the method. I can't stress that enough!
Pour over drip was pretty common throughout Santa Cruz. Numerous cafes used this method, but SCCRC had my favorite beans and roasts. The other places were all really damned good, but SCCRC was my favorite. The attention to detail and craft of such a simple, mundane thing always impressed me.
For five years, I would drink several of these a day. It became my normal. It was how you made coffee. Any other form of straight coffee was inferior, but still... coffee and I was happy to drink it because coffee.
Then March 1995. I moved to Seattle. A place I'd loved from afar for years. The music. The mountains. THE COFFEE! However, this was not a city of pour over drinkers. It was fancy lattes with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Sour, bitter percolated drip. Weirdly acidic espresso... a trend that proudly continues 24 years later.
It would be years before pour over would start appearing in cafes around Seattle.... and when it did, it wasn't the same. The barista would drop the grounds into a dry filter and just start dumping water all over it. There was none of the finesse of your average Santa Cruz cafe barista when it came to this technique. I stopped ordering it early on because it just wasn't worth the wait when the pour over was basically no better than the percolated or French press options.
In 24 years in Seattle, I have never owned a coffee machine. Several French presses because it's a great dump and go method of making coffee when you're in a hurry, but not so much of a hurry that you can only press a single button and BOOM! coffee. I've always had a pour over cone and a kettle though. Making coffee this way has been my ritual for decades now.
Still, to this day, nearly 30 years later, I make coffee at home in the same fashion that I learned watching the baristas at SCCRC. On Q13 news yesterday morning, I watched the champion barista of some 2019 coffee making competition vindicate my stubborn adherence to this practice as she explained in great detail the EXACT method I use to make pour over coffee. She won an award with this method! By the transitive property, I too am a world champion "maker of pour over coffee".
Comments