LET'S HAVE ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE

People have been drinking coffee for a thousand years-and most of it bad! Incredibly, however, not many are aware of this inferiority. Otherwise, Americans hardly would be gulping down 150 billion cups of the stuff annually. For the U.S.A. currently imports about 25 million bags, or 60 percent of all the beans grown. Today, of course, coffee is a universal drink and its global consumption exceeds that of any other beverage. Despite the modern prevalence of coffee, a really golden cup rarely is encountered anywhere today, a full millennium after that first bitter brew in Arabic Yemen. And in all the time elapsed since then the average drinker neither has learned what coffee can and should taste like, nor how to make it properly.

For this extraordinary illiteracy there's really no excuse, although there are several explanations.

In the first place, very few persons are exposed to GOOD coffee and the public has had little occasion or opportunity to develop a sense of discrimination. This is a great pity because GOOD coffee is just as easy to make and enjoy as the poor variety.

Secondly, the coffee-drinking habit in America has been acquired largely for the way it affects people, rather than for its innate goodness, and this partly accounts for the general indifference to quality.

Unlike alcohol, a depressant or narcotic, coffee is a stimulant, although there is nothing inherently habitforming in the drink itself and no after-penalties or letdown. Coffee also, of course, is a convivial beverage, promoting individual cheerfulness and corporate fellowship. It quickens the mind, sharpens perception, fortifies the spirit and lends wings to the imagination. Coffee does provide a definite "lift" and that, in a burdensome world, is one of its true benefactions. But only one, for there's more to coffee than pickup, if people only knew it. For a nation which prides itself on "gracious living," such ignorance is lamentable. Particularly since most of us regard coffee as an exclusively American heritage. We blink to learn that London was the world's coffee-import and drinking capital more than 400 years ago and that coffee-houses in Vienna were an institution several centuries before that.

This is not to say that the foreign brand today is superior to ours. On the contrary there is real justification for the complaint of Yankees abroad who can't wait to get back for some "good old American Java." However, I'd certainly like to be told where a better homeland product can be found.

It's true that in some of the big U.S. cities you can get GOOD coffee, if your search is diligent enough. The most likely places are the more expensive restaurants and hotels, or the specialty spots catering to the connoisseurs of good food.

In Los Angeles, for example, the Biltmore's coffee uniformly is good, the Ambassador's excellent on occassion, Dave Chasen's and Perino's most of the time. Fine coffee has been a tradition of the Palmer House in Chicago for decades and while I haven't been in New York recently there must be a likely strike or two there and possibly in San Francisco and New Orleans as well. But don't count on it.

The coffee you get in Arizona is so uniformly terrible that it nullifies the law of averages which mathematically should guarantee at least one exceptional cup now and then. Recently I lunched with a friend at a fine Phoenix restaurant. The food was excellent but the coffee positively evil. Of course, one swallow doesn't make a summer, but in thirty years of vacation roaming about the state I have yet to strike coffee gold. In all these United States I know of but one bonanza where the coffee-vein invariably is rich, clear, full-bodied and roundly mellow. That's at my own table.

There, for more than twenty years, I and my friends have enjoyed what I fondly consider the superlative cup. This good fortune can just as readily be yours who have ears to hear and the will to share. However, before divulging the secret, which is really no secret at all, there are other background facts about coffee which you should know.

For the lack of brewing know-how and wretched quality standards that prevail today, primary blame must be given to commercial eating places. In no two of these establishments will the coffee be or taste anywhere near the same. Nor will any two pots at the same counter be consistent, except in mediocrity. Although not a business man, poor coffee, in my opinion, is poor business. Really GOOD coffee might be the best advertisement a restaurant could buy. To make coffee a profit item, rather than sales leader, many proprietors use cheap blends and skimp on the grind. They say people want weak coffee and indeed most cafes, roadside diners and counters use only one pound of coffee to four gallons of water.

Of so penurious and short-sighted a malpractice, Chief Steward Bozzo, the Palmer House expert, explodes in vast contempt, "Dishwater! Drug-store coffee!"

Also much to blame for the bad coffee we drink is her ladyship, the American housewife. It is she, after all, who makes two-thirds of the amount consumed, or close to a billion cups.

Although the Coffee Brewing Institute has distributed 4,000,000 pamphlets of precise information on how good coffee can he made, she seldom listens to the experts. Price-conscious above any other consideration, she'll pass up the recommended select grinde for say cheapez brand.

The Institute, supported by both the U.S. Deparsements of Commerce and of Agriculture, warns her that Ivat 40-42 cups of good coffee can be obtained from a pound. She gets 60-65 caps and even boasts of this sesatsister economy. Is it any wonder that the staff her family gets is pale, anemic, stale, bitter, breckish, béting, cloudy, crustic, sour, musty, muddy, rancid-in short vile?

But let's turn to a consideration of the good bean itself.

Coffee is the seed of fruit grown on trees averaging some 12 to 20 feet in height. Growers refer to the fruit as "cherries," since that is what they resemble in size, color and appearance. When full-red, the fruit is handpicked, de-pulped by machines, dumped into fermentation tanks for loosening of the gummy covering around the seed parchment, re-washed, spread thinly on sunexposed concrets for three weeks of deying, screened for uniform size, graded for color by human eyes and hands, sacked and conveyed in ship holds to market.

This "green" coffee is then roasted in, or near, American and other port cities, blended by high-salaried experts, ground to four standards, vacuum-packed or otherwise processed and distributed to your grocer shelves. At this destination, coffee represents the whole or part-time efforts of perhaps 100,000,000 people whose livelihood it is. Chemically, coffee is one of nature's great miracles. Within the parchment and these inner coverings is packaged as weird a combination of elements as you could name, including ethers, esters, oils, fats, phenols, furfurals, acetones, ammoniacal and other fearful substances such as trimethyldioxypurin, or caffeine, rigonellin, an active principle of tobacco, trimethylamin, an element of putrefying fish, and so other but lesser constituents. How nature does it, out of so unlikely a conglomeration, is one of the real mysteries of life.

It is not essential to the making of good coffee, for tunately, that the housewife or anybody else memorize this extraordinary catalog of components. What should be registered indelibly, however, are two characteristica that are of material importance.

The first is that most of the flavor elements in coffee are highly volatile. On exposure to the atmosphere, they vaporize as readily as high-test gasoline. In the green, pre-roast state, coffee will keep for lengthy periods, under proper storage conditions. Roasted beans deteriorate within days or a few weeks. But once the roasted shell is broken by grinding, the precious aroma, flavor, body and strength rapidly dissipate into thin air.

That is why your vacuum-packed can of ground coffee is fresh, rich and tasteful the first brewing. With each subsequent lifting of the lid, however, some flavor is lost until the lower half of the tin yields only the bitter acids, alkaloids and remaining unpleasant residues.

There are two things you can do about this. Buy ground coffee only in small cans. Or, as I do recommend, get it in the roasted bean, grind it yourself and only in the exact amount required for each brewing.

The second fact you should know and remember is that ground coffee also is amazingly absorbent and takes on every vagrant odor afloat, if left uncovered. Your nostalgic memories of "mother's coffee," produced in the kitchen environment of tallow candles, kerosene stovefuel, grease-fry, icebox and other unsavory influences, that has no longer may be regarded as a valid criterion of excellence.

A main reason for so much slipshod coffee, instead of good, is a thin, totally invisible and almost indissoluble oil film deposited with every making on the utensil used. If not removed, it soon imparts a stale taste so each subsequent brewing. This rapidly becomes rank and quite offensive, particularly with metal pots.

This will be news to many Arizonans and to those other hardy pioneers of the great West who for genera tions have maintained, mistakenly, that to clean a coffee pot destroys the sccumulated. aromes" of a thousand makings. It was, and in many areas still is, contended that a man's coffee should be boiled, steeped in the grounds for hours, kept "hot, black and strong enough to walk by itself." A lot of the coffee you get today at many of the big ranches is still this ambulatory type or, even worse, a dude variety that couldn't even stand on its feet, it's that weak.

Because it penetrates so deeply into the pores of metal utensils, this film can never be eliminated. Even on glass, with its impervious surfaces, water, soap or detergent won't touch it. The only thing that will cut the film is soda, plain baking soda. If combined with ordinary household ammonia, the cleaning cleansing is even more effective. Use two tablespoons of each to a gallon of boiling water.

At the Palmer House, where coffee is made in 60gallon quantities, these giant vessels are subjected to soda scouringa round-the-clock daily. Only thus are his customers assured coffee that is "sweet, and never stale," says Borzo, guardian of the hotel's reputation for more than thirty years.

For good coffee you must use the grind provided for your type of coffee making. The four methods generally followed in this country are percolator, drip, vacuum and scooping. The grind for each method has been scientifically determined by the length of time that water is in contact with the dry coffee. This is six to eight minutes for percolators and the grain size is coarse. The fine grain is used in vacuum-made coffee which takes only three minutes or less. The other grades are in between and marked, on each can.

Whatever the method or grind, it takes two level measuring tablespoons of coffee per cup to secure the ideal combination of flavor, aroma and body. You can't make coffee stronger by pouring water over the grounds a second time, nor by extending percolation. Excessive boiling has only adverse effects.

Since the slightest variation of grind brings out different flavor characteristics, a grinder of your own permits selection to any taste exactness. Electric grinders for the home kitchen can be obtained at most hardware or appliance stores. Current prices are around $27.50. Incidentally, I paid $22.50 for the identical makes and model twenty years ago, If you like, I'll discuss my own preferences of brewing methods and special techniques later. Right here and now I think we coffee-lovers should face up to a new disaster peering over the horizon. This is the sudden and inexplicable vogue for soluble, or the so-called "Instant," substitutes.

coffee is not now. It has been on the market for years but not until lately as it really caught-on. As a concentrate, it is not bulky to carry. It appeals to housewives as a relief from the cleaning of kitchen paraphernadia and because the variable table preference of each guest for strength can be consulted. The fact that it isn't coffees, by the distance between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, is blithely dismissed by the lazy hostess.

Oh yes, it is manufactured from good coffee beans. The process begins with the making of regular coffees in wholesale quantities, 1,000 or more gallons at a time, This normal liquid is then incredibly, "dehydrated" and the remaining insolable residues, from which every whiff of original goodness and flavor has been evaporated, are ground into powder for a quick cap dissolve by the re-introduction of water. How do you like that for a whimsical cycle!

Another menace to the happiness of true coffee-loves is the increasing prevalence on the American scene of coffee-vending machines whose sensitiveness to quality standards is exactly nil, as you might know. Equally depressing are the soulles hordes of coffee caterers seeking to cash-in on the relatively new coffee-break, a really smart device to increase sales of the mach-abused bean,

But let us turn from this dismal prospect to a more cheerful contemplation. Coffee came originally, and still does in minor quantities, from what then was known as Arabia, and its Red Sea province of Yemen. According to legend, it was the nocturnal antics of goats rendered mysteriously sleepless that brought to attention of local monks the miraculous properties of the noble bean. A little sleuthing disclosed that the animals had been feeding on the leaves and berries of a strange plant traced to raiding Abyssinians some centuries earlier. This was about the year 1,000 A.D. Today the universal beverage, coffee is a world commodity bought, sold and traded on the same scale with wheat, corn, sugar, cotton and tobacco. Fortunes have been made and lost in the great coffee exchanges. The tree is indeed native to Ethopia, as it is to Kenya and other areas of Africa. It is worthy of note, however, that the species “coffee arabica” is still the basic producing plant, although there are many other varieties. Coffee was introduced into Java, Sumatra and other East Indian islands first by the Portuguese and then the Dutch. It was brought to the two Americas by a Frenchman who stuck in the ground on Martinique a single plant swiped from the king's garden at Versailles. Subsequent growths were transplanted to Central and South America where the frost-free soil, humidity and solar heat of the tropics proved ideal for propagation. Coffee is not grown in the continental U.S.A., although there were once experimental plantings in Florida which did not prove successful. Conditions in Arizona and Southern California are quite favorable but high labor costs make it an impractical venture. Some of the world's finest coffee, however, is raised in Hawaii. Many wars have been fought over coffee and its trade. Napoleon, blockaded from coffee imports by England and her Teutonic allies, extended meagre supplies obtained through an Italian underground by the addition of chicory, the parched roots of a weed common throughout Europe and most of North America. Chicory is still combined with coffee in some regions, notably French Louisiana, whose natives had acquired a taste for the unholy concoction. Similarly deprived of coffee in World War I, the resourceful Germans made ersatz from artichokes, dandelion roots, dahlia tubers, chrysanthemum seeds, monkey-nuts, vetch, chick-peas, carob beans, horse-chestnuts, parsnips, holly berries, pumpkin, sunflower, etc. It may astonish my fellow Americans to learn that at time of the Jamestown settlement the coffee-drinking champion of the world was England, with London the heaviest consumer city for over a hundred years. Coffee-houses, a belatedly new phenomenon in ultramodern America, flourished in London and Vienna from early in the seventeenth century. It is true, however, that today that most of the fine coffees grown come to this country. The large bulk of these shipments are from Latin America, with Brazil the giant among producers. In July, 1953, an unprecedented and disastrous freeze destroyed more than one hundred million coffee trees in Brazil and sent retail prices in the United States skyrocketing, as many of us recall. Coffee comes to us in eight standard grades, with Santos Type No. 4 the high-quality Brazilian norm. Next to Brazil, Colombia is the largest South American exporter. Its upland Excelso coffee is hardly excelled anywhere. From Jamaica comes the famous Blue Mountain and from Guatemala we get the magnificent Cobans. Other prize coffees include the Hawaiian Kona and the truly superlative Manheling, one of Java's many fine contributions. A mix of one-third Manheling, one-third Arabian mocha and one-third Colombian Excelso produces a superb blend. Choice among these splendid coffees is a matter of personal taste and my preference is for the Colombian highland type blended with the Guatemalan lowland variety. I buy it in Los Angeles, fresh-roasted, in the bean, two pounds to a purchase. Coffee in my home is made by the vacuum method which I consider the most efficient system and least subject to variation. Before describing the precise process, let me say that good water is essential to a perfect brew, just as it is to a superior beer. Hard water, water with a content high in mineral or other contaminants, or water artificially “softened" simply will not make good coffee. I use bottled spring water containing only natural fluorides. Distilled water, despite its vague flatness, is greatly to be preferred to the average hydrant tap.

When water is first brought in contact with the coffee grind, it must be boiling. Any lesser degree of heat fails to extract the full round flavor and produce the body good coffee always has. Thin coffee is an abomination.

As water in the lower glass bowl nears the boiling point, I flip the grinder switch. A glass container with graduated concentric rings shows me exactly when it has received the right amount of grind for my predetermined number of cups. The dry grind is then poured into the upper bowl and immediately placed in position over the now boiling water in the lower bowl. In this quick sequence there is not more than ten seconds' exposure of the ground coffee to the atmosphere before contact with the water and none of the aromatic goodness is thereby lost.

The upper bowl mixture of water and coffee is then stirred vigorously with a spoon for about 30 seconds before removing both the sealed-together bowls from the fire as a unit. Some two minutes later the vacuum process has returned the completed brew to the lower chamber. The two bowls are then separated and the coffee reheated-but never to the boiling point-for serving.

I use cloth filters over a porcelain, spring-taut separator and never, never the same cloth twice. No amount of washing or soaking will take away the inevitable staleness. The cloths cost four cents each but guarantee a clear, sediment-free and wholly untainted cup that is indeed good to the last drop. At my house we scour the bowls, connecting rubber collars, porcelain spring and measuring glass at intervals of no more than three days.

Sugar and cream are matters of purely personal taste. I like both for breakfast. Dinner coffee I take black, with a little sugar. Never use half-and-half for good coffee. In fact, I won't even use so-called "coffee" cream or table creams which have a butter-fat content of only 20 per cent. Instead, I insist on "All Purpose" or "Pastry" cream, whose 30 per cent butter-fat produces that truly golden color which is the assurance of a perfect brew.

If you like iced coffee, here are two important tips. Always make it double-strength and never pour hot coffee over cubes or crushed ice. Put in the ice only after your coffee has been precooled in a covered container-not metal! If you must use silver service at table, be sure it is porcelain lined, like mine, and keep it sweet with soda scourings, too.

As I hope you have by now concluded, good coffee is never accidental but definitely is available to every family that knows the rules and is willing to abide by them. Good coffee is a convivial, hospitable beverage. It promotes fellowship, is a wonderful stimulant to the mental processes and, unlike the narcotic alcohol, has no depressing after-penalties. The lift or pick-up you get from coffee drinking is in its caffeine, of course. But caffeine is in no degree habit-forming and this is medically established beyond peradventure.

People say caffeine keeps them awake nights and so drink tea, which has more caffeine and tanin than coffee. It's bad coffee that keeps folks from sleeping, in my opinion, and not the caffeine in a well-brewed cup. For it also is a medical fact that good coffee promotes good digestion and sound sleep.

In his book, "Coffee, the Epic of a Commodity," the German researcher, Heinrich Eduard Jacob, gives the following description of the way coffee can stimulate the imagination:"Now, however, though he had almost ceased to be aware of his body, his mind was unusually active, cheerful and alert. He was not merely thinking; his thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team of horses. A hundred details, ordinarily blurred, became meticulously clear. Although the team was covering the ground faster and faster, there was no confusion. Far from it, he was thinking five or ten times more clearly than ever before. In the time normally requisite for one thought, the imam could now, without effort, think a dozen thoughts, and yet keep them absolutely distinct. The members of the racing team did not get their harness tangled. The ideas were luminously clear, and sped onward toward the distant horizon. But, having reached that horizon, they were as plainly visible as if they had been close at hand and the imam felt as lively and vigorous as if he had been refreshed by thirty hours' sleep."

You'd gather from that flight of the imagination that Herr Jacob had written it under the influence of a pretty fair cup himself. In this respect coffee is indeed one of the great boons to mankind. That is, good coffee.

Why don't you try it yourself, sometime?