My husband was a tea man. He drank proper tea, from a pot, and although he was a truly and creatively dreadful cook, Noel made a better pot of tea than I did.
Coffee, though: that was all me. I have a long history with coffee. When I was putting myself through university, I worked in a coffee store called the Bean and Leaf, which sold, as one might guess, coffee beans and tea leaves. A few years later, a friend started up a coffee store in Los Gatos, and I was about the only person he knew with any actual experience with coffee apart from drinking it. So he hired me to set up and manage the store.
(This was at the same time I was starting my theology MA, and becoming involved in a whirlwind romance with my husband. Hey, why not?)
We called the store Kaldi’s, after the mythic goatherd who noticed his goats acting particularly frisky one day after they’d been eating the red berries from a shiny-leafed bush.
(My friend Ken Orrett painted a fabulous mural on the wall: goats, coffee, and dancing goatherd.)
Kaldi gathered some of the red berries, rubbed off the outer hull, and dried them in the sun on long tarpaulins—wait, no, that was in Papua New Guinea when I was there in the eighties.
But be it an early goatherd or highland PNG or a coffee house in Santa Cruz, the inner beans get roasted, ground, and brewed into…ahhhh.
I may drink tea that’s been brewed in “bandages,” but when it comes to coffee, I’m a purist, and a snob.
Tomorrow: JS Bach, coffee lover.