Roast Your Own

Coffee is a crop grown by povertous, hunched-over, little people, in distant countries saddled with picturesque mountains. They grind it using ancestral skulls and thighbones as mortar and pestle. It smells like old cardboard*, and to preserve the aroma the wrinkled small ones pack coffee in cans, tightly sealed after all the air has been sucked out by the lungs of towering, deep-chested, higher-elevation-dwelling people who supplement their income by inflating the bicycle tires of hipster tourists with cardboard-scented air**.

Ancestral bones don’t last forever, so a few years ago the more forward-thinking of the wrinkled chiefs hired marketing consultants to justify their cost-reducing measure of shipping the coffee in its unground form. Thousands of slack-titted homely tribal women were laid off, and the mortars and pestles were purchased by the Smithsonian Institute, which promptly recouped its expenses by selling half of the stock to specialty porn sites. The marketroids devised a brilliant scheme: sell the raw coffee at a higher price than the processed form to trick stupid American consumer-pigdogs into thinking that they are buying a better product.

The garbage disposal industry jumped on this new opportunity like a slack-titted homely tribal woman on the last living coffee-can sucker. Rich folks needed to grind their expensive raw coffee by themselves, and their skinny wrists couldn’t handle a mortar and pestle. Seventeen disposal factories were converted to the production of coffee grinders. Homeowners across the nation went on waiting lists to get one of the suddenly reduced number of garbage disposals, chewing up their own waste in the meantime, if they weren’t rich enough to import Cambodian orphans to do it.

The end of the age of pre-ground coffee would have been a blinding roundhouse punch to the jaw of drug smugglers if it had not been for the swift uppercut delivered by savvy Detroit cops unexpectedly turning up in Los Angeles to expose the dog-defeating olfactory power of ground coffee. The smugglers, burdened with thousands of tons of now useless coffee, gave up the drug trade and opened coffee shops, desperate to unload the incriminating stuff. But hip young Americans in a hurry didn’t want boring old coffee, and the coppers were sniffing around, so the smugglers invented a machine that could take an entire pot of coffee’s worth of grounds and turn it into a few teaspoons of sludge. They called it espresso, because drug smugglers are all Italian, and the middle classes drank it up. The Illuminati, never blind to a profit, pressured the smugglers into forming a corporation and turning over their patent rights. The name of that corporation was Starbuck’s.

No, that’s not right. I’ll come in again.

What we know as coffee comes from the seeds of a peculiar kind of fruit that grows on a peculiar kind of tree that prospers at high altitudes, usually the sides of mountains. The seeds are a little difficult to remove from the fruit pulp, but once you’ve processed them, they’re dense little yellowish green things that look a fair amount like coffee beans. The seeds are smaller than coffee beans, and as I mentioned, denser. If you put a couple of ounces of these seeds in your whirly blade grinder, you’ll likely break it.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what you should do. Break that grinder, or throw it away, or save it for turning sassafras leaves into filé powder. Whirly blade grinders are blunt instruments, only good for turning brittle objects into boulders and dust.

So: take these dense seeds that smell like burlap sacks and look a fair amount like coffee beans. Apply the right amount of heat, for the right amount of time, and you will have something that looks exactly like coffee beans, only they’ll smell like nothing you’ve ever smelled. Carefully slice them into infinitesimal fragrant shards and infuse them with almost boiling water, and the liquid that flows forth into your carafe will taste like nothing you have ever tasted.

Coffee is not bitter, and it is not black. It is not oily, sour, or flat. Coffee does not need cream or sugar. Coffee, when the all the stars align, is heaven.

Next time on “Roast Your Own”, the Proper Application of Heat.

* Cardboard is considered a delicacy in foreign countries
** It is a closely kept secret that the hipsters later deflate their tires purposely to inhale the vapors produced by the combination of coffee grounds, foreigner-lung-juice, and ancestral bone dust. Ask Roosh if you don’t believe me.

Tagged as: coffee, coffee beans, good coffee