Learning to Drink Coffee

I can remember going into a grocery store in south St. Paul between 1996 and 2003 and seeing green coffee beans available for sale.  Only once were they sitting in stacks of massive burlap bags.  The rest of the time they were in a clear enclosure (plexiglass, I suspect by the bends to fit a circular base,) in heaping piles, much like movie theater popcorn machines filled with freshly popped corn.

Of course the beans in the enclosure were a pale grayish green with some mottled shades of light mocha brown.  People would engage the dispenser at the front of the enclosure and out would flow the green beans through a dispensing shoot.  Most people caught the flowing beans in a bag designed just for this purpose, but a few curious children would lift the dispensing lever and the green beans would flood the terazzo flour in an 8 to 12 foot radius. 

For those who caught the beans they were seeking, the next step was to dump the contents of the bag into a machine with the giant word "ROASTER" stenciled across the front.  There was a dial just below the giant word with three raised words arranged in an arch over the dial - "light - medium - dark." 

Now that I am more interested in coffee than I was then, I wish I would have taken the time to observe the entire process, start to finish, to learn about the "on site" roasting opportunity.  I do recall the beans emerging from the "ROASTER" a dark brown, with no signs of green, but have no idea how long it took, which word the dial identified, or if the end result was worth the hand crafting.  There wasn't a grinder in sight, so I assumed that hot beans, re-bagged, and headed for the checkout, had to be ground on the home brewing turn.

I think this was a missed opportunity in my formative coffee years.  While I have friends who are very particular about the roast and the grind of their morning java, I am able to distinguish demitasse from decaf....but that's about it.  I attribute that to my first coffee drinking experiences, which were in the dormatory in Spain.  Each meal the women who were serving meals emerged from the kitchen with massive kettles of steaming sludge that thy poured into giant handleless "cups" at each place setting.   The brew was so thick and so dark, that only the most knowledgeable coffee drinkers in the group truly appreciated the beverage.

After much pleading and challenging discussions, we were able to have the sludge fill only half of the cup, and the woman with the sludge kettle was flanked by a second woman with scalding hot milk.  These half and half mixtures were still a very dark color, and extremely strong flavor, but thinner and easier to drink.  During our entire semester, the only beverage offered at any meal in the dorm was coffee.......

Since no stores were nearby, buying bottled water, Fanta, or Coka-Cola....or any other beverage, was not possible.  We soon discovered that you either drank sludge and milk........or.......nothing!  Yes, they did have sugar!

I have wondered since if the kitchen in the dorm roasted their own beans, or if massive burlap bags were delivered along with the fish, fish, and more fish we ate daily.  Another missed learning opportunity!