Caffeine and the West
One of the recurring elements in Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the sort-of outlaw characters asking the heroine to make coffee. He mentions that his mother made good coffee, which seems like an odd thing to say to modern ears, but there was something of an art to coffee in the time before our fancy machines that control the water temperature and the amount of time the grounds spend exposed to the water, or even before simple devices like percolators. About the simplest way to make coffee, though one fraught with the danger of inconsistency, is to just boil the grounds in a pot. This cowboy coffee produces a thick, strong brew, full of little solid bits of coffee like a pulpy orange juice, and requires a deft hand and careful attention lest the brew be too weak or too bitter, but it can be made anywhere there’s coffee and a fire, whether you can find a place to plug in your Mr. Coffee or not.
After my Braun drip machine, a trusty friend that I appropriated from my parents, a solid machine that helped me through many long nights in college and even followed me into the desert on the In-n-Out trip, finally gave out after probably close to two decades of service, I used a Bodum cafetière, a simple device originally made in a clarinet factory in Normandy, as my coffee machine. The idea is basically to steep the coffee grounds in hot water much like tea and then push all of the grounds out of the way through a metal filter, creating a strong and mostly filtered brew, capturing that power and charm of the coffees of the Old West without having to watch quite so carefully not to drink to the bottom of the cup. I like the way coffee tastes from a French press, and it and my gas range have worked quite well during a couple of recent power outages. But stupid me, I went and broke it. I had the glass beaker in the dishwasher, and for some reason I decided to rummage around in the cabinets before starting the dishes. A jar fell out, hit the coffee press right on the corner and put a neat little hole in my morning routine. I’ve since ordered a new beaker from my favorite coffee merchant (I have no idea how much they charged me, but they sell the whole deal for $10 under the MSRP, so I figure it can’t be too bad), but in the meantime I’ve had to find some other ways to make my coffee.
I haven’t gone all out yet and made the coffee of the old West and, according to Internet, parts of Scandinavia. Though similar in theory to making coffee in a French press, boiling it in a pot usually takes a fine grind, like Turkish coffee, so that the grounds do their thing and settle into a mud in the bottom of the pot, while the French press uses a more coarse grind, mostly to ensure the grounds are caught by the filter when the plunger is pressed. I haven’t yet felt adventurous enough to deviate from my usual coffee, so I’ve just been doing about the same thing I did with the press: I mix the grounds and water in a mug instead of a big glass thing, and after a few minutes I pour that mixture through a sieve into another mug. It works pretty ok, but it’s a little more chunky than I’m used to, and, since I don’t care to go through all of that more than once in a given morning, I’m now only drinking one mug of coffee a day. I hope my new glass thing shows up soon.