March 18 2004, 12:15 AM Coffee

I know that I can make Turkish coffee. I have the fluted copper cup for making, and the rose and orange blossom waters for putting in after. I was told a secret: let it boil up three times, pulling the cup from the heat with a quick wrist each time, and then on the third time, pour. I do not think of Turkish coffee as coffee. I find it to be a beverage out of bounds, a thick, powerful thing that is outside the realm of my normal coffee experiences. I like it a good deal, and I can make a pretty good cup of it, and sometimes do.

I cannot make a good cup of Espresso. We do not have appropriate tools, and with what tools we have I am fully inept. I can put everything in place and flip switches, and the resultant brew is not burnt or bad, but it is never good, or ever better. I have stopped trying. This is all right; we have an excellent local espresso place, and if I go there I do not get coffee thrown at me.

Here's what I know about regular coffee.

Use clean equipment. The simpler the coffee maker the better, as there are fewer places where old oils may lurk. In my youth, I have had coffee brewed with a simple filter basket over a metal bowl, with water poured carefully from a kettle, and it was really pretty good.

Use good water. If the tap water tastes weird, run it through a filter. Don't forget to change the filter! Or bottled water, even. Like in bread, it makes a difference.

Buy whole beans, buy them from a place that roasts them themselves, and keep them in an airtight thing when they get home to the kitchen. Don't keep them in the bag. Buy them in small quantities, so they don't get stale; we go through maybe a half a pound a week (we don't drink a lot of coffee). Grind them right before they are to be used.

If one can, find a local coffee roaster, and show up enough that they know the looks of one. When a level of rapport has been reached, ask for beans not by varietal, but by freshness. Most of the types of arabica beans are worth trying, and eventually favorites will be found, but the quality of the thing is better marked by the time since roasting than the particular place it fell from a plant, in our experience. We find that we gravitate to lighter roasts from Central America, and our roaster knows it, too. We know we will have a good week when we walk into our shop of choice and the proprietor gestures to to the large plastic buckets set beside the roaster, and we get to lift the lid to greet the fragrant steam, scooping precious, still-warm coffee beans, having never asked the variety, nor needing to.