Coffee before coffee

In 1993, Associate Professor Suzanne Koptur wanted to have coffee when she visited her new tea-drinking FIU colleague, so she mail-ordered me a 2-cup Gavalia coffee maker.

Everything about the coffee maker was adorable and it even came with a couple of ground Gavalia coffees. Drawn to cute gadgets as I am, did not wait for Suzanne’s next visit to try it out. Mixed with half & half and a bit of sugar, the coffee was pretty good, even for a tea-drinker. Before long, I’d nixed the sugar, but a small cup of coffee remained a nice daily complement to my breakfast of toasted English muffin and fruit.

Thus, in my late 30s, began my one-cup-of-coffee ritual. A second cup in the morning tended to wire me (risk of being obnoxious) and a cup in the afternoon messed with my sleep.

In my mid 50’s I read about pesticides in tea. Why would anyone knowingly do a hot water pesticide extraction then drink the contaminated hot water? I switched exclusively to organically grown teas. Then it occurred to me (duh) that many growers in poorly-regulated tropical countries apply massive amounts of EPA-banned pesticides to everything they grow, including coffee. Forget Gavalia: not organic, not happening. Whole Foods had a very good organic coffee in their 365 product line, then discontinued it. Sprouts Market has no connection to Jeff Besos, prohibits open carry in their stores, and sells 24 different organic bean varieties. My favorite is their organic fair trade Sumatran dark roast.

I didn’t adopt another habit as compulsive as my breakfast cup of coffee until my mid 60s when I rekindled my middle school era passion for fishing.

Sunday morning before sunrise, I’d grab a rod and head over for a quick fishing walk along the north bank of Snapper Creek on the southern edge of South Miami.

There I’d catch an occasional snook or peacock bass, but I’d also see the morning canal birds: Limpkins hunting apple snails, flocks of Chimney Swifts skimming the water for emergent aquatic insects, the occasional Peregrine Falcon or Short-tailed Hawk.

That’s when I discovered the “coffee-before-coffee” paradox.

People’s kitchens and back yards face the canal banks, coffee is diuretic, and there’s no place to pee discretely. I figured, incorrectly, that I could simply postpone my one cup of coffee by an hour and have it with breakfast when I returned. Not so simple. To attain sufficient aim and focus for skip-casting lures under low-hanging tree branches where the snook hang out, I needed a cup of coffee before my cup of coffee.

Roll forward to the present, my late 60s.

Professor Emerita Suzanne Koptur remains a good friend but the sweet two-cup Gavalia drip machine she gave me is long dead. Plastic lives forever, so for the past 20 years, its detachable plastic cone has sufficed for single-cup pour-over production.

As for me, the coffee-before-coffee problem has gotten so much worse. How many times have I caught myself spooning fresh grounds into  my coffee cup or stopped myself from pouring half & half into the filter cone? I don’t even try to fish before my one cup.

© Philip Stoddard