Submitted For Your Perusal » coffee

Music and Medicine

Matt Thomas — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:15:33 +0000

Filed under: coffee, smoking, video Tagged: Iggy Pop, Tom Waits

Titrated Doses

Matt Thomas — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 17:06:56 +0000

“I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.”

—Annie Dillard

(Via Wesley Hill.)

Filed under: coffee, quotes

Your Dad Doesn’t Know What a Latte Is

Matt Thomas — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:07:15 +0000

“Your dad drank coffee before you did. He has been drinking since before Starbucks was a small Seattle coffee shop and long before you stopped drinking Starbucks because it was ‘too mainstream.’ His cups were strong, each sip was an eye jolting, bitch slap to drowsy that firmly signified work was about to begin. You hipsters couldn’t sip from the same mug as your father. Your coffee is sweetened with unrefined sugar from a fair trade farm in small town South America where the workers are paid a living wage. His was black. You top off your lattes with a non-fat, non-dairy, soy, vegan foam. Your dad doesn’t know what a fucking latte is, nor does he give a shit to find out. He drank coffee to wake up, not so he could have a free place to steal internet while bitching about all the political change that needs to happen. So hipsters, next time you want to be a perennial bad-ass, reach for some Folgers and harden the fuck up.”

—Dads: The Original Hipsters

Filed under: coffee, masculinity, quotes

Coffee Is for Writers

Matt Thomas — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:48:53 +0000

“I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, and I distrust writers who don’t drink it. How can anyone be a writer without coffee? … Coffee has been an essential tool of almost all the greatest modern writers, and certainly of the most prolific ones. Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups a day (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 72 cups a day). Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote what amounted to a love letter about freshly roasted coffee. Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, loved coffee almost as much as they loved cocaine (Holmes: ‘A cup of coffee would clear my brain’). Anthony Trollope, admirably disciplined, rose every morning at exactly 5:00 and drank his coffee before writing for three hours, after which he went to work at the post office. Edgar Allan Poe drank coffee by the gallon (the tell-tale heart’s pounding: conscience or caffeine overdose?). Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, could write a detective novel in three days on the power of his bottomless coffee cup. Beethoven loved his coffee strong, and Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated a sonata (BMV 211) to the glories of coffee.”

—Joseph Finder

(Via.)

Filed under: coffee, endorsements, quotes, writing

A Cup of Coffee

Matt Thomas — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:17:27 +0000

“One should not underestimate the role of coffee in the bourgeois social imaginary. The specific rituals and behaviours of commensality that have emerged around coffee drinking do seem to occupy a special place in bourgeois life: coffee does not intoxicate, it is even conducive to labour, but one must still take a short break to consume it; the conversation that accompanies coffee consumption can range from the banal to the serious, but it never takes place among irreconcilable enemies and tends to present itself as an opportunity to neutralize noxious conflicts; it is pleasant to have coffee with others, and yet the act of drinking it is not an essentially collective enterprise, and hence does not violate the idea of a society of neatly separable atoms. The coffeehouse or the café is thus the site where the bourgeoisie has, throughout its history, shown that it can conceive of a kind of human interaction that, in a minimal fashion, transcends the contacts necessary for purely economic transactions. One can say that bourgeois society allows for at least one place where community appears as something other than the secondary and somewhat mysterious effect of the pursuit of individual self-interest. We can converse, for a while, over a cup of coffee.”

—Jakob Norberg

Filed under: coffee, quotes

A Damn Fine Cup of Coffee

Matt Thomas — Wed, 12 May 2010 20:40:34 +0000

(Via.)

Filed under: coffee, TV Tagged: Twin Peaks

Sugar Rush

Matt Thomas — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:45:43 +0000

For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee – with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.

—David Lynch

(Via.)

Posted in coffee, movies, quotes, work, writing Tagged: David Lynch

Sage Advice

Matt Thomas — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:20:09 +0000

“I’m going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it; don’t wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.”

—F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper

Posted in coffee, quotes, TV Tagged: Twin Peaks

How to Make Coffee at Home

Matt Thomas — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 02:36:29 +0000

In an interview with Salon, Michaele Weissman, author of the new book God in a Cup, explains how to make coffee at home:

Percolator — never.

Mr. Coffee — throw it out immediately. Most standard automated coffee pots don’t heat the water hot enough or consistently enough. The water needs to be around 205 degrees F. as it pours over the grounds. Otherwise the grounds will be over-extracted and bitter or under-extracted and tasteless.

French press — this plunger system makes very nice coffee but requires a certain deftness of hand and it produces slightly gritty coffee that some people like and others don’t.

I prefer old-fashioned, inexpensive drip pots that use brown paper filters, such as the Chemex where you pour nearly boiling water over freshly ground coffee.

Oh, and always use filtered water.

The most important piece of home equipment: A burr grinder. Those little blade grinders most people use basically beat the crap out of the coffee. Not good.

Good to know.

Endorsement: Sasaki Colorstone Dinnerware (1985)

Matt Thomas — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:15:57 +0000

Whilst browsing in a hip vintage/antique store by my apartment – the same place I once found a mint-condition yellow Parker Big Red pen – I came across a striking set of four espresso cups and saucers designed by Massimo Vignelli – i.e., the guy who, among other things, designed the classic 1972 New York subway map – that I bought immediately.

On vignelli.com, he explains the concept behind them:

Decoration is usually obtained by adding something. Since our design process is based on subtraction, we obtained decoration by removing the glaze from the edges, exposing the material. An unusual, but effective way to achieve product identity.

How to Defend Your Coffee Habit

Matt Thomas — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:04:42 +0000

From lifehack.org: “How to Defend Your Coffee Habit.”

Coffee and the Enlightenment

Matt Thomas — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:46:38 +0000

From Wired comes an interesting article called “Drugs, Body Modifications May Create Second Enlightenment.”

This line jumped out at me: “Amphetamines are largely banned in the United States, though coffee, which acts in much the same way, is the second only to oil in global trade.”

(Via Kottke.)

(Related Reading: Jakob Norberg’s “No Coffee,” a wonderful article from a short while back which asks “What is it about coffee – and coffeehouses – that makes it so agreeable to the bourgeoisie?”)

Endorsement: the Bialetti Moka Express

Matt Thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:26:20 +0000

Coffee vs. Alcohol

Matt Thomas — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:02:13 +0000

The conclusion was clear: Why would anyone want to feel like this? Although I never became a teetotaler, I knew — especially when I woke up the next morning with a hangover — that I would cast my lot with caffeine, not with alcohol. Why would I wish my senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I’d pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge — but of course I didn’t. Who does? Don’t we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves?

—Anne Fadiman

In Praise of Starbucks

Matt Thomas — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:55:15 +0000

In this caffeine junkie’s opinion, cup-for-cup, Starbucks serves better-tasting coffee than your typical “our tables are usually occupied by anti-corporate-chain-store hipsters who shower only once or twice a week’ indie coffeehouse.”

—John Gruber