How do you plan to celebrate the last Sunday of September this year?
It’s International Coffee Day, and I plan to pay homage to the beverage by sipping my favorite coffee bean broths all day.
What makes coffee so appealing? Sure, it smells great — if you’re not burning it.
But it’s really just some ground up, boiled beans — or ground up beans with hot or cold water added, depending on how you make it — where we discard the beans and consume the soup it leaves behind. Weird, but so am I.
Yep. Coffee is my favorite bean soup, and I love bean soups.
I recall once getting my dad a cup of coffee from one of those coffee vending machines of yesteryear and saying as I handed it to him that I loved the smell and would drink it if it tasted like it smelled.
“Everyone would,” he replied.
True, I’ve heard many people over the years say something very similar.
“I love the smell of coffee, but can’t stand the taste.”
“I wish coffee tasted like it smelled.”
“I want some chocolate and to be left alone.”
OK, so that last one didn’t have anything to do with coffee, really, but I’ve heard it an awful lot.
I started drinking coffee when I was 28 years old.
I was a student at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and needed something to keep me alert. Cocaine just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.
I mean Coca-Cola. Sorry.
I loved doing some of my classwork sitting in or near the on-campus coffee shop, so I decided I’d bite the coffee bean bullet and train myself to enjoy coffee. Or at least to tolerate it.
I paid for a cup of coffee and took my mug over to the dozen or more carafes on the sideboard. I asked a friend who was refilling his mug which blend he recommended.
He asked if I was going for taste or potency.
Both, I answered.
He recommended “Doc’s Blend” — made there in the cafe’ to the specifications of professor and dean Dr. Jimmy Dukes — but cautioned me not to try to drink it like it came out of the dispenser.
“You’re going to want to add a lot of sugar or creamer to it, and cut it with half hot water,” he said.
He explained that it was a combination of the two strongest coffees available in New Orleans, made at double strength.
Go big or go home, right?
I went home.
I couldn’t handle it. Even following my friend’s advice, it was like I had drained the oil from a car that took 6 quarts of Valvoline and had burned it all down to about a half-quart of sludge. Tasted like it, too. I got jittery just from smelling it.
So I tossed it and got something of medium potency and decided I’d build from there. I never did make it to be a connoisseur of Doc’s Blend — the cafe’ manager told me only three people ever actually drank the stuff, being Dr. Dukes and two really odd individuals — but I had much more respect for Dr. Dukes after that.
Twenty years later, I can honestly say that I love coffee. Some days I drink cup after cup, and some days I don’t have any — I’m weird that way — but I really enjoy it. I once owned six coffee makers and had three sitting on the counter. I am much better now. I only own three Keurigs, one full-pot drip maker, a single-serve drip machine and three French presses. That’s better, right? Well, I keep one Keurig and a press at work, and one Keurig is in storage as a backup.
I have given a French press each to four of my children and a Keurig to the fifth. This is because I love them.
For Christmas this past year, I received 13 different types or flavors of coffee, not counting three (four?) more blends that were given to me in the first couple months of 2019. It was a wonderful holiday season.
So, I plan to press and drip, pour and sip my way to a happy Sunday.
I guess I’ll make a list of things to do Sunday night, because I won’t be sleeping.
Happy International Coffee Day!
I’d shake the hand of any fellow coffee lover, but my hands are already shaking.
Brett Campbell can be reached at ChunkyBrett@mail.com or 601-934-0901.
