|
Fuss about filter coffee
I do drink coffee. About one cup a day, either an espresso or cappuccino
made by a barista in a café or brewed in my stove top coffee maker, or if
I'm in Chennai, filter coffee made sweet and strong with lots of decoction
added to the freshly boiled milk. What I don't do is obsess about making
coffee. All that fussing about how much roast and level of grind and then
endless arguments about the right technique which can involve buying
equipment that costs as much as a small car - when that starts I'm out of the
door to the nearest café where someone else can do all that for me.
I think my lack of patience with coffee fanatics is
also one reason why I have a sneaky fascination with filter coffee. It is,
of course, quite possible to be obsessive about making filter coffee. RK
Narayan in My Dateless Diary gave a description of his mother doing exactly
this as she "selects the right quality of seeds almost subjecting
every bean to a severe scrutiny, roasts them slowly over charcoal fire, and
knows by the texture and fragrance of the golden smoke emanating from the
chinks in the roaster whether the seeds within have turned the right shade
and then grinds them into perfect grains."
All this is could be taken from any coffee
fanatic's textbook, but it is what happens next that is heresy. Whatever
their doctrinal differences, most coffee fanatics will agree that the
ground coffee must not be mixed with other substances, that the brewing be
fast and consumption be quick, ideally unmixed with any other substance, not
even milk. But with South Indian filter coffee, despite some holdouts for
pure coffee, the standard is now for chicory to be added. The brewing is
not fast, but excruciatingly slow, as the coffee drips lazily to form the
'decoction'. And it is nearly always drunk mixed with milk.
This is what is entertaining, even valuable, about
filter coffee: by contrasting one fanatical way to make coffee with another
way that is equally fanatical, yet quite opposed, it suggests that it is
the fanaticism that is foolish. Coffee is just a good drink that can be
made in different ways and if this doesn't seem like a particularly radical
conclusion, you haven't met hard core coffee obsessives. Recently in
Chennai I even found coffee decoction being sold in plastic pouches and
while it didn't make the best cup of coffee I have ever tasted, it wasn't
that bad. I had to fight the urge to buy pouches to give my fanatic friends
just to see the looks of horror on their faces.
How can filter coffee be so different, yet good?
First, one has to understand that it is different - decoction drunk neat
does not taste like a strong espresso, but has a mellower caramel note
underlying the dominant coffee bitterness. Of course, this also depends on
how much chicory is used, since that is very bitter itself. Different
percentages are used in commercial blends and I once spent a rather nerve
jangling day trying them, from the barely perceptible 5% chicory to a
frankly undrinkable 40% chicory and concluded that 15-20% chicory gave the
most characteristic filter coffee flavour.
Harish Bijoor, who has had much experience in
consulting about and selling coffee, explains the key difference in the
brewing. "Quick extraction pulls out the oleo resins that are negative
to good coffee taste as we know in fast brew mechanisms. Slow-brew extracts
the right stuff and leaves back the undesirables." I have written in
this column about the wonders of cold brew coffee where the powder is
steeped for at least 24 hours in cold water. That is the ultimate slow
brewing, as the coffee flavour slowly dissolves out to give a very mellow
tasting coffee but one with disconcertingly no aroma.
Cold brew coffee makes one understand how much the
hot brew we are used to is about smell as much as taste, and perhaps one
should see filter coffee as an intermediate form. Because it uses hot water
- and fresh roasting if you are fanatic - you get aroma. But once it goes
into the standard two cylinder coffee filter everything slows down. The
holes at the bottom of the upper cylinder are just pin pricks, allowing
only the smallest of drops through. Western coffee filters use a medium
grind so the water goes through fast, but South Indian filter coffee is
finely ground so the water stays in contact longer. I have read that one
reason chicory is used is because it contributes to the clogging effect,
drawing out the brewing even longer, resulting in more mellow taste,
despite its own inherent bitterness.
The interesting question is where this method came
from. Coffee drinking in South India is not that old as A R
Venkatachalapathy reminds us in his wonderful essay "In Those Days
There Was No Coffee." That phrase, he explains, was used by mid-20th
century Tamil writers like Va. Ramaswamy Iyengar and U.V. Swaminatha Iyer
as a way to describe the period before 1910-15 which is when modernity as
defined by British-influenced innovations like coffee drinking really
started to make their way into middleclass Tamil households. In the 19th
century and before the standard drinks were neeragaram, fermented rice
water, or buttermilk, or just plain water, and he quotes a Tamil tract from
1914 which accuses coffee of marginalising all these drinks.
The parallel is with tea which was also mostly a drink produced for and
drunk by the British in the 19th century. It was only in the early 20th
century, after production levels had risen beyond the point where the
export market could absorb it all that plantation owners started looking at
the domestic Indian market. The Tea Market Expansion Board launched an
all-India campaign to promote tea drinking which, after initial failures,
succeeded spectacularly when they understood that to make it really
acceptable in India it had to be sold as a drink made with milk and sugar,
not drunk on its own.
Indians will evidently drink anything if it comes in milk, and coffee was
no exception. It was preferred in the South partly because it grew locally
in the Nilgiris, and partly because elitist Tamil Brahmins resisted the tea
campaign as too down-market, giving tea a working class (and Muslim)
reputation it has never entirely shrugged off in the South. Coffee was so
linked with Brahmins that the Dravidian ant-Brahmin leader Periyar launched
a campaign again coffee houses explicitly calling themselves as such, and
Venkatachalapathy notes that when the Tamil short story writer
Pudumaippithan wanted to call someone crazy he remarked: "You are a
chap who drinks tea at a Brahmin hotel."
But the knowledge of how to make coffee had to come
from somewhere and the answer must be the British. At the end of his
influential cookbook Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878) Colonel
Kenney-Herbert has three pages "On Coffee Making" and the method
he describes, from careful selection of beans, to slow roast to the type of
percolator used is almost identical to how filter coffee is made today. In
fact, he suggests going even slower by pouring in hot water in
teaspoonfuls: "The slower the water is added, the more thoroughly the
coffee will become soaked, and, the dripping being retarded, the essence
will be as strong as possible." This was made in advance to be added
to hot milk or water.
Other British writers took this even further. Flora
Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner in their Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
(1888) even recommend steeping the coffee in cold water overnight, and only
then bringing it to boil before straining and storing for up to a week. But
predating all this was a manufactured product, the bottled coffee-chicory
essence called Camp Coffee first made by the Scottish company Paterson
& Sons in Glasgow in 1876. This was expressly sold as a product used by
the British in India since its label famously showed a British officer
enjoying a cup of coffee with his Sikh bearer behind him. Camp Coffee, or
imitations, was sold in both India and the UK and set a taste standard for
how the British felt coffee should taste.
Camp Coffee is still sold in the UK, though the
label has now been updated: the Sikh bearer is now an officer himself and
sits having coffee on equal terms with his British colleague. When this
change took place it caused a storm about political correctness gone too
far and might have helped drive away old customers. The product is now
really hard to find and I only got a bottle thanks to my friend Rachel
Dwyer who managed to find it online. The formulation includes a lot of
sugar so when you first taste it all you get intense syrupiness. But add it
to hot milk and this is diluted down and then I did get a hit of that
mellow yet intense taste of filter coffee.
Filter coffee fanatics might think it ridiculous to
link their brew to Camp Coffee, while regular coffee fanatics might see it
as conformation of all they find wrong about filter coffee. I have no proof
if any real link exists, and am not suggesting anyone gives up making
coffee any way they like in favour of this. But if someone were to make or
sell it in India it would certainly be worth trying as just another way for
non-fanatics like me to enjoy the many forms and flavours of coffee.
Vikram Doctor CDET10920
|
No comments:
Post a Comment