Well, nothing: I'm doing everything wrong. It turns out that I thought I was a coffee grower, almost-almost a connoisseur of this steaming psychoactive drug, but I am a mere prisoner of the Matrix who shares gastronomic and social mirage with millions of people. Among them, possibly you.
Yes, you may think you like coffee; You may have even subscribed to the credo of its exhilarating property to justify your bad mood in the morning roughness "is-that-without-a-coffee-I'm-not-a-person." But no matter how hard you try to see yourself wrapped in the aromatic photogeny of its vapors, the real experts in coffee - in this metaphor, an assembly of three-meter-tall titans who cross their arms like disco porters and look at you From above between derogatory shakes of the head - they think that not only do you not like it, but you probably don't know what coffee is.
I've been there too, and I've come out of this clouded state of ignorance thanks to one of those titans. The story of my epiphany began with these words: "I invite you to sit with me and enjoy a coffee for the first time."
Coffee in italics
The phrase was uttered by Aldemar Monroy, owner of Loma Verde, a coffee shop and tasting service located in Sabadell. Although its business model - artisanal, organic, rudimentary - is opposite to that of Nespresso, I can't help but see in it an Andean variety of George Clooney. I had gone to his store recommended by a co-worker of my girlfriend: I had been living in the city for a few weeks and was looking for a place to buy quality coffee beans. Knowing that the matter was article matter, I brought my tape recorder.
The store is small, white, modern. It has a huge toaster in the window and is decorated with coffee machines with bizarre traffic, with curvilinear traffic of bellies and glass tubes, which could well belong to the alchemical machinery of a laboratory. There is a bar. And, behind the bar, is Aldemar, in a green apron. "Hello. I wanted -I looked around the store and stopped my eyes in front of an exhibitor- to buy coffee ”.
There was no one else there; It was just him and me (and the coffee pots, and the coffee bags). There was a silence. Aldemar narrowed his eyes curiously and I felt judged by those eyelids turned into net curtains, but this should not be taken into account, since feeling judged is one of my favorite activities.
"Do you want coffee or do you want coffee ?"
I meditated.
The change in tone between the first and second coffee, which I have tried to bring to the text with a musical italic, made me feel like a student of an exam for which I had not studied. I had entered there with the confidence of knowing I was a client and a giver of things -in this case, money-, but with a single question that Colombian bewitcher had taken all the power from me and had become a submissive recipient of other things (in this case, coffee, or coffee ?), things my tiny mind couldn't understand.
What were the differences between one coffee and another?
And above all, how could I tell him that I wanted coffee ?
In writing it is easy to press the italic button, but in real life, to order coffee , you have to sing , and as every beginning actor knows, sometimes it is difficult to do ( sing ) without feeling ridiculous. Then I fantasized about the following image: I would lean on the bar, arch my eyebrows mischievously and say something like: "You know what coffee I mean"; Immediately afterwards, he would press a button inside the bar, a secret door would open and he would say to me: "Come with me."
But none of that happened. About four or five or six very seconds after he asked me, "Do you want coffee or do you want coffee ?" I swallowed hard and replied:
-Good. Me. Hum.
I didn't have time to develop my babble anymore, although I had several ideas on how to do it. Soon Aldemar began to shake his head and thrust his dialectical claws into my amateur legs, as if I were a helpless Mufasa about to fall into the precipice of ignorance and he a roaring Scar who was going to spare my life.
—You see, we come from a family of coffee growers who have been in the coffee business for more than 150 years. We offer one hundred percent Arabica coffee grown by ourselves in the shady coffee plantations of our plantations in Colombia.
I nodded and may even say "ya," or "aham," or "uhum." He followed.
More than talking, he recited.
—For us, coffee is not just any business, it is our life. Here in Europe they are used to taking it with milk and sugar. Our intention is that you enjoy coffee in its natural form, as we Colombians do.
I wanted to say, like sticking out my chest, that I drink coffee without milk and sugar, but I felt in that conversation like the heroes of the movies when they are walking on an icy road and the ice breaks and the heroes plunge into the water They cold and try to return to the surface, but they don't find the hole they originally fell through, and they suffer, and they open their mouths, and bubbles come out of their mouths. I said: "I take it ... yes ... I mean ... alone, huh", but those words were bubbles in our conversation, because despite saying them, Aldemar did not stop. Possessed by his didactic ferocity, he kept explaining to me what for him was coffee , while I tried, from time to time, to look for a hole to catch oxygen, with new rhetorical bubbles that manifested themselves through more “yeses”, and “yas ", And" ahams ".
We continued like this for a long time, until I made it clear to him that he knew that he offered quality coffee because his shop had recommended me and that I wanted to try that coffee. Then he uttered the phrase:
"I invite you to sit with me and enjoy a coffee for the first time ."
The proof
I told him that I didn't have much time and that I only wanted to take a bag of 250 grams of grain, but he insisted.
"I don't want to trick you." I want you to taste the coffee as we drink it in Colombia so that, if you don't like it, you don't feel committed to anything.
"It's just that I already had two coffees today." It's seven o'clock in the afternoon and I'm getting up very early tomorrow, ”I lied.
He wrinkled his forehead, offended. I realized that I had pressed a sensitive nerve. His entire body, until that moment gesticulating, dynamic and expressive in his monologues, stopped as if an interventionist God had pressed “pause” on the remote control.
"No, no, no," he exploded. Those are misconceptions about coffee. That if coffee gives me gas, that if coffee disturbs me, that if coffee disturbs me ... Coffee does not alter! Aldemar protested with an euphoria perhaps poorly chosen to express that specific message. I invite him to have a coffee with me and he will check it out; It will be my eighth coffee of the day.
I gave up.
Aldemar unleashed his stage skills in a Chemex, an hourglass-shaped glass device that filters coffee through a conical funnel in the upper mouth. The system is the same as that of so many other filter coffee machines. Aldemar put water to heat in a kettle, ground the beans, gave me to smell the result, deposited the ground coffee in the Chemex filter and, little by little, with erotic circular movements, began to pour the water over the coffee, causing a soft bubbling that made it swell like a cupcake. The eyes of Aldemar, whose name is only a phoneme away from being a Gothic nightmare, gleamed with obsessive fury as he completed his ceremony.
"It's oxygen," he said, licking his lips at the chemical magdalenization of coffee.
When it was ready, he served it to me in a glass, which allowed me to see the color of the coffee. It was not black, but a translucent reddish brown.
"Now we smell it," he said to me, and I listened: we both smelled our respective glasses. The first sip tastes bitter, ”he added before drinking. I imitated him and found that it was true, it tasted bitter; also soft, delicate and fruity, but bitter as coffee is bitter, well. The second sip has an acid undertone, ”he continued. And the next one has a sweet taste.
I followed in his footsteps with ritual obedience. What he said was true; a truth perhaps reinforced by the effect of suggestion, but unequivocal on my palate.
The truth is that he had just been challenged and now it was up to me to decide. I had arrived there with the intention of buying 250 grams of coffee and had been convinced to drink free coffee; that is, it had been subject to a reversal of the natural buying and selling process. When they tell you: "up to now you have not drunk coffee, this is coffee ", and you drink it, two paths open up before you: either you surrender to the coffee maker or you amend the plan. In some ways, you feel compelled to admit that it is the best cup of coffee you have ever had, because if you did not you would have to argue why it does not seem so, and who has such self-confidence to argue with the member of a centennial coffee lineage?
Undecided before the exact words to summarize my verdict, my head became a hype of the Champions League draw in which an innocent and unruly hand was immersed to extract the most urgent sensations of what my papillae were, pore by bit, communicating to my brain. So I said, eloquently:
—It's… ugh!
And Aldemar nodded, satisfied. I had become his client.
I asked him about the almost reddish color of his coffee.
"We Colombians call coffee red," he explained. Coffee is native to Ethiopia. He came to Colombia from Europe almost 290 years ago. The Spanish called it red, because of its resemblance to wine, and that term has remained for us Colombians. Truly wine and coffee are very similar. You both have to savor them. You Spaniards understand wine, but coffee ... Coffee on the tree is sweeter than the grape on the tree. Coffee is also fermented, although this has been lost with industrialization, because what big brands want is to go fast to sell more.
"Does this coffee come directly from Colombia?"
-Yes. We do all the processes: we sow it, collect it, ferment it and dry it to remove moisture. Finally, we toast it. In Europe they are used to very high roasts. You don't roast the coffee, you burn it.
You . Here is a subject that I did not want to belong to. From that moment, I decided to convert to his creed. That cup of coffee had changed my life. Just as a vampire doesn't drink water again after tasting blood, I wouldn't be able to dive back into the charred espresso of our bars. I ordered a 250 gram bag. And he offered me of various kinds.
—This one here is 7.90 a quarter of a kilo, this one at 15, and then there is this one, more special, at 35.
I pretended to meditate for a while, as if I wasn't clear from the first moment that the only one I could afford was the first.
My new life as a coffee grower
The decision to buy Colombian coffee one hundred percent arabica was one more step in my self-taught evolution towards flavour sybaritism . The previous one had been to start grinding the coffee myself with a manual grinder, which turned my breakfasts into a liturgy of spiraling Herculean waste.
The grinder had made me a more sensitive sniff to aromatic nuances, but also a grown man dangerously obsessed with sticking bowls into the nose of his visitors while saying, in a broken voice, "Do you smell it, do you smell it?" To my surprise, not everyone liked being chased around the house with a bowl of freshly ground coffee while moaning, "Do you smell it, smell it?" But hospitality is not rocket science, unlike conditions. organoleptics that make coffee beans a more fragrant product than industrial ground coffee. This is something that cannot be explained to bowl rejectors. They open their eyes in puzzlement and smile through clenched teeth and shrug as they are offered with an organic balm. I thought that the rejectors were still facing the platonic shadows of the cave, while I had seen the light.
Before leaving the store, Aldemar asked me what type of coffee maker he used. I told her that I was an Italian and she seemed to agree; Although he sold several pyrotechnic coffee makers there, he vouched that classic mocha was a safe option. But, and here Aldemar put a serious tone, in all coffee machines you had to follow a few steps. He then gave me a series of very clear advice, which he expressed with admonishing rigor. It was fraught with threatening advice, akin to "if you don't follow it, terrible things will happen", in the style of what he gave from the bearded Chinese man and smoker of Gremlins about Gizmo's eating habits. They were these:
1. Grind the coffee with a grinder that crushes the bean by direct friction. No Thermomix or cheap electric grinders. Better a manual one, if possible from wax.
2. Use filtered or bottle water. (First expense).
3. Preheat the water before boiling it. (He had never done it before).
4. Do not press the coffee into the tank. At most, tap it slightly with a teaspoon to mold it to the container. (Personally guilty).
5. Always fill the water up to the screw, even if you want to make a soft coffee or drink little coffee. "The intensity," emphasizes Aldemar, "must depend on the amount of coffee, not the amount of water." (Guilty again).
6. Put the coffee maker on low heat, never on high heat to finish before, because the coffee would be ruined. (All life doing it wrong).
7. Keep the lid of the coffee maker open while on fire. (I had seen this done by some people, who I laughed at, taking them for crazy).
8. Remove as soon as it starts to bubble. (Perhaps the only point I did follow on my own. Sometimes).
9. Never consume a coffee with a roast date of less than two months. "It is when the coffee expires," warns Aldemar, "beyond two months it can be drunk, but it will lose its properties and will make your stomach feel bad." (I do not look at the expiration nor of the yogurts).
From that day on, I started to get up at six, an hour earlier than I used to, to apply his advice with scientific precision. The first thing I did was grinding. Was it a disgust to find that my partner, being awakened an hour earlier by the heartbreaking crackle of the grinder, did not share my enthusiasm for the purity of coffee? It was. Did that stop me? No. I decided to go to a room away from the bedroom so I could grind without waking her up.
The rest of the steps followed with a disappointing fluency. According to Aldemar, the trick of preheating the water helped it later take less time to boil, but the exercise hindered me. Coffee is just one more of the many things one does in the morning before going to work. If it gets stuck at a certain point, then the rest of the processes (showering, dressing, preparing the tupper, etc.) suffer.
And there I was, waiting for the coffee to come up with the hob at 5.
Or at 6, let's see.
Minutes passed: uhm: nothing.
Let's try in 7 ...
The idea of using low heat is to avoid singeing, but how can you savor a coffee if you look alarmed at the time on your wrist while you bring the cup to your mouth, like a comic character?
I soon began to understand that sybaritism was a little incompatible with being, well, a currela. Not just because of the 7.90 of organic coffee one hundred percent Arabica of Colombian origin, but because of time management: a poor person today is not just a ragged beggar, he is someone who repeats phrases like "the quota" or "my landlord" too many times a day. Normal people, who travel every day by subway, bus and suburban, are you there to preheat the coffee and put it on a slow fire?
We drink coffee as an elixir, but also as fuel. My dayjob , so to speak, is in a weekly social chronicle. I'll be clear: The closings in a magazine at heart make Billy Wilder's front page look like a Disney movie by comparison. What would Aldemar say if he saw me enduring the day based on annealed coffees in a thermos with a metallic aftertaste? Or, worse yet, drinking from the office machine . Well, I need those coffees, even if they go against this new, well-dressed religion that I wanted to join.
Leaving aside my poor membership, the whole society goes against Aldemar. Hearing him speak, one is tempted to believe that he has never enjoyed a coffee, when the reality is that he has been doing it for years and decades. I don't know how many days I spent following his instructions, maybe a week or two, but soon I began to skip them due to lack of time or apathy. Yes: is there anything more working class than apathy? "I'm not for bullshit: I want a coffee now ."
I go to the supermarket; I watch customers stop by the coffee section, filling their cars with bonkas and marcillas and ranchers. I see people like me, people without time. The roasting date? No sign of industrial packaging. I try other places where coffee is sold in bulk (stores where they offer you coffees from Colombia, Kenya, Brazil ...) and not only do they not know how to tell me the roasting date, despite being sold as specialized establishments, but they also don't know how to tell me what The region of Colombia, for example, is the coffee they sell, or how many meters it has been grown (something that, in the case of Loma Verde, is carefully detailed). Is a coffee fad beginning to germinate?
Aldemar's heritage
Aldemar has bewitched me and ruined my life: he has given me a gift that goes hand in hand with a sentence. I can no longer live without feeling guilty for every coffee with milk I take, for every time I turn on the fire to make it faster or then reheat it in the microwave or pour water on it to lighten it.
I still think that Loma Verde coffee is the best I have ever tried, but I have decided that I cannot give up my baggage. I need to alternate those quiet and tasting coffees with others of urgency and energy refueling.
I return to Loma Verde to have a frank conversation with my druid. This time the place is not empty. Aldemar attends to a client who has been visiting his premises for a year and who has decided to buy a Chemex to make coffee at home as they prepare it there. The client's name is Miguel and he works in the Sabadell courts, very close to Loma Verde.
—Are you able to attract the majority of customers who come to the place to your style of understanding coffee? I ask Aldemar when Miguel is already gone.
"Many of them," he tells me. Most casual customers come through the door and ask me for a cut or an espresso. These are the words I hear the most. So I ask: “Does coffee hurt you? Do you pour milk so that it does less damage? Do you know that there is another way to drink coffee, that in Colombia we do it in an artisan, rustic, different way? ” And I persuaded them to have one with me without milk and sugar. Here we have no sugar, no sweetener, no panela.
"What kind of clients come?"
-A little of everything. The coffee breaks come from the courts, like Miguel, and many from Banco Sabadell. They are used to the way we make coffee here. We have an espresso machine, but we always, always clean the handle before using it. They don't do that in the bars here, where they burn coffee.
—But this is a store with a tasting service, not a typical cafeteria. A normal bar that lives off cafes can't afford to clean the handle for every coffee it makes.
"Yes, it can, maybe we have to wait, but it's a matter of hygiene and health." Burnt coffee is bad.
"I will be clear." Are poor people coming to Loma Verde?
—Yes, working people are coming. The other day a lady came to me and said: "It's a little expensive, but I'm going to take it." If people buy it, it is because they notice the difference. They see that our coffee does not harm them, that it is not laxative, that it does not give heartburn or reflux.
I have seen some posh coffee specialty businesses proliferate. They are wearing bearded tattoos that the day before yesterday were making haircuts for thirty euros with a beer tasting. Aldemar himself admits to me that there is an unfriendly fashion around the corner, of which he is happy "if it serves to raise customer awareness of the quality of coffee."
His, I think, is different. I imagine him and his brother looking at rental prices in Barcelona and lowering their expectations to end up opening in Sabadell and, I do not know, I empathize because it is the same thing that has happened to me, not as a businessman but as a currito. No: Aldemar is not a shamanic titan who is in possession of the caffeine truth. He cannot give or take away coffee lovers' cards, nor has he come into this world to take us out of the cave with his aromatic and certainly delicious infusions. He is just a coffee farmer with an idea, to go back in time, increasingly widespread in other branches of gastronomy, and which comes to redound to the current great dilemma of our shopping basket: is it possible to continue being a good person ( good coffee grower, good ecologist, good-whatever-it is) while still being working class?
In Colombia, Aldemar tells me, the government prohibits any coffee crop other than arabica to protect the native variety of the country. It is an example of statism in the face of the agitation of capricious individuals in which the market boils, with the consequent guilt every time that, out of necessity, lack of time or fucking laziness - after hours of labor crushing - we buy something packaged in forty plastics or, in this case, industrial coffee, pocho and cheap.
I don't want to drink cheap industrial coffee, I want to drink organic coffee, one hundred percent arabica and cultivated at 1400 meters above the ground, but sometimes I will have to alternate, without martyrdom. Aldemar himself succeeds in defining the situation by building a bridge, again, between coffee trees and vineyards:
—I don't understand about wines, but if I want to enjoy a good glass, I'm willing to pay for the experience. And if what I want is to get drunk, maybe I'll settle for Don Simón.
Because, just as there are cafes and cafes , there are also days and days .
