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86129squids
| | Posted on Monday, January 10, 2011 - 02:08 am: | 
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Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale, coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people more boring.
Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive process, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted my coffee when we drink it.Coffee's power changes over time. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera." This is true, but the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while- for a week or two at most- you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water. |
86129squids
| | Posted on Monday, January 10, 2011 - 02:16 am: |
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For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder. |
86129squids
| | Posted on Monday, January 10, 2011 - 02:19 am: |
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I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thought he'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One assumed that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.
From The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, by Honore de Balzac} |
Lemonchili_x1
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 05:21 am: |
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Buying . . ANY of this?
Yeah.......... no... lol 
It was nice to disprove the myth that all American coffee is awful on our trip. While some was definitely average, we had great coffee in several places on our trip. You'd never guess where I bought what I thought was the best latte of the trip though...  |
Blake
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 09:14 am: |
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The Scottish restaurant? |
Moxnix
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 11:22 am: |
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(Message edited by moxnix on January 11, 2011) |
Mr_grumpy
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - 04:59 pm: |
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Ezblast
| | Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2011 - 01:07 am: |
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I shudder... |
Moxnix
| | Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2011 - 12:21 pm: |
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Ah, come on. Store coffee in Europe is like boutique stuff here. Was living in Berlin in the late 1980s & listening one evening to a BBC radio travel show about the worst cuppa' in the U.S. Funny stuff, the travel reporter chose the baddest cup to be one he suffered on an airplane between LA & NY. |
Ezblast
| | Posted on Friday, January 14, 2011 - 02:32 am: |
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That was then, this is now, with way better flavor available, back then most American coffee did suck, but then back then I was working AR for De Choix (now defunct) SF branch, who where known for their desert coffee, and other brands of Gourmet food they wholesaled to SF's better restaurants and grocers. In collage the been of choice was chockafullanuts coffee - something like that - lol - my parents drank and liked folgers, I grew up to hate it, the nun's had better coffee, being Irish they where connected - lol - learned to love little coffee shops I could find in life. Today though America has great coffee.
EZ |
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