A Few Brief Thoughts On Coffee

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Good Morning.

I recently conducted an extremely scientific poll on Twitter asking people to describe what coffee tastes like. Of course the answers were all over the place. Some people described the chemical composition of coffee, trying to give a vague impression of the different types of tastes it can have. Other people described generalized flavor comparisons. I even got a synesthesia response: gold/goldenrod with some orange and red flecks.

No one ventured to say that coffee tastes like coffee, that is to say, that it has a monolithic flavor all unto itself. And while that’s probably a product of most of my social media circle being related to people who, like me, work in specialty coffee as a profession, it also ignores the fact that most of the American (and likely World) population sees coffee as just that: coffee.

My partner was interviewing a beer brewer about the addition of coffee to beer, and one of the main reasons they gave for the pairing is how ubiquitous the flavor of “coffee” really is, and how it’s something almost everyone can identify easily. This is an easy perspective to adopt when the product you make is a singular beverage crafted from a variety of ingredients. Coffee, then, is also an ingredient, and is best to be viewed as a singular flavor.

That singular flavor — the one almost everyone can easily identify — is actually the lack of coffee. Or rather, the horrendous absence of the things that make coffee so complex, unique, and dynamic. There are around 1,000 identifiable flavor and aroma compounds available in roasted coffee for extraction during the brewing process, but the true flavor of coffee is temporary: these aromas are volatile, which means they evaporate into the air given enough time, and one of the main driver’s of a truly spectacular cup of coffee are its fruit acids, which quickly are overshadowed when chlorogenic acid starts to degrade and breaks down into quinic acid and caffeic acid. What that means is that every brewed cup of coffee is a fleeting impression: a moment, if you will, captured in time, before a change in temperature and oxygen exposure causes it to go flat, sour, and bitter.

The truth about coffee is that it can be everything to anyone. The most popular descriptors for coffee are the same ones used most often to advertise liquor: bold, yet smooth. Those two terms are highly popular because they don’t actually describe any aspect of taste, and a few decades ago research showed that most people respond to flavor descriptors that they want to describe themselves rather than what would describe what they’re drinking. It starts to become clear that the cultural significance of coffee is much more highly important to society than its culinary significance. Except, well, even society can’t quite agree on what that is.

In Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Rory are motor-mouthed coffee obsessives who lament that the only good coffee is the stuff that’s available at Luke’s Diner. “Good” is an odd word because there’s never any extrapolation of what that means. Coffee is either “good” or “not as good as Luke’s,” and largely the obsession over coffee is presented as an affectation to keep their high-energy conversations going.

In Twin Peaks, however, coffee is a respite. This article on Eater gives us a good impression of how that shakes out, but the long and short of it is that Agent Dale Cooper, famous for his catchphrase of “damn fine cup of coffee,” uses coffee as a daily pause, a brief moment of normalcy in an extremely un-normal time.*

Music doesn’t settle in on a single cultural definition of coffee, either. R&B singer Miguel’s “Coffee” is about tender, intimate moments in the morning after while Kelly Rowland’s version of that moment in her song “Coffee” is a little more explicitly about the morning of. Sylvan Esso’s “Coffee” explores the drink as a metaphor for a relationship going hot and cold, as is (sort of) Kate Bush’s “Coffee Homeground.”

Probably the most used form of coffee in song is that of early morning reflection, as in Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup Of Coffee,” in which the narrator asks for another moment of reflection with a temporary lover. Or in George Jones’ “A Good Year For The Roses,” the narrator describes “a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee that you poured but didn’t drink” as an artifact of the woman who has left, and did so without even pausing for the reflection that could be paired with that coffee. And so and and so on through Gordon Lightfoot and Squeeze and Otis Redding.

None of that really prepares us for Black Flag’s “Black Coffee” which ruminates on fueling silent, jealous rage with black coffee while the narrator, effectively, does nothing but stare at a wall and imagine transgressions. That opens up a variety of new songs,touching on coffee’s caffeine content as the main focus, going all the way back to the Ink Spots’ “Java Jive” through Lagwagon’s “Mr. Coffee” and beyond.

It’s hard to see coffee as anything else but a projection of self, after a while, and yet coffee keeps appearing in movies and television and songs as a singular stand-in that we’re all supposed to understand universally. To that degree, coffee is self-myth — a story we tell ourselves about ourselves that exists to communicate something bigger, broader, and more powerful than ourselves. And if that’s the case, I’m really only interested in the myth of Buck Owens’ “Truck Drivin’ Man.”

In the song, the narrator stops his truck at a roadside diner called Hamburger Dan, and in the chorus, asks the waitress to “pour me another cup of coffee, for it is the best in the land.” As much as I am bound to obsess over the best cup of coffee in the United States being available at a roadside diner called Hamburger Dan, it is the next part of the song that truly sets off a circuitous science fiction hell: “I’ll put a nickel in the jukebox and play ‘The Truck Drivin’ Man.”

In the song “Truck Drivin’ Man,” the narrator is a truck driver who stops for coffee, hears a song about a truck driver, asks the waitress for another cup and tells her “this song’s about me, I’m a truck driver,” and then says he’ll play the song again, the song called “The Truck Drivin’ Man’,” which isn’t a real song, but was created for the song by songwriter Terry Fell for the narrator of the song to listen to and relate to as part of the song that’s called just plainly “Truck Drivin’ Man.” Like some Lovecraftian eldritch horror, “The Truck Drivin’ Man” is something we never see, never hear. We hear it described, and we known it exists in that universe, but we never get to know what is in the song except that it’s a song that describes a truck driver, which is what the song “Truck Drivin’ Man” by Buck Owens does, creating a mirror image of a man in a mirror, reflecting into an infinity.

At the core of this Groundhog Day damnation is the temptation of the devil himself. The coffee at Hamburger Dan is the best in the land, and, assumedly, irresistible. So if coffee can’t really be described, and if coffee can be everything to anyone, then this is the version I choose coffee to be for me: a hellish lure that traps me in a never-ending loop of truck driving, talking about truck driving, listening to a song about truck driving, and having a perfect moment of the best coffee to ever exist while doing so.

But then again, coffee can be anything to everyone, so maybe your version of coffee is just a quiet morning of reflection.

* I won’t begrudge the author of that piece for saying “damn good coffee” in the title as it could have been the editor who beefed the quote but, c’mon, it’s easy to just fact check the quote)

** Half-filled really is such a beautiful line linguistically too — it rolls off the tongue well, and suggests that the woman in the song never planned on staying around anyway but decided to acquiesce to the narrators pleas for her to stick around to at least talk.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.