How I drink coffee

Developing rituals despite my best efforts

Oct 28, 2022

I got home on Sunday evening after a hectic few days back in the UK, but it was only on Monday morning, once I had brewed my first homemade coffee in almost a week, that I felt I had truly arrived.

What follows are some non-exhaustive thoughts about just this: the process of preparing my daily coffee. Coffee holds a powerful place in our collective imagination, even more so for anyone interested in the origins of what we eat and drink and where it comes from. It’s a topic I know I will return to often here. By writing first about how I consume it, I am starting at the end of the chain, but also at the beginning: the first encounters with this structuring ritual in my life.

Coffee in my prized mug from Minuit Céramique. I am also insufferable about mugs.

I first started drinking coffee because I was a die-hard tea drinker.

It had to be loose leaf, ideally the Cardews Oxford Breakfast blend, brewed for 4 minutes in the little silicone man that hung over the side of my favourite Emma Bridgewater mug. It was touchy anyone else offering to make me tea. I knew it wouldn’t meet my exacting expectations and that I would be disappointed. I was, needless to say, an insufferable teenager.

I’m not even sure how much tea I was drinking at that point, but I know a single day without it was enough to send me spiralling (or, as close to spiralling as a teenager as unnervingly level-headed as I used to be could get).

The biggest hardship for me was what passed as tea abroad, made with (God forbid) heat-treated milk, or even worse, served black. I remember the trauma of a microwaved mug of tea made from a reused teabag in Seville, and a bowl resembling lukewarm dishwater in Lyon that gave a new meaning to a whiter shade of pale.

Coffee was therefore to become a very pragmatic answer to this deeply impractical problem of my own making.

Having never been a coffee drinker before, I made the conscious decision, aged 17 or so, to start drinking incredibly bad coffee. The logic was simple. In a rare flash of self-knowledge, I realised that my tea preferences were out of control. Rather than attempting to be any less of an obnoxious tea snob, I decided that I would simply cultivate bad taste in coffee, so that I would never be without a tolerable hot caffeinated drink option.

The number one rule was that I had to drink exclusively black coffee, because most scenarios where I couldn’t get good tea were down to a lack of fresh milk. Starting university, I would buy only instant coffee, and content myself with that.

Fast forward a decade, and I now regularly bring a thermos of homemade coffee to the office because I find the one they have there so undrinkable. So it’s safe to say that my strategy has failed. Except for the milk part: despite a brief dalliance with flat whites for a few years, I am now firmly back in the black coffee camp.

Looking back, there were two key turning points in my relationship with coffee which continue to shape how I drink it now. They took place fairly close together in time, while I was still a student.

First up, in an intense moment of caffeine craving while working in the library, I ordered a long black from Jericho Coffee Traders on Oxford High Street. When they passed me that little cup with its orange-brown crema, I remember being blown away by just how good coffee could taste. It was fruity, unexpected, complex. I was hooked.

The second was the communal coffee breaks me and my friends would have during our final year of university. In the run-up to our final exams, we would gather in the kitchen around elevenses and share the contents of a couple of battered moka pots. I am wary of betraying the past with rose-tinted nostalgia, but to me those coffee breaks symbolised everything that was good about that period (things that I continue to value now): living with my favourite people within a 3 minute radius of my bedroom, never taking things so seriously that we couldn’t afford a twenty-minute break to console one another about our shared upcoming demise.

Coffee, and in particular the moka pot, became a symbol of sharing and of comfort. That same moka pot has lived everywhere I have ever lived, perhaps that’s why I refuse to commit to any more refined coffee-making technique (though I did recently get a welcome upgrade to a bigger Bialetti).

The latest step in my coffee journey was buying a hand grinder earlier this year. It brings together the two sides of what my coffee habit does for me: it has got to be delicious, and grinding beans from scratch means they are fresher and more flavourful (also an excuse to collect bags of locally-roasted beans each time I travel), but also it is about the effort I put in. It’s a process, one that drags me away from my computer and makes me do something concrete, mechanic, with a fixed start and end point.

A lot of the talk around fourth-wave coffee focuses on people wanting to replicate coffee shop quality coffee at home during lockdowns, but I also think the importance of the process of making coffee cannot be overlooked. It’s a privilege to be able to fritter away so much time and money on my coffee, but I think that paying attention to these daily actions has inherent value.

I recently shared an extract from Haley Nahman’s newsletter on my instagram, where she talks about chores as a necessary kind of maintenance that gives our lives meaning. She describes how ‘having things I both want and need to do every day provides a natural balance and rhythm to my life’ and I feel the same about the little moments I spend grinding coffee rather than just popping a capsule in a machine. Yes, I prefer the flavour and supporting local coffee roasters, but I also crave the ritual of weighing my beans, heating the water, listening for the pot to make the characteristic noise telling me that if I don’t take it off the heat immediately my brew will burn.

On reflection, that is what young Lizzie was doing with tea without realising: my emphasis on how I made tea was less about the outcome and more about taking a moment to do something correctly. Ironically, I have become significantly less uptight about tea in recent years, opting most mornings for PG tips and (close your eyes, UK readers) long-life milk.

I hope you enjoyed this second edition of Lizzie Wrote This. There is a lot more to come. I hope you’ll stay around.

Baker’s dozen

13 good things from the last fortnight:

Recreating the rosewater lemonade a friend made for me several times this summer
My new lilac eyeshadow from & other stories
Making a three-layer chocolate and salted caramel cake for my Grandpa’s 90th birthday
A delicious meal at Benoli in Norwich with my nearest and dearest
Going on my first run in a month after weeks of being under the weather
Watching Kleo on Netflix - think Killing Eve meets The Bridge meets German reunification: farfetched but addictive
Starting my rare office days with cinnamon rolls from Hopla Geiss
A spontaneous after-work walk in the Bois de la Cambre
Mum’s lasagne at home last week
Making the effort to follow a new recipe from scratch, this time Claudia Roden’s spiced mince with aubergine puree
Making carbonara for my pals
Homemade samosas
Finally cracked and downloaded BeReal - let’s see how long the honeymoon period lasts