Coffee: The Roast of Glory

“The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

I am surely not alone to hold C.S. Lewis as the finest writer in modern Christianity, as far as the English language goes. It would be imperialism to assume that other cultures' Christian writers don't measure up since I have not read many of them even in translation. 

My book by Soren Kierkegaard "Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses" was translated from Danish into English quite capably by Howard and Edna Hong. Every so often they employ the original Danish word and then offer the English word side-by-side One such instance is "opbyggelig" which means upbuilding. That Danish word just captures a viscerality, an uplift, a strenuous spirit, that upbuilding  does not. It looks like I will finally finish (or Danish, for an easy pun), this weighty book as I am on page 365/401.

The book languished and loomed heavily on my shelf for years. Its profundity and depth scaring me away as a dragon in its lair. It was not because it was sulphur-breathing evil but instead was the pure air of sparkling and blinding insight. I usually read a paragraph or two until I hit something profound. And then I stop and ponder. And ponder. And ponder. It puts pebbles in my mind like a stone in my shoe and forces me to cease my reading and reflect. Pearls of wisdom.

C.S. Lewis's writing had and has the same effect on me. I just can't rush read his work. I need to slow down and savor his sentences and the ideas they embody. There are great thinkers who are not particularly great or arresting writers. Although I suppose one has to be a great thinker to be a great writer, what is called in Ph.D. circles, a necessary but not sufficient cause to be a literary exemplar.

In college, when I became a Christian, my taste and desire for reading was re-awakened. There was a thirst that I had for the written word that I had suppressed throughout my teen years. Reading for pleasure got lost in the forest of adolescent angst (probably one of the reasons  I became wayward to start with),  and C.S. Lewis was one of the few Christian writers who I felt not only was orthodox but also wrote craftily and charmingly about the faith. It was like a romance rather than an arranged marriage of me to his writings. I walked the paths of his prose like a lost child trying to find his way home.

Much of present day Christian writing, even scripturally-sound, is just poor. Like D minus barely passing poor. That's a fact, jack.  

The Weight of Glory essay, partially quoted above, is simply one of the  most majestic and monumental works of writing about the heaviness all of us feel of holiness, the sense that life and all that is life is sacred. We can run and hide from God but we will only succeed in widening the rift and abyss in our souls, for as Augustine aptly wrote, "Lord are hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee."  I have spent so much time running from this rest in a quest to remain autonomous.  All that leads to is loneliness. 

The created world is a mirror of sorts, an analogue to the eternal world embodied in things. This is not pantheism but instead incarnation. Of all creation, only humanity has eternity in our hearts. We discern that this is not all there is. We either embrace this realization or we distract ourselves from the ache of deeper questions. And so we eat, drink, pop our meds, and try not to be miserable. Merry seems to be stretch and far too ambitious for such a serious century as our own.  

One created thing I do love, and too affectionately perhaps (outside of words) is coffee. I must have Ethiopian blood somewhere because making coffee is nearly a religious ritual for me. I have started to roast coffee beans, attempting to remove one more layer of consumerist sheen from the inherent craft of coffee roasting and making. And best of all, coffee drinking. If I could, I would grow coffee in my backyard--and just might, when I retire. Buy a parcel of land in Jamaica, grow my hair long so I can have dreads, and be the old and tall white coffee bean bearing man of the mountains.

I ordered some green coffee beans from Amazon. These beans grow wildly and organically supposedly in the high mountains of Papua New Guinea and are helicoptered out in small batches, safe from pillagers and bandits.  I know that Amazon gets a bad rap, and much of it is deserved, for its all-consuming marketplace. Yet, it is pretty remarkable, that I can obtain coffee beans airlifted to my cup from half a world away. 

Before Amazon came along, let us recall (if you are old enough to remember) that buying options were narrow and defined by demographic and geographic location. I live in redneck USA (Trump-Land) to a degree but can have blue blood tastes. All I need is a computer, a mailing address, and a credit card. I don't have to reside in a place like where I grew up to have access to excellence. So, be careful when people talk about the good old days. They weren't all great. Sentimentality is a seducer. Beware of those who paint pictures of the past that are all golden. It is an edenic illusion. 

The green beans are in a stable state and can be stored for 12-16 months without turning stale. Once the beans are roasted, however, the culinary clock starts to tick where taste will be adversely affected by time. It is best to roast, let the coffee beans rest for a day or so, then grind and drink. I used an iron skillet for the roasting of the beans at the top of this post. There is a bit of unevenness in the roast of each bean. It is difficult to create an entirely uniform roasting temp for each bean when doing it by hand but that is OK. When you grind the beans, just stir the grounds thoroughly, and the roasting variation will coalesce into a continuity for the cup.

There is an interesting two cracks in the roasting of coffee beans. Starbucks, in its darker roasts, has popularized the second crack which is when the oils are released from the coffee bean at extremely high temps, I think around 400 degree fahrenheit from what I recall in my recent tour of the Starbucks East Coast roasting facility in my school district. Although I do like the darker blends on occasion, particularly of course with espressos, I don't typically prefer high quality beans to be cracked the second time. The first crack is the release of water from the coffee bean and my desired taste profile tends to be closer to the water crack versus the oil crack. The tale of two cracks. Starbucks, to its credit, now has blond roasts.

Starbucks gets a bad rap too. But, let us remember how shitty coffee was before they came along and set up on your corner. Instant Coffee--who ever thought this abomination up? Castrate the beans. 

My analogy about dark roasts is like this: good bread and bad bread taste more the same when they are burnt. A lighter roast allows the unique flavor, fruitiness, and the sweetness of the coffee bean to remain versus stomping it into the ground like a cigarette butt. It is common for beans of lesser quality to be burnt to hide the lack of good taste. NOTE: A side warning, if your beans are more lightly roasted, count on a higher caffeine content.  Caffeine burns off at higher temps. It is somewhat similar to Belgian beers being lighter tasting in some cases but having higher ABV's. Dark taste doesn't not necessarily mean more alcohol. Guinness Stout in fact was brewed specifically to taste weighty and strong through its darkened malt profile, but is relatively low in alcohol. This was concocted to keep the Irish from being wastoid drunkards.

After roasting the coffee beans on the lighter side, grind them in a burr grinder which is much more uniform than a blade. I brew using a technique called "Dropped Coffee" which is an urbane high-end variation of the rustic Cowboy Coffee. Let the grounds sit on top of the hot water and they will drop to the bottom of the cup over time. With a little shake or two towards the end of saturation, you know your coffee is ready to be consumed. The down side of French Press, Pour Overs, and regular coffee makers, is that the beans either are not fully saturated or are too saturated. Dropped grounds are an internal indicator that the brew is ready. Plus, you avoid the toxins of brewing in plastic which is common in coffee makers. I pour the ready brew through a stainless steel filter/strainer and am left with coffee for the gods. 

So, here are some spiritual takeaways:

- Adversity, like heat, matures us and makes us who were are supposed to be. Trauma is getting burnt by life and leaves us bereft, bitter, and broken. Like beans that have been beaten into submission and are more ash than anything, we need to promulgate a just society that matures people into whole souls. Materialism is  far too mechanistic to provide a substantive basis for existence. Surviving certainly can happen but humanity is not merely a machine. Empiricism is a truncated way to view the world and a loosey-goose spirituality that lacks content is not valid way to animate us to become our best selves.  

- In Christian circles, it is easy to get burnt-out in a different way: never-ending activity, even from the best of motives. I think one of the best things that could happen to the American church is for us to lose the buildings, the parking lots, and the trappings on consumerism. Pyrotechnic worship with lights and rock music and preaching from the pulpit spotlight, are a very poor substitute for the still small voice of God who lessens Himself in order to make us more.  Cut out the sugar and the cream and go straight to the source and drink. 

- We need to read more and watch less. I was out on a bike ride last Saturday through Columbia and almost everyone was on their phones. I was really wondering what is so enchanting online as to distract masses of humanity from simply enjoying a crisp and sunny Fall day without their mobile Matrix devices. If you want to feed your soul, get outside and away from it all or close your door and read. Meaning  is like spiritual nutrition in an age seduced by image. Once consumed, twice as empty as before. We have an addiction to the visual and it is not just porn but the prosaic too.  The Reformation freed the Scriptures from the selfish and greedy hands of Rome. Now, we neglect the Word for lesser pursuits. Use techniques and technology--like computers, roasting, grinding, and brewing--to become consumer of better and not lesser things. A cup of coffee should provide a metaphor for a well-brewed life. It should taste good. The aesthetic becomes a pointer to the giver of beauty, God himself.    

Augustine was converted when he heard a child's voice saying "Tolle Lege." Take and Read which lead him to open the Book of Romans. The world was never the same. Likewise, Take and Drink.

Eric Bierker Ph.D is the author of "On The Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively to College." A book for the college-bound.