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Bean there, done that
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Send the espressos machines to Italy, French presses to France and raise a toast to brewed coffee. The humble steel filter stirs and wins the frothy battle for coffee lovers. SERISH NANISETTI discovers
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Photo: Shanker Chakravarty
Fresh brew Minissha Lamba savours filter coffee
Every morning Pavitra, a history lecturer at Osmania University, wakes up half hour before everyone, boils a cup of water, measures five spoons of coffee powder into the filter, stamps it down and then pours the boiling water into the filter. After a 20-minute wait, it is 10 minutes of feminine indulgence as she sits alone and drinks the steaming cup of coffee from a steel tumbler.
Identify the routine? Variations of this routine play out in most south Indian households. Now, news comes in that brewed coffee brings out the most flavours in the bean. “Steep coffee in water, and you’re going to taste gradations of flavour you’re simply not going to find in espresso,” David Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York told The New York Times.
A surprise considering a generation of coffee lovers are switching over from their humble filters to expensive percolators or for fancy looking French presses. If one American café has imported a $20,000 machine from Japan that brews coffee with a halogen element then another company called Clover is peddling a $11,000 machine that brews one cup at a time. Pricey, you might say, but then no price is too high for that perfect brew.
The smell of roasting coffee beans wafts like Jerry’s cheese lure of beckoning finger outside the Vasant Coffee House in Mehdipatnam. Just the memory of it can make the cognoscenti close the eyes and breathe in. Inside the small shop, as a drum rattles shaking and swirling the beans, Vasant Naresh pulls out the dipstick filled with beans and checks them, ‘not done’. He takes out the four beans and puts them aside and gets back to dealing with his customers.
A world away in Sultan Bazar, there is no electricity, the generators are spewing out a blanket of acrid diesel smog and shoppers walk with covered nose but at one place the acrid smell gives way to the bouquet of coffee smell as it gets roasted, ground and packaged at the Bharat Cafe established in 1952 by brothers K.A. Balakrishnan and Narayanaswamy. Their photos hang on the wall and the son-in-law runs the shop.
In walks N. Ramanamurthy who lives in Uppal but makes it a point to pick up his 60-40 combination here. “We use the filter and the powder I get from here is the best. The readymade packets are no good,” he says. From Uppal to pick up coffee powder in Sultan Bazar? But then coffee is about insane passion (music composer Beethoven reportedly counted 40 beans to be ground for making his coffee).
“Some people ask for coffee powder, others ask for 60-40 or other combinations of coffee and chickori but a number of people specify how much peaberry and how much plantation,” says M.P. Doraiswamy who’s been working for the past 20 years at Bharat Coffee House and can pick out old timers and the combination they want from yards off.
If the snooty uniformed baristas are happy to show their chrome plated steaming machines and coffee-making process, not so the decoction making process in the dozens of Udipi hotels in the city. But with the single mistake of keeping the cauldron of decoction hot, most coffee lovers know the exact time to get the right notes of the coffee cup. Ask the regulars at 8 a.m. or 4.30 p.m. and they will tell the time to get the right cup of coffee.
Or raise a toast to filter coffee in your home in the morning.
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