A Libertarian Ode to Coffee

Coffee Lover.jpg
True Love

I really, really, really love good coffee. Not watery, traditional American Maxwell House coffee (or, as it was referred to in the move Bagdad CafÃ?Â??Ã?Â?Ã?©, “nur braunes Wasser!”), but real coffee. That means in the Italian style (ground and with the water forced through it with 8 atmospheric pressures to make espresso and cappuccino), in the Turkish style (ground to a fine powder and then boiled with sugar and served bubbling hot into a tiny cup), in the German style (filtered, like old-style American, but a rich and flavorful brownish black), in the Austrian style (similar to Italian, but with greater variety and flair), in the French style (pressed through a plunger at the table, or hot and slightly bitter espresso drunk at the counter for half-price), and on and on. But not I-can-see-the-bottom-of-the-cup American style. (I should add that the only coffee I ever had that was worse was that served in Britain and the English-speaking parts of Canada.)

Fortunately, Americans can now benefit from decent coffee, thanks to���¢�¢?�¬���¦.the large accumulations of financial and human capital made possible by voluntarily formed limited liability corporations. My friend Jacob Grier has an ode to caffeinated capitalism at Smelling the Coffee.



9 Responses to “A Libertarian Ode to Coffee”

  1. Chris Farley

    Try The Coffee Fool. You can find it on-line. I’ve been ordering from them religiously since the very first pot. It is the freshest, sweetest, best coffee I’ve ever had.

  2. Your comments about American coffee are deeply offensive, and will doubtless lead to rioting and the burning of embassies. I wonder if what Patrick Henry said of Jefferson might be equally said of you, that you have “abjured your native victuals.”

    But seriously, not all American coffee is scared water. Maybe it’s just you east coasters. Or maybe things have just changed over time. In chapter 49 of A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain complained of the weakness of European coffee, compared to American:

    “To particularize: the average American’s simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak; well, in Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage. You can get what the European hotel-keeper thinks is coffee, but it resembles the real thing as hypocrisy resembles holiness. It is a feeble, characterless, uninspiring sort of stuff, and almost as undrinkable as if it had been made in an American hotel. The milk used for it is what the French call ‘Christian’ milk–milk which has been baptized.

    “After a few months’ acquaintance with European ‘coffee,’ one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream, after all, and a thing which never existed.”

    And he then offers this recipe for German coffee:

    “Take a barrel of water and bring it to a boil; rub a chicory berry against a coffee berry, then convey the former into the water. Continue the boiling and evaporation until the intensity of the flavor and aroma of the coffee and chicory has been diminished to a proper degree; then set aside to cool. Now unharness the remains of a once cow from the plow, insert them in a hydraulic press, and when you shall have acquired a teaspoon of that pale-blue juice which a German superstition regards as milk, modify the malignity of its strength in a bucket of tepid water and ring up the breakfast. Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement.”

    For myself, my favorite is Greek coffee. You only get half a cup of drinkable stuff, but it will keep you rattling for six days.

    (A Tramp Abroad is here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/119/119.txt)

  3. Tom G. Palmer

    Shame on you, Timothy, for confusing Greek coffee, pale imitation that it is, with Turkish coffee, which stems from the true introducers of the beverage to Europe. (To all my Greek friends, I’m just kidding! Really!)

    You may be right about the changing relative quality of American and European coffee. I recall reading years ago (somewhere…I feel a bit like Ronald Reagan recalling his service in World War II) that American coffee went downhill with the introduction of the supermarket chain, since such chains would advertise “loss leaders” in the papers to get people to come and shop, and that the most popular loss leader was cheap coffee. Overtime the mass producers substituted the loathesome robusta bean for the sublime arabica bean; the former is chock-full of caffeine but tasteless. A good espresso is not wonderful because it has more caffeine than a watery and tasteless cup of coffee, but because it has more flavor. I’m sure that somewhere there is a lonely doctoral dissertation on just that topic sitting on a university library shelf.

  4. “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.” – Turkish Proverb

    But it wasn’t the Turks who introduced coffee to the west, it was Ukrainian cossack Yuriy Kulchytsky. He had been captured and enslaved by the Turks, but eventually escaped, taking with him the secret of coffee. He opened Vienna’s firt coffee house, the Blue Bottle, thus contributing to the advance of western civilization.

  5. Tom G. Palmer

    I know the story, but the context usually offered is that he used bags of coffee left behind by the invading Turkish army after their defeat (by the Poles under the leadership of Jan III Sobieski) in 1683. That was the source of my reference to the Turks having “introduced” coffee to Europe.

  6. Tom, I think that Charles Steele may be right here. Coffeehouses existed in europe before the (second) siege of vienna in 1683. I personally dont know when coffee was introduced in the Ottoman empire but I do remember having read about coffeehouses being opened in europe already in the 16th century. The Turkish chronicles dont write anything about coffeebags left behind in vienna but what is true is that european traders visited the ottoman empire very often. I have not come across any article about a cossack introducing coffee in vienna but if Im not wrong there were already coffeehouses in venice. Venicians traded a lot with the Ottomans.

  7. Kenneth R. Gregg

    During the years that I worked in downtown Los Angeles, I acquired a taste for Lebanese coffee. There was a small restaurant under one of the diamond marts that I would partake of this delectible black, strooooong, thick coffee sweetened with sugar. I would sit back and watch the merchants come downstairs and compare their diamonds with each other. What fun that was!

    I find I just cannot consume American coffee or (yuch!) instant c-ff–.
    Cheers!
    Just Ken
    kgregglv@cox.net

  8. Everyone is taking shots at the delicious brown water that I call coffee. I think the perfect cup of coffee is a mild roast, lightly sweetened, with a tiny bit of cream.

    I would definitely like to try this Turkish coffee sometime, though. As long as it doesn’t taste like the burnt sludge that Starbucks calls coffee.