toast
June 22, 2005 – 7:14 pm“aawwwwww,” he said. “tastes like a hundred pieces of burnt toast in a cup.”
there are only two treatments of an ignoramus at such a juncture: show him what bad espresso really tastes like, or simply knock him off his barstool. both would have been blockheaded of me. both would have stunted the saturday morning effort at spreading espresso gospel. but for an amateur who had spent two weeks tinkering with a sublime yirgacheffe roast, had self-booted his carcass from the sack at 8 on a saturday after two straight weeks of 3 a.m. bedtimes to serve these guys, who had stayed late at the mornin’ meeting to sling another round, then stuck his neck out with a free offer of straight shots … well.
you’ve heard a variation of this diatribe before, from pro baristi who get it far more often. the point remains that palates beg to be saved. i’ve tried weaning folks of the additives, then the milk. i’ve tried the forced-ingestion-of-ristretto method, using forceps to pry open the jaws. i’m kidding, of course. in the end, there’s little to say but, “ah, but what scintillating burnt toast it is! subtle citrus high notes and a winey character, eh? bet your toast doesn’t do that!”
i don’t believe i have an espresso ego. really. the chapel hill trip shredded any pretenses i may have had left, and i had struggled mightily with the new ethiopian shots. i was not pulling them confidently. but this one was good. really good. i had tasted it first, and was passing it around to demonstrate to taster’s choice drinkers that strong and bitter are not the same. which is when the guy with an aversion to anything without caramel and froth and the metaphoric aplomb of a shop-vac salesman piped up so vociferously.
“stuff goes straight through me,” he said. “oh, not this yirgacheffe,” i said broadly. “the ash will stick to your gullet and putrify your breath for weeks. no chance it’ll ever get to your digestive tract.”
