One Beer #4: Yesterday's Coffee (Iced)
From Modelo to Bustelo, anything can be a beer. This is this one.
I don’t do the measurements or anything scientific. It’s two scoops, and then a little more, depending on the water amount, and then I generally just turn the pot off the second it’s finished brewing. One hot cup is plenty, but I’d rather drink it iced for the rest of the day. Temper the bitter flavors, and get the results faster. Perhaps one of the more utilitarian practices I maintain.
This felt like a big secret. When I started drinking coffee, and then when I started drinking iced coffee, before my pre-frontal cortex had fully developed, there was this sort of known-unknown about how the coffee gets put over ice. You have to brew it - it’s supposed to be hot. And then how quickly can it get cold? Because I’d argue this is better, when it’s over ice. I don’t remember when I first heard the term “cold brew,” but it probably wasn’t until I worked in a coffeeshop that I understood that it was acceptable to just let a pot of coffee cool completely, however long that may be, and put it over ice. Iced coffee is just old coffee. We’re just drinking old coffee!
Here’s an issue: I have this old coffee pot. It’s a green model I bought for $10 in a Rochester, NY Goodwill. It leaked at first, but after a deep clean, it hasn’t leaked since. Not a single issue, even if I make sure it’s off every time I want to leave the house. I like this machine because of how un-fussy it is. I don’t want to get a scale to measure the amount of coffee I want, and I don’t want to become someone who can tell the difference between a good or less good shot of espresso. I don’t even really want to judge what I am drinking every day, so much so that I’ve had the above thoughts about not complicating it any more. The issue, then: in what way is this any less fussy?
I love to buy a coffee, too. I’ve had a year of long commutes — an hour uptown and an hour back at its best. I’ve found myself buying an iced coffee for the ride there, and then once I’ve gotten off the train it’s time for another iced coffee. My $3.75 commute has just added nearly $10 more, and every single article about “The young people can’t buy houses because they can’t stop spending” feels totally justified and true. As if the issue is me spending and not that the job I’m commuting to simply isn’t paying enough for the world I’m commuting through. It can be cliched to feel like there’s always someone above to be blamed, but this is a real trick played by those above. Of course they are to blame. How can you blame me? I’m all the way down here.
There’s some effort, too, to keep this practice unfussy. All week, I’ll do things and think, “I could talk about that.” Seeing Don’t Worry Darling, seeing a concert. Getting a proper haircut for the first time since the pandemic began. The notion of “since the pandemic” being a such a standard part of the collective lexicon now. I have half and full thoughts on all these things, thought about them a lot this week. And then I get here and try to just spin out naturally, and I naturally don’t touch those things. It’s like, then, the thoughts I have about those things are the kind of tchotchkes in my house. Here they are, this is where I keep them, everything in its place and every place with its thing. If I don’t touch them when I’m trying to be natural then they’re some kind of decoration on some kind of mental tapestry.1
For whatever it’s worth, a movie like DWD probably worth seeing in the theater if only for the feeling of a collective energy alone. I’ve seen plenty of movies in the theater since the pandemic, but there hasn’t been nearly as much JUICE from an audience leaving as there is outside of the Williamsburg Cinemas twice a night since last Friday. Everybody fired up with opinions about the real piece of shit they just sat through, the torture these beautiful people just put them through. God, that movie was bad. We need a dozen more like it.
“A coffee isn’t a beer, Colin.”
I respect this question. It’s not, I guess, save some of the grossest “stouts” I’ve ever tasted. Here’s the sort of ethos I want to work with here, though. A writer friend of mine in college were talking once. I was saying that I had a drink the night before while I was writing a story, and that it was sort of fun, and that I felt like some sort of tradition or something (a completely misguided feeling, albeit an honest one). He said something like, “Yeah, a beer can really open it up. But just one.”
I’ve found this to be true. Just one thing to open you up, to kind of get you in rhythm. Not an opening of the floodgates, but a crack in the dam. And this, to me, can and should be anything. It’s coffee in the morning. A ginger ale on the plane. A cheap, cold beer on an unpopulated live stream.
I started doing this on Instagram during the early pandemic because I thought it would be funny and I had to sit in front of my computer to do this kind of homework for my MFA. I figured it could be just a funny image people would pop in on, me, stone-faced, clacking away. When people joined — with a drink, whatever it may be, quiet… I hadn’t realized I was putting these two ideas together. The floodgates and the flood itself.
I guess what I’m saying is: Twitch or Instagram? Any input?
A list from my phone:
G
1 garam masala
2 genefication
3 grandma falls
4 gates
5 gen z
6 golf
7
8 graham
9
10 great
11 gorpcore
12 gentrification
Barf