Coffee

What is your favorite drink?

Of course filter coffee in all its avatar is my favourite drink. In my village it was a period twenty thirty years after independence so several British things stayed in people’s daily use and companies like Brooke Bond served the same product that they served abroad. There used to be dry small cakes of coffee, five paise for one.

You bring ten fifteen such cakes. The fad of hundred per cent pure Nescafé or Bru has not entered Indian homes. All coffee was filter coffee but in Maharashtra, except for Uduppi run hotels in urban area filter pots were not there. They made coffee by dissolving these cakes in water.

After boiling well, they used to filter in fine cloth which today’s posh people, including my readers would find uncouth but it was the practice in elite homes too. Some grains of chicory would seep through the cloth and rest at the bottom of the cup of the upside down church bell shape.

This was the only coffee available until I reached Pune for my PG where I first saw NES & Bru in affluent homes but still coffee was not served on daily basis. Even today it is decorative drink in classical music mehfils or friendly get together. Some children and youth are served it as a luxury. Several times sachets of coffee become stones or stones in half finished bottles.

In my workplace my head Prof Sadashiv loved coffee but he always loved to maintain a middle class image so always used filter coffee powder, boil for a long time, never allowed his wife to enter kitchen until upma was to be prepared and would filter it in cloth himself. This was for large get togethers but in our personal meetings his wife’s made simmering Bru was served in mugs while we watched NDTV news Rajdeep, Pronoy or Barkha. Gone is he and gone are the days.

I used to bring hotel pack Nes by KG rate from my friend Vishwas tea shop and would keep in safe (steel cupboard for clothes and valuables) to safeguard from moisture. I served coffee to my daughters and students in that old Wada and almost always cleaned mugs.

In 1999s I went to Madras for conference and first brought filter pot and Swanvac vacuum bottle made in Korea from Cooptex shop of P Chidambaram, the Finance minister then and silsila of filter coffee started in my life. Then one day on Deccan Gymkhana CCD i got complimentary filter coffee pot on one kg filter coffee and I acquired Ph D in coffee making.

Then onwards my home might be the only home in the state to serve filter coffee. Now I am proud owner of Bialetti filter pot made in Romania sold in Italy. I get Narsu’s filter coffee from Thutukudi (Tuticorin), my friend Asir sends to me. Coffee is my life. I have won and lost many things for it.

Image : Phono

Listening to vinyl with a filter coffee in hand is the better paradise than Khayyam says of wine in his Rubai