I was out of sugar. Contemplating a cup of bitter morning coffee, I carefully picked my way up the 100 metres of unpaved lane and around the corner to my local warung.
As Old Ibu carefully filled a plastic bag from a big sack of unbleached sugar, insect parts and dust, I ordered a glass of kopi Bali and took my place on the unpainted bench. It’s a long way from Starbucks, but the coffee culture is well established here. This unprepossessing establishment is an energy centre for the neighbourhood and the nearby temple. Old Ibu dispenses gossip and groceries, Pak Mangku hangs out between cremations, the young guys shoot pool and the babies chase the chickens. The bench that runs the 3-metre length of the warung is never empty; even at this early hour several youths in temple gear lounge around smoking pungent clove cigarettes and drinking black coffee out of little glasses. Everybody except the babies drinks coffee.
You won’t find this particular brew on the menu boards of fancy coffee houses. This is very local coffee indeed. A glass costs Rp 500, twice that if you want milk. Wayan insists that home-grown coffee in Bali is all organic. Who would bother wasting expensive chemical fertilizers on the compound’s garden? Someone might throw a little cow manure around the coffee bushes now and again, but for the most part they are left to themselves, shaggy and unpruned. I’ve been looking forward to drinking my own coffee, but Wayan tells me not to hold my breath. She points out that the half dozen coffee bushes in my garden are about five years from bearing fruit.
Recently she brought me a bag of little gray beans from her own garden that I didn’t even recognize as coffee. She’d picked them a few days before, removed the red covering by hand and dried them in the sun. It didn’t look much like coffee and didn’t smell of anything at all. We spent a companionable hour picking through the beans and discarding the small, discoloured ones – about half the volume. Then she poured the remainder into my grandmother’s cast iron frying pan and started to roast it over the flame of the gas stove. I was left in charge of this operation, which took almost 2 hours of constant monitoring. Finally the beans took on a dark mahogany colour and began to smell like the real thing. The picking, cleaning, drying, sorting and roasting of about 500 grams of this politically correct, shade-grown organic coffee had taken about a week. I’d like to report that it tasted remarkable, but in fact it was pretty ordinary.
There’s a legend that a goat herd in Africa first became aware of coffee’s potential when he noticed his flock frolicking around wildly after consuming fallen coffee berries. He tried some himself and experienced the world’s first caffeine blast. It’s a charming tale but almost certainly fiction. Coffee berries taste awful, and most of the caffeine is in the seeds inside them.
But someone in the Arab world must have looked at those pretty red berries a millennia ago and thought, “I bet if I picked those berries, tossed away the fruit, dried the seeds in the sun for a few days and roasted them black, ground them to powder and brewed them in hot water, I’d get a buzz.”
That powerful buzz was initially thought to be sacred. Coffee was first consumed as a beverage in the Arab world about 1,000 CE, when it was linked with doctors and mystics. Drinking coffee was said to produce sensations ranging from exhilaration to religious ecstasy. Physicians dispensed it as an expensive medicine and it was used as part of religious ceremonies; Sufis would stoke up on it before a night of whirling. Then coffee’s interesting side effects began to trickle into the secular community and it was adopted by scholars, artists and other night owls to help them stay awake. Coffee went mainstream when the world’s first coffee houses opened in Mecca around the 15th century. The trend was well established in Europe 300 years later, about the time the Dutch started to establish plantations in Bali.
Both Robusta and Arabica still grow here, though Wayan identifies the small bushes in my garden as kopi biasa. Unpruned coffee trees can grow to almost 10 meters in height, though they bear much more heavily when tightly pruned. In India, pepper vines are trained around the coffee bushes, which in turn like to grow in the shade of taller plants.
The battle about coffee’s effect on health continues, with over 19,000 studies undertaken on the subject. One faction insists that coffee in any quantity is unwholesome and leaches vitamins and minerals from the food we eat. The other claims that drinking 2 – 4 cups of coffee a day may lower the risk of colon cancer and asthma by 25%, gallstones by 45% and cirrhosis of the liver by 80%. It’s touted in the industry as an anti-depressant and a performance enhancer. I suppose it depends on who is performing what.
Probably the most interesting coffee in the world comes from Vietnam. A species of wild fox, presumably depressed, eats the fallen coffee berries. The beans are passed in the fox’s droppings, and are then carefully collected, washed and sold as a niche product. Talk about a specialized occupation… I’ve been hearing about this coffee for years, but never met anyone who would confess to trying it.
I ask my neighbours on the bench why they drink coffee. They variously reply, “Because it tastes good,” “It helps me stay awake when I’ve been up all night,” “Because I always do.” A random survey in any Starbucks would reveal the same. Addiction to the little black bean seems to span all cultures and tastes. Please pass the sugar.
