In this week’s Food Issue, Kelefa Sanneh writes about Aida Batlle, “a fifth-generation coffee farmer and a first-generation coffee celebrity.” Sanneh follows Batlle everywhere—from the steep hillsides of her farms in El Salvador to a roasting plant in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where her beans become the coveted ingredient in single-origin pour-overs. Sanneh maintains that “brewing a proper cup of coffee is a lot harder than uncorking a bottle of wine and a lot easier than cooking dinner.” Which leads to a natural question: how does he brew his own cup?
Give me your coffee making ritual in detail.
Well, the article was inspired by coming to work at The New Yorker. The offices are in Times Square and there wasn’t an obvious place nearby to get coffee. I tried a few places, including Starbucks, where my regular order is a triple-tall americano. I also tried the Flavia machine in the office once, or maybe twice. That didn’t work. At first I thought I could tough my way through it. Then I turned out to be not so tough. So I started spiralling down the drain of coffee obsession.
I had a great machine at home—a Technivorm Moccamaster. But I didn’t want to bring that to the office. So I was trying to figure out what to do. First, I brought an old blade grinder to work. I got what they call a Clever Coffee Dripper, also known as an Abid. It’s a plastic cone with a stopper at the bottom. You put your filter in, put your grounds in, put your water in; the stopper stays plugged until you put the cone on your mug, then the coffee drips out. It lets you control your steep time.
What about water? How did you get hot water at the office?
I bought myself a glass Pyrex measuring jar and then I microwave it. Four minutes for 16 oz.
What about beans?
That’s easy. Don’t refrigerate. Just keep them somewhere not too hot. Use them in a month from when they were roasted.
O.K. Let’s continue.
The Clever was pretty good, but then I got dissatisfied with my blade grinder. So I replaced that with a hand-cranked burr mill. Which seemed to me to make the coffee taste better, although that might have been an illusion—I don’t trust my senses the way that Aida Batlle trusts hers. Then I started to get unhappy with my Clever Coffee Dripper. The coffee wasn’t quite sweet enough. My steep times were all off. The drawdown was kind of slow sometimes. I concede that the problem may have been user error.
Anyway, then I got an AeroPress, which is known for the sweetness that it brings out. I believe it is designed by the guy who created the Aerobie. It faintly resembles a penis pump, or, less scandalously, a bong. It’s two plastic tubes, and one of them has a plunger. You push the smaller tube through the bigger tube. It’s sort of like a French press, but instead of sequestering the grounds at the bottom, you’re pushing water through the grounds.
I got that, and I quite liked it, but that led me into the thousands of ways online that people were using or modifying their AeroPress. There are championships every year—people have different recipes, protocols. And by the time I found myself looking into that, I kind of realized that: a) I might as well be just making pour-overs, and b) I should probably write a story, so that I could retroactively reclassify all of this wasted time as work.
Nice. Final question: Give me your coffee method when travelling.
When I travel, I pack my hand grinder and some beans and the AeroPress. I have that in my bag right now. You can use a hotel coffee maker as your boiler, even though it doesn’t heat the water quite hot enough. With those tools, you can make a reasonable facsimile of a decent cup of coffee. If you are staying in a B. & B., you can barge into their kitchen and insist on making coffee with your own gear. In my experience, they don’t forbid that, though they don’t necessarily appreciate it.
Photograph of Aida Batlle by Alessandra Sanguinetti.
