Amulet's Coffee

When serving mid morning brunch at home, for 4+ people, whether it be idly/dosa/vada/pongal, or eggs/pancakes/bacon/sausage kind, a siphon coffee maker is the best for its grand spectacle as a Table Center piece, as well as its fast action. No paper filter involved. I have one at home that is used on such occasions. This can use the same coffee- roasted and ground for a Madras Filter. Always a hit with the first time spectators. Amazon/dot/in has it at various prices. Goes on sale occasionally :

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It would be a nice wedding gift for a boy/girl who likes/makes coffee at home. Especially attractive if one or both are Sci/Engg types with an eye for pyrex glass laboratory apparatus.

 

I was warned that I cannot have more than five images in a post. So I combined the images of the two different coffee makers in my thread starter post.

In Kumbakonam, and Tanjavur, there are coffee shops where the waiters can toss a coffee from up high, and thus produce a "head". That is really not froth. A milky froth of western coffee shops is not the same as a coffee's own head, made up of large bubbles with low surface tension. The latter break easily when slightly disturbed. This is what makes lifting the coffee cup to one's lips (i.e., the slight disturbance) makes the bubbles break and send the coffee aroma to your nose. Stable frothed bubbles made entirely of milk do not break easily, and even if they break offer only a milky aroma of a baby. And they form a milk-moustache on the upper lip of the coffee drinker. Not the right thing for a coffee aficionada..

A good coffee has a head made of its own full composition. This is achieved by placing a few tablespoons of thick decoction at the bottom of a tumbler, and pouring steamy hot milk into it from up above. Or by making very hot coffee and tossing it from a large beaker directly into a tumbler -- as they do in Kumbakonam.

Here is the way a Mexican shop does (just the first few seconds of the youtube) When you are there, ask for excess decoction. When doing this at home, you need to put the coffee cup in the sink so that any spill is contained. After a few days, you'd be good at it:


This lady's elocution is so precise and clear; great for a Language Learner

 

Yes. You have observed it right. It is all very different, the way people want their coffee. And before their morning coffee, people are easily excitable, and quarrelsome too.

Coffee habit is also different on either side of the Vindhya mountains. South drinks coffee, and the North does not.

A person from the Tanjavur district would swear that he'd rather drink TEA when he goes to Delhi, instead of suffering the bad coffee they make. This is almost like the license plate they have in America which proclaim (I had adapted the original proclamation to fit my sentiment) "Give me Good Coffee or Give me Death".

People in South India would know cases where a happy marriage function had stalled, or serious fights had broken out because some important person in the groom's party had been served a coffee with what seemed like "Second Decoction". A whole bunch of elders from the Team-Bride will have to run a Peace Mission to the groom's party's lodgings and convince everybody that the affront was totally without malice or forethought, and they are nevertheless deeply, deeply sorry for the same. And somehow get everyone ready for the first item on the fixture.

The first item on the fixture would be Kaasi Yathra. The bridegroom threatening the assembled that he'd be heading for Kaasi, and skipping the whole rigamarole of a marriage and Gruhasta-bizness, because his mother had been given the veritable slap-in-the-face of a 2nd Decoction Coffee.

Scots refer to their national drink in Gaelic as 'uisge beatha', or 'usquebaugh', meaning 'water of life' ... For the Tanjore district crowd, a morning filter coffee from a first decoction is no less culturally important. Anything less would be deeply hurtful.

@iyerviji , let me answer your question "Who is that?" over here: It is YOU.

 

You had that aphrodisiac just a phone call (to the desi store) away, and you had it slipping your grasp all this time ? Tse... Tse...Tse....

If you had never made coffee before in your life, an indian coffee maker to impress a Indian coffee drinking guy is not the better approach. The indian coffee filter has such close mechanical tolerances (top beaker fits into the bottom beaker rather tight in the new purchase, and trying to pry them apart to get at the coffee is not for the novice) for engineering appreciation, but it is a cumbersome thing to handle.

Go with a vietnamese filter (it is the same as the Madras filter, but no struggles), and it produces a faster decoction, because of the lack of a back pressure from tightly closed decoction receptacle. Amazon sells these. Buy the 11 oz size, and use 1 tablespoon of coffee per cup, plus one tablespoon extra. For two persons, you would use 1+1+1 table spoons, Watch a how to video on youtube, and they will stress the importance of how to add hot water in two steps. First step to swell the coffee grinds by adding a small amount of hot water, so that you get a swelled wet coffee cake; and then in the second step you will add the extra water which will be backed up by the coffee-cake and retard a fast drain of the water, and produce optimal extraction. If you want to ponder over why the powder does not go down, even though the particle size is smaller than the average hole in the coffee grinds holder, that is a technical subject related to "depth filtration". In brief, the initial coffee-cake has tortuous routes for any wayward grind particle to go through and not a straight route downward. This traps the grain, and not let it just fall through.

If you are interested, you should try it using the same scheme I have written for shravs3.

Coffee roasters (my mother, grand mother, aunts ) know and older children are taught to recognize the sound of popping, and the development of sheen on the surface. It is a knowledge transferred through generations -- of females. Although our method of roasting had become more automatic, the recognition of completion of the roast is the same. A very simple test is to be able to split a roasted bean with the pressure of the thumbnail, and get a nice "familiar" smell from inside the broken roasted bean. My method of using a popcorn maker also provides the intermittent stops when the system's thermocouple detects overheat, I can inspect the beans, do the crush/sniff test (if I want to) and let it go one more round, or stop. After a couple of batches of roasting, it is easy to know that in your wattage roaster, you'd let it go x cycles, and stop. Easy ..peasy.

Pea-berry (the round bean, hence the name) is the runt of the coffee plant. Each plant produces some of this, while most of the other beans are hemispherical, flat on one-side Arabica beans. Peaberry would produce a very weak, anemic decoction on its own, and to fortify the color of that decoction one would add an appropriate amount of powdered chicory. The Arabica beans (ie. Plantation A) is the one that produces a nice dark decoction.

In the times of coffee beans rations, the Triplicane Urban Cooperative Society was the rations distributor, and they required each household to buy a certain amount of runt beans, in order to qualify for a certain amount of good beans within the allotted ration for the family. Coffee drinking, although not widely practiced by the Tamil/Telugu people in the city, there was an ongoing shortage after the war, and that continued up until the early 1980's. New Arabica cultivation methods came into being ( coffee can be grown under bright sun, and not necessary to protect the plants under big shade trees anymore) because of the green revolution, and plant genetics, and rations are no more. Vietnam became a big coffee producer, second only to Brasil.

The old runt, peaberry coffee has also been hyped by suitable marketing as the Pinot Noir of coffee -- pale beverage, that has to be enjoyed for its unique aroma without soiling it with sugar and milk and other impurities.... is the line. And now there are peaberry fanatics in the world. Anyhow... there are other unique shapes of coffee beans that one could buy in the street markets ( like the Koimbedu market in Madras) of Addis Ababa, that are not exported out of the country.

And by the way, the old cast iron Made-in-England coffee grinder with Burr-plates inside the grind chamber is still available in England, and some are sold on Ebay by those who dont want them anymore. They have a C-Clamp to fit a shelf in the almirah. Good to display, but not for daily use.