Without coffee

“The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.” – Jonathan Swift.

The hardest adjustment to living here has easily been going without coffee. This is a tea-drinking part of the world, and that’s that.

I’ve been trying to make the best of the situation. The machine on the left is the height of Khrushchev era consumer technology. This coffeemaker was actually a wedding gift my in-laws received, and only rarely used since. I imagine the Soviet designer setting down to work out the details of this thing shortly after someone explained to him roughly how a percolator works, and with a distant memory of a cappuccino machine he'd seen in a movie.

To operate this thing, you put ground coffee in a metal filter at the bottom and screw it to the bomb-shaped top. You add water to the bomb and plug it in. To get coffee in any reasonable amount of time you have to boil the water first before you add it, and before the process completes you must unplug the thing and carefully screw off the top to let out the steam. I don’t know what will happen if you don’t, but my father-in-law is quite insistent it must be done, and since he’s a physicist I trust his judgment. The final product that dribbles into the carafe is pretty awful. It doesn’t help that Russian coffee is dry and overroasted, and would be thrown away as ruined in the West.

Allegedly, coffee is becoming popular here as a western affectation, but I don’t see it. From what I can tell, Russians still see it as an evening beverage, something that must go with sweets. And if you are at a restaurant or someone’s home, if you ask for coffee you are likely to get a cup of Sanka instant -- without even an apology. Of course, I remember all those times in the States when Olga would ask for tea and get a Lipton teabag and a cup of tepid water. I guess we are even.

Living in America, I had come to believe that instant coffee was an idea dead and all but buried. So the sheer market penetration of instant coffee is nothing short of astounding. The most alienating moments I’ve had in Russia have been looking over the shelves and shelves of instant coffees (I haven’t had the guts to try the ‘MacCoffee’ pack I bought the other day. I just appreciate the mash-up of Americana on the packaging).

Good coffee and watching baseball are what I miss most after only two and a half weeks here. Back home I buy single-origin blends and meditate on the differences between Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and Costa Rican Tarrazu. My coffee grinder is perhaps my favorite kitchen possession. That said, I’m hesitantly coming around to the charms of tea. Fortunately, Russians make their tea very strong, and they take it seriously enough as a culture that the stuff you can buy cheap at the store is pretty decent.