Coffee Cerimony
On my first day in Kaohsiung when I was nearly dying of heat stroke, before thick rains drenched me, I was walking along a bicycle path and noticed a guy making coffee out of a two wheeled cart. At the moment he was making a cup of coffee for a woman on a bicycle who had a very cute dog in her basket. The feeling was almost yuppie, but the guy making coffee was more urban cool. Anyway he had an elaborate ritual, clearly influenced by tea ceremony. He was using an Yixing pot to adjust the water temperature. His implements were urban rustic, for the most part plastic, his coffee filter holder was even chipped. He had a pot of continuously boiling water. First he would have you pick your selection of beans from down below and then he would grind them, while he was doing that he would clean everything with hot water rinsing and re-rinsing each implement. Then he put a coffee filter in the filter holder and rinsed it so that it was wet. Then he poured the ground coffee in the filter and moved and shifted it around in there. He did several more pourings before rinsing the ground coffee itself, obviously following tea theory that the very first bit of water which touches the thing to be brewed will be ‘dusty.’ After cleaning the grounds he then put them over a plastic container and added water to the grounds in a circular motion. He really got the grounds to bubble up high! Then he poured the coffee into a paper cup and gave it to me. It was about 75 cents.
I suppose you are wondering how the coffee tasted, or felt in my stomach or smelled or something. Unfortunately I was to overwhelmed to remember these details.
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It sounds like you’re having a wonderful trip. Thanks for sharing.
I want some!
Yes, some of the best coffees of Asia grow here in Taiwan. It is quickly becomming a second culture like tea, people get very sophisticated.
There was an old Swiss missionary in the catholic youth hostel in Taroko gorge, who grow his own coffee, roasted and grounded it himself, and it was the best I ever had.