I remember the first time I heard someone wax all precious and ridiculous over cappuccino, and that was when I really knew we were headed for trouble. I never got to know her, she was the fianceé of rather an annoying yuppie who attended the Mennonite house church I was visiting back in 1979. She herself was of the privileged class. A tall, attractive young blond woman ready to graduate from medical school. And oh so charmingly feminine and girly and everyone was eating out of her left hand. Except me. I found her cloying, annoying, even nauseating.
One day, a Sunday, following our little church service, little miss annoying chirped on and on about the wonders of a good cappuccino. That was back in the day when espresso coffee was still in its infancy in Vancouver, and gourmet coffee was yet a glint in its daddy's eye. Personally I didn't care a rat's ass about cappuccino, or any fancy espresso drinks. Espresso straight up, okay, as long as it got me going, but coffee is coffee is coffee, and really, what's the big deal, except for young bourgeois women to get all smarmy about something fancy and delicate, I suppose.
And her yuppie boyfriend, who actually was okay, would smile on her like an indulgent daddy. Especially when she said how much she also loved Italian ice cream.. Maybe he liked the way she licked his cone.
But, snide remarks aside, I was really beginning to notice, in 1979, just how much my purported generation had already begun to sell out on the great ideals of the sixties and early seventies, and how so many of us were already turning into mindless consumers and ethically challenged sybarites as well as materialistic hedonists. I did not like at all what I was seeing. Coffee, in its new, evolving and mutating forms, seemed somehow to symbolise this horrid slide into decadence.
Yes, decadence. I recall Oscar Wilde's great quip (one of his many) upon his tour of the United States of America, that they appeared to be the only country on earth that had somehow gone from barbarism to decadence without any in between stage of civilization. and Canada, like any younger and minor sibling, naturally was going to mimic our big fat stinking brother to the south. Decadence was already becoming one of the real buzzwords as global capitalism and mass consumerism were already getting ready to totally swallow us in their maw.
Then coffee really began to hit the scene, and not simply as that famous bitter swill whose job was to wake us up in the morning, keep us awake all day and, if you happened to be a shiftworker or a student cramming for midterms, keep us awake throughout all those nights every bit as dark black and bitter as the brew we happened to be swilling. As espresso and cappuccino were already beginning to wear out their welcome, along came locally and regionally sourced beans (arabica, of course) and suddenly, the consumer palette was getting educated about the differences between light roast, medium and dark roast. And it had to be Sumatran. Or Kenyan. Or from Guatemala, or Colombia, or one of those countries. And not only from those countries, but from particular estates that provided the perfect settings of terroir, sun, volcanic soil, rain, altitude and shade. And if the beans had been shat out of a cat's ass, or even better, an elephant's ass, so much the better.
Yes, you did read that correctly. There is a species of civet, not really a cat, but thought of as a cat, that eats coffee cherries and poops out the beans after it's been digested. Elephants too! The beans are carefully selected, cleaned off (one would hope), dried, roasted and ground to perfection. and of course there was that trend for a few years of flavoured coffee, grand marnier coffee, vanilla coffee, mocha coffee, hazelnut coffee, or just add cinnamon or whatever mix of spices and enjoy your cuppa.
Then came Starbuck's and all their imitators. Suddenly, no one was ordering coffee any longer. It was dark roast, light roast, medium roast. Sumatran, Ethiopian, Colombian, Costa Rican, and it was espresso, americano, latte, cappuccino and then came the ultimate insult to the every day coffee swiller: the frappuccino and all it's precious variants. And pumpkin spice lattes.
More tomorrow, ducks!
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