Juan Valdez Spells Satan

There are many things in this life which we simply will never understand. No matter how fast and how far science takes us, certain elements of our culture, current or historical, will always result in head-scratching, a shrug of the shoulders an a clichéd, ‘Whaddya gonna do?”

The sound of one hand clapping.

The true nature of God.

Paris Hilton.

All are things that we cannot now, and perhaps never will, grasp in there entirety. Of course, as Robert Browning wrote: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” According to Browning, this head-scratching and grasp-achievement is simply something we have to put aside and move on with ours lives.

But one such cultural/historical concept I feel should be reviewed with all due haste.

Coffee.

Coffee may smell good, and I won’t dispute that in any form. But it tastes like someone burnt something. Why anyone who isn’t Klingon and feeling the need to prove their manly-worth would want to drink something so foul truly boggles the mind. But further, how the concept of coffee as a beverage in general was arrived at is further cause for consternation.

Consider exactly how coffee beans must be fussed and bothered with in order to achieve your regular cup of joe. Laborers must pick baskets of coffee beans by hand. By HAND people. Like with fingers and sore backs and such. They can’t even use a machine to handle these oh-so-delicate beans. The cost per human-laborer’s basket is something around $2 to $10 depending on how many pairs of silk gloves the workers have to wear, and how long they have to apologize to the bush before plucking the bean.

Now, after all that is accomplished, a task that can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few days, the beans must then be “defruited”. I am not making this up. Defruiting, despite not being a real word, requires the outer skin of the bean to be removed, either by washing, soaking, scrubbing, scouring, or promising the beans a movie career and plying them with appletinis.

After this, the beans must be dried. Here is where coffee is actually treated in the manner which I feel this soul-sucking commodity deserves. The beans are poured onto flat cement or hard rocks and repeatedly racked into piles, and then pushed back out until they every last drop of life-giving moisture has been allowed to depart from their black hearts.

After this phase, the beans are sorted. Apparently, like American Idol contestants, just don’t make the “coffee” cut, and must be thrown back into the sea of semi-talented, but mostly annoying divas and hacks. I understand Simon Cowell has had his fill of bashing the wannabe grinders, the beans are then allowed to age somewhere between one and eight years.

Eight years, folks.

This is how long it takes a doctor to complete college AND medical school.

Finally, we come to my three favorite parts of this process: roasting, grinding and brewing. In the 19th century, beans would be thrown into an open pan must as Christians were thrown to lions and punk-rock mutant frogs . Now, we mass torture the beans at 400 degrees for a few hours before grinding the hell out of them and passing the bags on to fools who actually think this is a good thing.

Interestingly enough, even after roasting, this Spawn of the Overfiend will continue to emit CO2. Yes, that’s the byproduct that humans expiate, and causes bad side-effects if we breathe too much.

Once all this has been accomplished, those drinkers of this Beverage of Doom will then pour boiling, steaming hot water over the concoction and serve it as some kind of daily ritual.

To boil it down, if you will allow the pun, the coffee bean takes more time, effort, energy and money to process for mass consumption than 747 Boeing does.

Of course, now, in my wee little mind, comes the question of just exactly how this process came to be. Some one stumbled upon these bitter, untasty seeds and said, “Hey, I know, let’s pick, shuck, dry, age, roast, grind, run hot water over these things, and drink it for fun!”

At what point did all this start making sense to someone?

I suppose I should just scratch my head, shrug my shoulders and say, “Whaddya gonna do?”