If we were having coffee…

It would be made by the hubby as I amongst many others vouch by its aroma, taste and what it does to you and your senses since he makes it with the concentration of an artist painting a picture or a sculpture moulding his new work or even a scientist engaged in an intriguing experiment.

I am a novice blogger,  just a fortnight old actually and it was a pleasure, generating much excitement when I came across weekend coffee share hosted by Diana from Part Time Monster. A fantastic idea and place to read many thoughts, point of views and broaden one’s horizon be it on gardening, poetry, education, cooking, current affairs or coffee, it covers all.  A big thank you to Diana and all contributors.

How-do-you-take-your-coffee-cartoonFor my first weekend coffee share, lets talk about, just that- coffee. I must admit that I love my tea, am an Indian after all and I also admit that I am not a nice person to be around if my morning cuppa or the 4.00 pm yellow label lovingly brewed with Darjeeling has been missed and this stayed so for the first thirty odd years of my life until we moved to Melbourne, Australia and I discovered coffee. I realized this rich brown or black liquid is really an art, a prayer, something sacred to the Australians and they took it very seriously. The phrase when in Rome be a Roman was not difficult to inculcate as the adults in the family fell in love with the coffee there. Apart from the usual latte, cappuccino, espresso we were introduced to some new entities called long black, short black, flat white, macchiato, short macchiato, long macchiato, double shot, skinny latte and most prefer it hot and strong.

India is very diverse where most of South India prefers coffee over tea and are comparable to the coffee snobs of Australia just how the British and most of north India are connoisseurs of tea. South Indians vouch by their filter coffee where the coffee drips down from the top container to the bottom and most homes keep a decoction ready to go. Years ago on a trip to Italy we were surprised to find stove top coffee maker where the decoction rose up from down, just the opposite of the South Indian filter coffee. I don’t think I ever drank coffee during our years in Tokyo, always drinking tea very daintily from delicate looking beautiful cups. I did say, when in Rome….

And then we moved to America and encountered Starbucks! Meaning no offense and with due apologies to Starbucks lovers, the less said the better. It took us months to get accustomed to the fact that the tall is short, grande is medium and venti is a bucket full of coffee. I believe there is something bigger than the bucket called trenta, lets call it simply the coffee pond. Coffee in Starbucks is as different from Melbourne coffee as chalk is from cheese and I laugh every time a visiting Aussie murmurs a tad embarrassedly, trying not to sound rude, er where can I find coffee, a good cup of coffee!

Tea or coffee, I would say majority of humans are addicted to them in different colors, forms, types, sugared, plain, hot, cold whatever, they like it. But when I think back to my childhood and my grandma’s pet parrot whose body clock told her it was 3 pm precisely at 3 pm and she banged her little steel bowl screeching loudly Maaaaa Teaaaaa….I know no beverage whether coffee or tea is to be taken lightly…

Picture courtesy: http://www.pinterest.com.

 

 

 

 

18 thoughts on “A Tale of Two Beverages…”

  1. For me coffee is precisely, 3 sips in the morning & 3 sips in the evening , made by hubby & it’s gotta be Taster’s Choice !!!! For all Coffee connoisseurs this is probably blasphemy , but it rocks my boat :).

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  2. Lovely read… For me my one cup of coffee and one cup of tea is as sacred as my morning chant n now I even carry my coffe n tea and bialetti along so 👍👍👍👍

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  5. It is amazing how everybody has a relationship with their coffee/tea in some form or another. I for one look at coffee/tea as an excuse to take a break … it somehow has that effect on me. I always wonder how people can pick their cofee and run :).

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  7. Welcome to the #weekendcoffeeshare!

    I have always been a tea drinker…minimum of two (massive) mugs a day of black tea with milk and honey…However, I’ve recently added a cup of coffee into the mix on our commute into town on work days. It doesn’t hold the same place in my heart as tea does, but it does the trick while we trek 45 minutes into the city!

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  8. Welcome to blogging and weekend coffee share. You couldn’t have described starbucks better and I believe that apart from a couple of shops, both in cities, Starbucks has pulled out of Australia. They didn’t realise the coffee culture here was as sophisticated as it is and Australians turned up their collective nose at what you have rightly termed a coffee pond. You’ve probably guessed it — I am a coffee snob but now limit myself to one a day, always at a coffee shop, and the rest of the time I drink peppermint tea (day) or chamomile (night). The best black tea I’ve ever had was a Fijian brand. It was addictive and whilst we lived on the island (can’t get it in Australia) it became a ritual to have tea and scones every afternoon.

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    • Thank you. Yes, I recall the only starbucks near our home in Melbourne closing its doors. If coffee is as good as it gets in Australia, difficult to stay away from it. The walk to my kid’s school had some 5 cafes and the aroma emitting right till the sidewalk from them was heavenly. No wonder I drank more coffee then. Now, in the States, I prefer homemade coffee as it beats all available in cafes around. Enjoy the rest of your week.

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      • The aroma is hard to go past. We are very lucky that one of the coffee shops near us has as their main business roasting coffee for wholesale supply. When the roasting is happening I drink in every breath. They do it in the afternoon. In the morning another one of the coffee shops is a bakery so we get the waft of the freshly baked bread. I think I am in heaven.

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  9. Lovely read.
    Initially when I had moved to Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, the filter coffee didn’t appeal to my taste buds. But in a couple of years, I acquired the taste, and thereafter for the rest of my stay there, I totally swore by it. And when I was moving back to North-India, I brought with me a filter, and heaps of roast and ground. But looks like I am devouring tea every afternoon!” And some of the filter coffee has gone far back in the cabinet! Like you said, “When in Rome…”, instead I would tweak that to “When in Rome, the Romans rub off on you!” 😀

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