A paean of adulation and science from The Guardian, on the topic of coffee: roasting, grinding and brewing your own.

Coincidentally I’d just taken to roasting my own beans again, in my trusty old war-stained popcorn-maker. This morning, as I savoured the end-result, it struck me that the aesthetics of coffee consumption were fully embraced in the first sip. The ensuing draught of bitter brown water I couldn’t honestly have told from the cheapest instant coffee in Costcutter.

No: the roasting phase contributes nothing to the experience. Roasting coffee smells like burnt rubber to me. The grinding phase maybe… a hint of what is to come when the hot water hits it. But I deliberately said “consumption”.

If I could find a good aerosol spray to give me a whiff of that first indefinable experience (though the Guardian article comes close to defining it) – I could short-circuit the time, effort and expense and go back to drinking cheap Instant. And thrill myself with the thought of all the money I was saving.

Maybe it’s my age. Ogden Nash wrote of swallowing oysters “without bothering to look for pearls”. Or, paraphrasing Bill Clinton: I drank coffee, “but I didn’t inhale.”