"Coffee is annoying! I'm already running around in circles all day, and at night too. So coffee and confinement? Is it really a good combination?"
Coffee is your ally, always and definitely!
There are so many ways to drink coffee, so many opportunities to succumb to it, so many coffee rituals to punctuate one's day, so much pep to hope for in our dreary confined day.
Drinking coffee, drinking coffee, drinking coffees, can only relieve, enliven, open, envelop.
The proof? Here you go. Thousands of them, like as many flowers as there are in a royal bouquet.
The ritual coffee
Whether you are Italian, Swedish, American, French, from Clermont-Ferrand or Nice, coffee is a ritual, your ritual. You used to drink it with your colleagues, at the bar, at the counter, in the dining room, alone? So you still take it today, as if to recall the time before, this happy normality of a ritualized moment of your day.
It is your daily bread, this hinge scansion between two moments and two activities, your clock. More than ever, the confinement invites us to these rituals, to hold these moments, futile in normality, but so happy and so normal precisely. The ritual coffee is like a coffee of structure and permanence. We are alive, we drink this life, and take a break.
The intimate café
In pajamas, in a suit, in sweatpants, in casual clothes or in nothing at all, coffee is associated with these intimate moments.
The one when you wake up for example, the one of the after meal rambling, the one of the morning escape, the one that you drink long in a thermo or in a big coffee pot like a big and deep descent in yourself. The intimate coffee is therefore the one of these moments when we find ourselves, in introspection or in rambling.
The coffee that opens
If tea is a vertical drink, which anchors, coffee is horizontal. It is the drink of the opening of the heart, of otherness and of the other, of sharing, in short of sociability. Confined as we are, torn to the extreme between antinomic and exacerbated emotions and reflexes of closure and openness to the other, of protection and giving, of introspection and extroversion, of egoism and generosity, of fear and trust, of conservatism and revolution.
The opening coffee reminds us that withdrawal is probably never the long-term solution, that it is sometimes necessary to find oneself, to protect oneself, and then to leave again... differently.
The travel café
The great and forgotten Hippolyte Taine was the first to write a book, which was a bedside book, Voyage autour de ma chambre. In this 19th century, without form but with so much noise and crash, death and floods, expeditions and annexation, Taine's room, far from the exotic and fantasized lands, was the one of a completely different journey.
Don't think that this is an inner journey in the oriental way or with the wise tone "we are the greatest journey". No, it is not. To find out, just read it, it is short, and you have time.
The time to accompany your reading, of a superb Chakra do Dago which will carry you, since your room, in luxuriant spaces where all is only diversified forest, astonishing fauna and stripping flora. There blossom, as you and us today, in a geostationary way, the coffee trees which gave the fruits of the seeds of which you drink the infusion.
Smell this black and rich earth nourished by the hot, humid, and fiery life of the Tropics. The confinement gives us the chance to stop, we who pass or rather run so often, in spaces, places, finally, and to make them its own.
Coffee as a plant
The animal that we are is by essence animated, it moves, it moves. Who can stop it? The confinement thus puts us to the test and makes us admire even more if it is, these heroes of the iniquitous incarceration, Mandela being the most known.
It also gives us the unique opportunity, at a time when we now know that trees have a secret life, to, if only for a few minutes a day, ape the plant. We who anthropomorphize everything, the time has come to "plantify". My mother used to say with disdain and disgust "larver". The plant does not move.
Or rather, it is, but it does not move, does not move. It is therefore there, present, totally. This is why she has developed sensitivities that we ignore, and sometimes envy. It is hot, she does not undress, it is cold, she does not cover herself, it is wet, she does not protect herself.
It lives there and reacts in a thousand ways. It feels everything, all the signals, those visible and objectified by man, and those invisible or not yet observed by the same. The plant is therefore ultra-sensitive.
The coffee tree, by its shape and size, a shrub with horizontally stretched branches stands guard, and seems full of caffeine that makes it even more alert and responsive than its congeners. So let's drink a Gedeo, a coffee from the origins of Arabica, and let's rest for a moment. Let's feel it.
Coffee as tasting
Coffee is undoubtedly the most shared and economical gastronomic drink in the world. Today we have a little time, we must take advantage of it to, not drink, but enjoy coffee. Learning to enjoy coffee means learning to pay attention to what you drink.
You can find an accompaniment in our book Café, published by Editions du Chêne. Or simply by making two different coffees, and varying these pairs: Moka Bunna Bet / Gedeo (focus on the sweetness, and the fruity and camphorated aromas, you will feel the difference between washed coffee and natural coffee), Geisha Hartmann and Geisha Finca Debora (focus on the acidity and the length in mouth, you will feel the altitude), Hayma and Iapar Rouge (pay attention to the sweetness and the aromatic complexity, you will grasp the notion of altitude again but also of old variety and hybrid), Chakra do dago and Maravilla (look at the body, and you will understand the reason for a blend), Geisha Biodynamic and Geisha Washed (the richness and the length in mouth produced by biodynamics will jump to your palate)....
Coffee as a sport
Churchill who said that his health was No sport. The confinement will undoubtedly prove him wrong, we have all become sportsmen, no longer on the couch, but in the living room.
But as all the research on health and coffee shows, coffee is good for athletes. Just ask cyclists, who are big fans of small blacks and long rides.
They run on coffee, the only nectar they suffer. So, we, sportsmen of the confinement, let's go! A good espresso of Iapar Rouge or Huista will give us the heart to work and will make us go the distance of our session, sponsored or not by the ministry of sports! By day, as well as by night.
Coffee concentration
As Cedric Vilani confided to us, quoting an illustrious colleague: "a mathematician is one who has the ability to transform coffee into a theorem". And yes, not only does coffee put the soul, the heart and the body in motion, to plagiarize Alexandre Dumas, but it also helps to concentrate.
It is therefore the first ally of our reflections, which at the moment are numerous, and resolutive!
A good Source will be your friend for life!
