In Pursuit of Hot Black Sludge — ⭐ SPECIAL ⭐ EDITION ⭐
Today’s edition is a very special edition; as it’s the first guest newsletter we’ve had here at New York Coffee, but also the first Special Edition newsletter.
Keep an eye out for future Special Editions, like New York Tea, Yemeni Coffee, Cat & Dog Cafés, and more.
Today’s Special Edition came from an unexpected conversation I had with a barista at Plowshares (remember gosh-goobly Plowshares?) a couple months ago. He [Elroy], in his years at the specialty-coffee game, decided that his relationship with coffee wasn’t about gently sipping on the aerated flavors and have your brain pick out notes, divine a ‘correct’ temperature, and pretending you have time to contemplate coffee and its place in this universe.
Sometimes you just need to pile drive a just slightly-less-than-boiling cup of jet fuel into your throat, avoiding your tongue so as not to burn it on its way.
Hey, maybe that quote should go in the Instagram.
I think he makes an excellent point, but he makes it much better than I do. I moved the coffee spotlight and the new-café section to the bottom if you’re interested in that first.
By Elroy R. If you liked this and want to support his work, check out his podcast and newsletter, Smoke Social, here.
Writing about bodega coffee seems to miss the point, and I resent myself for having done it. Why volley a stream of laudatory words towards something which obviously has no desire to be lauded? Who among us has ever washed down the last remnants of their cup of “Colombia” and thought to themselves, better crack out the typewriter and get praising? It’s like walking in on your parents fornicating. The less said about it the better.
Specialty coffee, on the other hand, not only begs to be written up but begs, more distastefully, to be liked. Yuck. Like a cloying nerd fawning over the only kid in class who bothers to acknowledge his existence, specialty coffee has that certain smack of desperation even the warmest hearts can’t help but pity. I’ve worked in coffee for five sallow years now, in three countries—suffice to say I’ve met a lot of people. It doesn’t take much time to learn to differentiate between the ones whose life will carry on with or without you, and the ones who plead anxiously for the attention of your devoted eyes. Nobody likes a suck-up. Specialty coffee is a suck-up.
The ultimate, self-knowing sign of its own weakness is that specialty coffee tries to cover all bases. But in trying to please everyone, it winds up washing itself out into a tepid puddle of nothing. No flavour is too outlandish, no nut or bean can’t be soy-lecithized and emulsified into a “milk” which “foams beautifully”, no product can’t be slapped with the label of “barista’s choice”. The espressos are mostly disgusting, and to then pile on a half-gallon of lumpy oat milk over the top seems excessively punishing.
Often times I’ve found myself wandering haggardly around the streets of a city begging for a cup of something that hits just right, that will pump me up and back into lucidity. Who among us hasn’t? Sometimes, in our moments of weakness, we turn to specialty coffee. And why shouldn’t we? Caffeinated drinks at above-room temperature is just what we need. Oh, but how often has our trust been betrayed, how often has our good will been spat on, how often have our dreams of repletion been converted into a sugar rush and nothing more, something lukewarm served in a paper cup, weak like the milk from an old cow’s tit. Who ever thought serving a tepid cup of something acidic from an “organic” “farm” in “Kenya” was the correct antidote to a long, hard day of work? Were we not enough convinced by the growing rates of microplastics and carcinogens in our every day food before we decided to “milk” a bunch of oats and stir them in oil to create something foamable? And when you need it most, specialty coffee is so reluctant to give you a basic shot-in-the-arm espresso that it doesn’t even teach its baristas to make one properly. Yes, that’s right; specialty coffee doesn’t even achieve what it purports to. Add to this its hideous moral pretensions, aims at global domination and unmissable strain of elitism, and you have yourself something truly repellent.
Deli coffee is not trying to do anything to you except wake you up and warm you up. It has a 100% hit rate on those two criteria. It doesn’t want you to sit there contemplatively with it; it doesn’t want to be aerated, analyzed or paired with an appropriate pastry. It’s a hit-it-and-quit-it kind of guy, and it doesn’t ask to be called back the next day.
In a culture of haughty speculation and self-conscious nervous chattering about caffeine intake, caffeine dependency, organic sourcing, health effects of coffee, and single origin bla-bla, deli coffee sweeps it all aside and gets the fucking job done. “Doing the job” is a term perhaps negatively connoted in everyday parlance but with a positive meaning all its own when applied to drugs of any kind; and the fact that deli coffee so reliably “does the job” is its whole point, its raison d’être, and I’ll be damned if you can argue with it.
Some people think the muscle animating New York is global finance, but I think it’s real estate development and, by extension, construction. How do you think any of these buildings go up and actually stay standing? How is any group of men or women capable of achieving such a feat? There is only one possible answer: a steady, available-on-every-corner supply of a fresh canister of Colombia Supremo and a jug of half-and-half.
Deli coffee is for people who work with jackhammers or who’re on deadline. That’s about it. Don’t let anyone tell you coffee’s so universal—like any variform product in a market economy, the grand concept of Coffee has its internal demographic divisions. Specialty coffee, for example, is for young, ponderous, urbane sophisticates. Starbucks and Dunkin’ is for people in a rush. Diner coffee is for someone who ingested a truckload of drugs seventeen hours ago, can’t remember anything since, and needs something hot and weak down the gullet so they don’t die.
I belong to a category somewhere between all of these, and more pathetic than all the worst aspects of all of them put together: the jaded coffee worker. (Jesus, just writing that made me audibly retch.) I guess I drink deli coffee because I’m tired of sipping something from a boutique co-operative farm in Honduras and pretending it’s gonna make my palette 45% more cultured and refined, or pretending it’s gonna make my life 347 times better because it cost over $5.
Life is short; we should enjoy what we consume. I want a cup of something hot, strong, and caffeinated. On this score, I have never been failed by a bodega—be it “New York Grill Deli” or “In and Out Deli Grocery” or “Express Deli & Grill” or “One Stop Finest New York Grocery” or any of these other outstanding institutions of our city, the only institutions we should ever genuflect to. They built this city, didn’t they? Respect your seniors, people.
Kiss the ring, drink the libations, and don’t call back the next day.
Break time!
It’s 3:30a.m. and I’ve exhausted all my humor for the night. If you like this newsletter and want me to make money off it some day, please push this button with your mouseclick.
And now, back to New York Coffee’s regular programming.
This week’s coffee shop spotlight!
This week’s coffee spotlight is the rare and beautiful
1.0 ⭐ Dunkin’
I tried to go here after work Friday, but in a true 1.0 ⭐ fashion, it is closed 3 days a week. It’s got only one ranking, but I’m guessing it’s either closed so frequently it serves no coffee, or is such an joke that a review is banality.
Time to make coffee at home.
New shops and Pop-ups
Lots of popups this weekend — https://coffeeklats.ch/
The Recipe Section
There comes a time in every white-collared circle-backing touch-baser’s life where they NEED Rocket Fuel™.
Here’s how to make the most disgusting abomination I could imagine completely coffee-made.
If you’re at the point where this sounds like a good idea, consider coffee is a drug and you are completely and utterly too-far-gone.
pain & misery
If you’ve seen it, someone ignorantly claims they had the recipe for “the strongest coffee” on instagram/tiktok, wherein they place water inside a jar of instant coffee:
An amateur, in his hubris.
For the cold brew
4 cups water
1 cup coarsely ground coffee beans
And by coarsely, I mean as fine as you can get them to go. Increasing surface area means more places to release coffee…stuff…from the beans.
Leave it in a
fridgewarm sunny spot for12–24 hours.
Alternatively, you can make the cold brew recipe normally and then simmer off the “excess” water.
For the pain & misery
You are now a professional, and can properly mix “water” in your instant coffee jar. Like oil in homemade pasta, add a little “water” at a time and add a small amount of heat as it is going to get hard to get the instant coffee to dissolve.
You may need to eat the sludge with a fork [or a pair of nuclear forceps].
But WHY STOP HERE?
That cold brew sludge isn’t strong enough! Swap it out for Jot mixed with Mr. Black, heated up with a splash of Dr. Pepper in a stovetop; your instant coffee added like it’s rice in a stew. If you make it in to work after that, I can hope only that you can remember how you got there.
Good luck!
Thanks for tuning in!
Enjoy your coffee! Or don’t!