Most coffee events involve tasting notes, a few technical terms and a hot drink at the end.
Author and philosopher Julian Baggini’s session at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival was aiming at something rather different: using coffee to think about how we live.
Baggini shared the Spiegeltent stage with Washington Vieira and Erin Newby Vieira of Santu Coffee, whose roastery on Union Street is one of the very best places in the city to sit down and drink coffee. Baggini is not, by his own admission, a coffee obsessive. He wrote The Book of Coffee with help from James Hoffmann, the closest thing the coffee world seems to have to a resident geek-in-chief. In this event, Santu’s two representatives provided the coffee expertise.
The ‘wisest book I ever read’
Baggini was open about where the book came from. He described Okakura Kakuzō’s The Book of Tea as the ‘wisest book I ever read’ and said that his own book was ‘essentially a rewriting’ of it.
Baggini nearly passed over Okakura’s book, assuming it would be a tourist-friendly introduction to Japanese thought aimed at Western readers. He was wrong. What stayed with him was Okakura’s challenge to something Baggini sees as deeply rooted in Western philosophy. In esence, the tendency to treat the sensory and physical as somehow inferior, to ‘disdain’ the ‘earthly’ rather than pay attention to it.
Coffee brings those things back into view. Even the myths surrounding it do. Baggini mentioned the familiar story of the goat herder who noticed his animals becoming unusually lively after eating certain berries. It is one of coffee’s ‘foundational myths’, part joke and part origin story. The truth is that the emergence of coffee as a drink took place over centuries.
The wrong preferences
Long before he got into the world of coffee, Baggini wrote a book about provincial England, Welcome to Everytown, taking ordinary tastes seriously at a time when he had encountered plenty of sneering from educated, metropolitan circles. Reading it now, some of its observations look remarkably prescient. The tension between elite opinion and popular feeling became central to Brexit and what has followed.
That same question runs through his thoughts on coffee. There is obvious snobbery within the specialty coffee sector, and Baggini was candid about the difficulty of caring about quality without becoming someone who looks down on people with the ‘wrong’ preferences.
The question of personal preference versus notions of objective quality was a key theme. Baggini compared it with music, where things we enjoy might not survive five minutes of critical examination. As someone who reviews cafes, this felt highly relevant. Separating what you like from what is actually good is much harder than critics sometimes pretend.
Started tutoring myself
For our first coffee experience, we were handed cups of raw green coffee beans. These are the beans, separated from the cherry, before roasting, and are how Santu and most other roasteries receive their coffee. Baggini asked us to describe the smell they gave off. The answers went in all sorts of directions. That was the point. Smell and taste really are subjective.
For Baggini, paying attention to the aroma in this way was significant. It was mindfulness without much of the usual mysticism: simply taking the time to notice rather than rushing to finish the task. Washington Vieira made much the same point from the coffee industry, noting that people now think about coffee’s flavours in ways wine drinkers have done for generations.
Baggini admitted he was still learning. He had only ‘started tutoring myself’ fairly recently, having grown up in a household where food was something to be eaten rather than carefully savoured.
The crucial eight seconds
A particularly interesting part of the event came with two roasts made from exactly the same beans: one medium and one dark. We smelled both bags and, almost immediately, the difference was obvious. The dark roast produced the sort of coffee that dominated cafes before specialty coffee started to expand the variety of coffee available.
Washington Vieira said that dark roast coffee probably needs milk or sugar to make it drinkable, whereas good specialty coffee probably shines best when unadulterated. He also knocked down one familiar assumption. Dark roasts actually contain less caffeine than lighter ones, so if you order a ‘strong’ coffee for the caffeine hit, you are largely associating darkness and bitterness with strength.
Then came the detail that seemed to surprise everyone. The medium roast took 14 minutes and 30 seconds. The dark roast took only eight seconds longer. Eight seconds! And yet the resulting coffees were very different. Baggini saw that as an example of the ‘fragility’ of ‘all that is good’, an idea that connected coffee roasting to some of the broader philosophical and religious concerns running through his book. Very small changes can matter enormously.
We then moved on to a cold brew, steeped at room temperature and served over ice, which provided yet another flavour profile. Whether iced coffee was ideal on a damp and chilly late August morning is perhaps a moot point. Admittedly, the coffee was delicious. This particular drink was Nitro cold brew, cold brew coffee infused with pressurised nitrogen gas, creating a velvety, creamy mouthfeel similar to a stout on draft. Again, we were encouraged to savour what we were drinking, rather than focusing on the coffee’s likelihood of giving us a spurt of energy.
The same theme emerged in relation to decaffeinated coffee, which is becoming increasingly good and difficult to distinguish in blind tasting. For Baggini, we could perhaps consider those who favour decaf to be the true coffee purists, in that they are focusing on the flavour rather than looking for the caffeine kick.
Honour to coffee
From the coffee itself, the discussion moved to the person making it. Behind this were deeper questions about the value of work. Baggini rejected the idea that ‘some people are less important than others’ because of the work they do. He brought up Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, about a Tokyo toilet cleaner, as an example of how dignity in work has little to do with status. What matters is ‘how you do your task’.
He knows that plenty of people ‘mock’ coffee culture for its ‘over-earnestness’. His argument is not that we should all become solemn about coffee. Rather, every cup deserves some care. Treating someone’s work as disposable can easily become a way of treating the person who made it as disposable too. Craft gives us a chance to ‘make small work great’. Washington Vieira approached the same idea from the roasting side, talking about the ‘mind-blowing detail involved in the job’ and the precision required to pay ‘honour to coffee’, as well as to everyone who grew, picked and processed it before it reached the roastery.
That precision led to an obvious question. Could coffee eventually be automated, given the exact measurements now involved in temperature, grind size and extraction time, the precise recipes that baristas use? Vieira was sceptical. He had watched home enthusiasts spend serious money on machines and grinders in pursuit of ‘the golden shot’, manage to produce the perfect espresso once, and then struggle to make it happen again. There are simply too many variables. Humidity changes. Someone opens a door. Conditions shift throughout the day. A good barista adjusts accordingly.
There is, it was agreed, something slightly odd about trying to remove that human judgement from the process. Erin Vieira pointed to the opposite problem: cafes ‘forcing pernicketiness on customers’ who simply want milk and sugar in their drinks. She and Washington both gestured towards, without naming it, one particular Edinburgh coffee shop where asking for either can earn you a look and, in the case of sugar, a firm no. The slight irony is that the coffee in that place is probably the best in Edinburgh, regularly visited by baristas from other places. Again, the tension between personal preferences and notions of objective quality came to the fore. The view of those on the panel was that the problem is the attitude, not the devotion to high standards.
A space you yourself want to be in
The final part of the discussion turned to the physical space where you consume your coffee. Santu has an obvious advantage here. It is a converted public washhouse with very high ceilings and plenty of natural light, rather than a space designed to look like someone else’s idea of a fashionable cafe.
Erin Vieira summed up the thinking behind it neatly: build ‘a space you yourself want to be in’ rather than chasing whatever happens to be fashionable. It is a good principle. There are plenty of cafes that seem to have been designed by committee, each following the same idea of what a coffee shop should look like this year. The result can be perfectly pleasant and almost completely anonymous.
Baggini ended by considering what cafes are actually for. They can be places to sit quietly with a book, properly alone, but they also carry on the older coffee-house tradition of conversation, argument and intellectual exchange. Then he added the obvious point, with a grin: putting people that close together also makes cafes very good places to eavesdrop. In other words, cafes serve all sorts of purposes. Increasingly, they are important ‘third spaces’, taking on some of the functions once provided by pubs. It was another reminder that coffee culture is about much more than the drink in the cup. The event left the audience with plenty to ponder, as well as a very pleasant aftertaste.
