Circumstances For Appreciation
While browsing the Coffee Review website, I found this article, that sheds an interesting light on why coffee, and above all good coffee, can make us so desiring for it:
The customs of coffeehouse and café appear to be intimately connected to the effect of coffee and caffeine on mind and body. Coffee stimulates conscious mental associations, whereas alcohol, for instance, provokes instinctual responses. In other words, alcohol typically makes us want to eat, fight, make love, dance, and sleep, whereas coffee encourages us to think, talk, read, write, or work. Wine is consumed to relax, and coffee to drive home. For the Moslems, the world’s first coffee drinkers, coffee was the “wine of Apollo,” the beverage of thought, dream, and dialectic, “the milk of thinkers and chess players.” For the faithful Moslem it was the answer to the Christian and pagan wine of Dionysus and ecstasy.
From the inception of the coffeehouse in Mecca to the present, customers in cafés tend to talk and read rather than dance, play chess rather than gamble, and listen contemplatively to music rather than sing. The café usually opens to the street and sun, unlike bars or saloons, whose dark interiors protect the drinker from the encroachment of the sober, workaday world. The coffee drinker wants not a subterranean refuge but a comfortable corner in which to read a newspaper and observe the world as it slips by, just beyond the edge of the table.
As a matter of fact, coffee never seems more enjoyable to me than when I am sharing a cup with friends and family, when finding myself in a pleasant place, or when focusing on my writing at home, surrounded with soft music and the delicate smell of the hot beverage. I wonder if this tends to be the same for other people as well – if the pleasure, even with a very good coffee brand, is somewhat lessened when drinking it alone and in circumstances that aren’t very favorable for properly tasting it (let’s admit that sitting a nice coffeehouse is way better than standing in a mall)? Unless it is the contrary, and the coffee itself is the reason why “appropriate” circumstances seem to us more enjoyable…
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Okay, I don’t know about those other posts, but I’m a real and sincere person, and I’ve got to say that I really enjoyed this post about coffee and its relationship to atmosphere, moods, Apollo, etc. I used to be a Dionysus – a drunk f*cker, LOL – but now consider myself more tuned towards the Apollonian. (Those I still have my Dionysian moments. Hey, you gotta have balance.)
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