The Courage To Pour In Water

Nowhere to find the leg­endary flip­ping image. You just have to go with this one…

“When you flip any­thing, you just have to have the courage of your con­vic­tions.” said Julia Child, played by Meryl Streep in the movie, Julie & Julia, right before giv­ing the pan­cake a flip on her TV show. This is an unthink­able clas­sic moment: is a celebrity chef hav­ing fear flip­ping a pan­cake just like most of us? It’s amaz­ing that Julia Child reveals the same fear just before drop­ping half the pan­cake on the cooker like we often do.It’s rem­i­nis­cent of the moment I poured water into the ground cof­fee in my Hario drip­ping glass for the first time: the uneven pre-moistening didn’t build an even cof­fee bed for hold­ing a steady flow, then pour­ing too slow, with over­flow­ing a big pos­si­bil­ity.… It’s daunt­ing to think how I was gonna screw up this pre­cious cof­fee, the leg­endary choco­late fla­vor, the flower fragrance…

First pour­ing. The fate of the cup is mostly deter­mined at this moment.

The Hario drip­ping glass has a sim­i­lar look to a Chemex but with a curvy pro­file. It’s one of the man­ual drip­ping meth­ods tagged “defi­antly sim­ple” by Corby Kum­mer. It is, in a way, quite sim­ple: a fen­nel fil­ter, a ket­tle and a glass to catch the cof­fee. But the brew­ing process is cer­tainly not as “sim­ple” at all: con­sider how much expe­ri­ence and judge­ment the fully man­ual process demands — it requires evenly pre­moist­en­ing, pour­ing in con­cen­tric cir­cles to cre­ate even sat­u­ra­tion, while avoid­ing over­flow. They are all ascribed to well obser­va­tion and exe­cu­tion — judg­ing the color of the foam and bal­anc­ing the grav­ity of the ket­tle and the swing of mus­cle to con­trol the pouring.

But it takes out the fun of brew­ing cof­fee — in effect, the sen­sa­tion which comes with the coor­di­na­tion of the phys­i­o­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal engage­ment in the process. The thick foam rises with my quick and steady pour­ing. Even a lousy pour­ing tech­nique guar­an­tees a sour or dirty aftertaste.

I wanna learn more about my cup in the process of brew­ing instead of push­ing a bunch of but­tons. I want sen­sa­tion expe­ri­ence the most, on my taste buds and whole body. So, “pour in the damn water!”