Roast Mortem

Fourteen

Thirty minutes later, my hair still damp from a quick shower, I descended the back staircase to my coffeehouse. Grabbing a Village Blend apron off a pegboard in the pantry, I peered through the open archway into the main shop.

“Good morning,” I called to the lanky back of my assistant manager.

Tucker Burton turned around, tossed his floppy brown mop, and flashed a footlights-worthy grin. “Well, hello, sleepy head! How are you?”

I avoided a direct answer, which might have resulted in a primal scream. Instead I firmly tied my apron strings and pointed to our machine.

“How’s she running today?”

“Not bad.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. Tucker already knew what to do next. He turned back to pull me a test shot, so I could judge how bad “not bad” really was.

The machine itself was a beauty, reliably stable when it came to maintaining temperature and pressure. The espresso was what worried me. Like a gifted but temperamental child, my favorite elixir had easy days and difficult days; days of generous glory with lush, oozing crema, and days of stingy infamy with thin, diluted sourness.

The process of coaxing every bit of sweetly caramelized flavor from Matt’s superlatively sourced beans was truly a kind of java alchemy. Three solid months of flight time had to be logged by my trainee baristas before they could attempt even one perfect shot for a customer.

What my newbie baristas had to fully understand was the array of variables that could devolve the process; how their perfectly dosed and tamped pulls of sultry-sweet nectar, executed in the exact same manner, with the same equipment and coffee beans, could suddenly turn into acidy slipstreams of espresso hell. Only when the untried learned to get comfortable with confusion, friendly with frustration, would the one-true-God shot be within reach...

As Tucker worked on pulling my taste test, I peered over the blueberry marble counter. Our tables were half empty, a normal pattern for a late weekday morning. The occupied seats were recognizable regulars — NYU students with open text books, neighborhood freelancers with open laptops, and a few hospital workers on open cell phones.

Tucker’s morning backup, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), appeared to be chatting with a small group of fans. (Yes, I said fans. Esther may have been one of my strongest latte artists, but her true renown as a local slam poetess had spread through at least two of the five boroughs. New customers, mostly aspiring “urban poets” and rappers, were showing up every day just to talk to her. Lucky for our bottom line they ordered coffee drinks from her, too.)

I finished scanning the room.

No sign of Matt yet.

After hearing his frantic message, I’d speed-dialed the man. All I got was voicemail (no surprise). So after my shower, I pulled on jeans and a Henley the color of toasted coconut and descended the stairs. I wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but Matt would be bursting in here any minute, and I theorized he’d be more likely to stay calm in a public place.

As the high morning sun broke through the low clouds, it made me feel calmer. The dazzling rays gleamed in the sparkling glass of our shop’s French doors. The restored wood-plank floor was all waxed and shiny; the twenty marble-topped tables stood reliably in place.

With new eyes, I gazed at the wrought-iron spiral staircase, soaring like a modern sculpture up to the second floor seating area where my tiny office waited with its shabby familiarity of battered desk and nonswiveling swivel chair.

Not even the relentlessly temperamental espresso-making process, the loudly squeaking back door, or our dangerously low supply of whole milk could shake my (guilty) feeling of thankfulness that it was Caffè Lucia and not my beloved Blend that had gone up in smoke.

“So, anyway, I didn’t know what my agent was thinking...”

I glanced back to Tucker, who had spoken again but not to me. He was in the middle of a conversation with Barry.

Like many of our regulars, Barry, a sweet doughboy of a guy with a receding hairline and soft brown eyes, was a free-lancer who worked from home and used the Blend as a way to mingle with humanity — or escape from it. Sometimes he brought his laptop, sometimes a paperback; other times, like today, he felt chatty and pulled up a barstool.

“Wait — you mean you don’t like the new job?” Barry asked between sips of his latte.

“Well, now I like the job. But when she told me about it, I said, ‘Honey, the stage is the thing for me — ’”

“What about that soap you did last year?” Esther interjected from across the room.

“Nobody calls them soaps, anymore,” Tucker replied. “It’s daytime drama.”

Esther propped a hand on her ample hip. “Well, whatever you want to call it, that was not a ‘stage’ job!”

Tucker smirked. “You never heard the term soundstage?”

“Repeat after me, Broadway Boy: As the Stomach Turns ain’t Masterpiece Theatre.”

“Just ignore the Dark Princess,” Tucker told Barry, making an insect-shooing motion with his hand.

Esther finally noticed me standing behind the work counter. She lifted her chin. “Oh, hi, boss.”

“Hi, Esther.”

Tucker had already preheated the portafilter (a required step for maintaining temperature during slow periods). He dosed and leveled off the proper amount of grinds and expertly packed them down with his personal purple tamper. Once more he tempered the group head with a quick flush of water. Then he locked the handle into the machine, positioned a clean shot glass, and hit the go button.

I closely watched the twenty-five-second extraction process. As I teach all of my employees, a barista does not have to taste a shot to know when it’s gone bad. The speed of extraction, visual viscosity of the liquor, even the color, are clear indicators of quality.

A full-flavored extraction, for example, has the texture of dripping honey; the color of a deep reddish-brown ale. An espresso with a thinner body and a light golden color might be prettier to look at in the cup, but it was completely sour on the tongue — not unlike Lucia Testa.

Hmmm...

Conversely black streaks in the crema meant there would be a level of bitterness at midtongue.

More of a Mrs. Quadrelli experience...

Okay, so I had Rossi’s case on the brain. What can I say? Finding solutions to puzzling problems intrigued me, and the puzzle of bad espresso was something I’d already mastered, to wit —

In case number one (the light golden color), there were two possible culprits: either the grind was too coarse or the brewing water not hot enough. In case number two (the black streaks), the grind was either too fine or the water too hot.

Solving bad espresso was usually a matter of testing new grinds and new water temperatures. The irony did not escape me. When it came to finding out who had torched Enzo’s caffè, Rossi would have to test the waters, too...

“Anyway,” Tucker went on, “I told my agent: ‘I will act the lines, I will write the lines, but I draw the line at radio announcing. Then she explained that it wasn’t radio announcing. This ad agency was looking for ‘character’ voices to do a series of PSAs — ”

“PSAs?” Barry said.

“You’re doing PSAs?” Esther asked.

Tucker deadpanned to Barry. “Didn’t I just say that?”

Her interest clearly piqued, Esther moved with all speed to join Tucker behind the work counter. “You have any ‘ins’ at the radio stations?”

“No.”

“Boris has a new YouTube upload ready to go. It’s called Strangers on a Train. He’s looking to get some airplay.” (Boris was Boris Bokunin, aka BB Gunn, assistant baker by day, urban rapper by night.)

“What is it?” Tuck asked. “A riff on that old switcheroo Hitchcock movie?”

“No,” Esther replied. “More of a hookup thing on the midnight A Train.”

“Sorry, sweetie,” Tuck said. “I’d help your man if I could, but PSAs are prerecorded in studios. I don’t have anything to do with FM program directors or their playlists.”

“Excuse me,” Barry said, “but what’s a PSA exactly?”

“It’s a public service announcement,” Esther said. “You’ve probably heard a million of them.”

“Like?”

“Like...” Tucker shrugged. “‘If you see something, say something.’ ”

“Yeah,” Esther said, “especially if it’s an abandoned backpack in the subway that’s ticking real loud.”

“ ‘Teachable moments with children...’ ”

Esther nodded. “If Zombie’s attack, aim for the head.”

“ ‘Just say no,’ ” Tucker continued.

“Especially to some foreign guy who promises you an exotic vacation in the Middle East.”

Tucker raised an eyebrow. “Speaking from experience, are we?”

“No comment.”

“You know what my favorite was?” Barry said. “The one with Smokey the Bear. Now how did that one go?”

“ ‘Only you can prevent wildfires,’ ” Tucker said.

If only, I thought with a sigh.

“You know what my all-time favorite PSA is?” Esther asked.

Tucker folded his arms. “Do I know or do I care?”

“It’s that one where some dude cracks an egg into a sizzling hot pan, and says,‘This is your brain on drugs.’”

“I remember that one!” Barry said. “The egg’s a visual metaphor. Like when you’re fried.”

I also recalled that PSA, but a half-assed omelet didn’t even begin to cover the extent of the nightmares I’d dealt with when my ex-husband’s gray matter had been on cocaine.

Tucker finished pulling my shot and handed it over.

Generally speaking, espresso became more temperamental as the day wore on. The reason (in geek-speak) was the coffee’s tendency to be hygroscopic, which basically meant that it readily sopped up surrounding air moisture, or in cases of excessively dry conditions, released it. So, in the morning, with lower temperatures and higher humidity, the extractions were magnificently thick and slow — not unlike the start of Mike’s lovemaking last night. But as the sun came up and the air dried out, the extractions tended to run fast...

Boy did that analogy give me pause.

Tucker’s test extraction for me looked pretty darn good. The viscosity was there, the color a deep reddish brown. But as I looked closer, I noticed a marked lack of tiger mottle — the deep brown flecking in a truly great pull.

I sipped.

Tuck fell silent, met my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s a slight hint of bitterness...”

“I didn’t taste it.”

“It’s there.”

Tucker sighed. “The humidity again?”

“I’m not sure...” I checked the machine’s gauges.

Esther came around the counter. “This I want to hear.”

“It can’t be the humidity!” Tucker protested. “I already went to a finer grind.”

“You did?” That surprised me. I turned to Esther. “You better get me the Glass.”

Esther showed her palms to the tin ceiling and pumped her arms in a victorious hip-hop club gesture she once told me meant raise the roof. “I told you, I told you, now the Best Girl she’ll scold you!”

“Oh, don’t be a ninny!”

As a gleeful Esther rushed into the back pantry to get the infamous Glass, I grabbed a paper towel, put it under the doser, and ran the grinder. A pile of fine black sand now sat on the flat white background like a negative satellite photo of K2.

“Here you go-oh!” Esther sang, setting a Holmes-worthy magnifying glass next to my grind sample. She tossed a smirk at Tucker. “I told you so-oh!”

“Tucker’s right,” I said.

“About what?”

“You’re being a ninny.”

“I am not!”

“Silenzio!” I picked up The Glass. Tucker and Esther flanked me, wordlessly watching as I spread out the grounds and closely examined them.

“There it is. You see?” I motioned them closer. “Evidence of irregular lumps.”

“Not again!” Tucker cried.

“Yes, again,” I said.

Coffee properly ground in a burr grinder displayed uniform particles with beautiful lattice networks (at the microscopic level), which properly maximized the area of coffee exposed during the intense espresso extraction process. But the uneven grains I was now studying had clumpish, oafish shapes. They were almost as horrific as what a cheap blade grinder would produce.

(Every so often I’d encounter a customer who regularly paid a higher price for our premium coffee beans but balked at investing in a decent burr grinder. Inexpensive blade grinders were fine for chopping spices, I’d always explain, but far too violent for chopping coffee beans. When those suckers started whirring at 20,000 to 30,000 RPMs, they produced enough frictional heat to scorch the beans they were grinding, which was why the coffee ended up tasting bitter. Blade chopping also produced uneven grains, a disaster for getting consistent quality.)

The final coffee might be drinkable, but it was far from achieving its potential. A sad thought because I knew just how much blood, sweat, and tireless tasting went into cultivating, picking, sorting, processing, sourcing, shipping, and finally roasting our premium beans.

My present problem, however, wasn’t with the freshness of our roast, the skill of our baristas, or the quality of our appliances. Like any other serious espresso bar, we used a conical burr grinder. The issue today was maintenance.

“Our baby’s blades have gone slightly dull from overuse.” I didn’t actually need to state this. Tucker had been through this many times before.

“Another teachable moment.” Esther smirked at Tucker. “I told you it wasn’t the weather.”

“Don’t rub it in. It’s bad form.”

“I’m just being honest, PSA Boy. You of all people should know the motto I live by.”

“Huh?”

“If you see something, say something!”

Tucker’s eyes narrowed. “Listen, Clare, I have an idea. Why don’t I give the Duchess of High Dudgeon her very own teachable moment, like how to change the blades. Then she can start sharing in the fun.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“But, boss — ” Behind her black-framed glasses, Esther’s big brown eyes turned pleading. “My friends are here! And I don’t really care about learning how to — ”

“Good idea,” I repeated, cutting her off. “I’ll take over the bar. You two take the machine to the worktable downstairs.”

We had a backup grinder for situations like this one. I pulled it out as Tucker unplugged the problem appliance. Then off he went, a pouting Esther in tow.

When I glanced up, I found Barry watching all this with a cross between curiosity and amusement. “Wow. I didn’t realize so much scientific rigor went into making my latte.”

“You have no idea.”

I’d once explained it all to Mike, or tried to. When things went wrong in making espresso, any number of variables could be the offending agent — a good barista had to go through each variable, eliminating suspects one by one, until the true offender was found.

Mike replied with one sentence: “Sounds like my job.”

I smiled at Barry. “Would you like another latte?”

“Yes, please! You have the best in the city.”

“In that case,” I told him, “this one’s on the house.”

Twenty minutes later, Barry was gone, and Tucker and Esther had returned to the espresso bar to help with a brief flurry of prelunch rush customers. I was just finishing the pour on my last order in line — a Hazelnut-Caramel Latte, which I topped with the flourish of a heart-crowned rosetta — when I heard a familiar door slam. Don’t ask how I can recognize one particular man by his door slam. I just can.

A minute later, our shop’s front bell was ringing and so were my eardrums.

“Clare!”

The customers in my half-filled shop came alert at their tables.

“What the hell is going on with my mother!”

My ex-husband had arrived.