Think and Drink

Rejoice with me in the wonder of beverages!

We all know them, we all love them. Most of us drink a beverage every day (and often two or three). Meals are incomplete without them; even the humblest picnic is rounded out by a canteen of chilled water, and who would even think about serving châteaubriand without a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape? Nobody, of course, that's who. Except me. I like my Châteaubriand with Lodi Vineyards "Earthquake" Petit-Syrah. So there.

I'm in love with beverages. As I write this, I'm drinking a cup of coffee -- which is far too hot for today, so when I get home, I'm going to have iced water. I'm not alone in my passion, though perhaps I'm more vocal, or more active. The detritus of America's love for drinking is littered everywhere in our cities, from overflowing trash cans to beer-bottles shoved into the underbrush of any park in the States.  Drink containers are like cockroaches: they never die and get everywhere. I'm in love, and I'm not alone. But beverages are unsung; titans like Michael Jackson and Anthony Diaz Blue have certainly brought reams of wonderful information to the world; Jackson in particular did wonderful work making good beer accessible to everyone. But they're fundamentally specialists; since every human on the planet has to drink to stay alive, very few of us ever think about improving it as a skill, or seeking out a specialist to teach us about nuance. In some ways, the writers of great manuals do a disservice to the casual drinker; people think of wine as something you must read books about to understand or appreciate, and that's a tragedy. People with perfectly well developed opinions wont share them because they view themselves as "uneducated." Stop it, amateur drinkers! Your opinions matter too! The chief difference between most "expert" drinkers and the everyman is a willingness to expend verbiage -- which is, I promise, no great skill. (I'll not poo-poo food writing further, lest I damn myself. More on this idea in a different article.)

Have you ever noticed that to eat somewhere is a picnic, but you can drink with anyone, anytime, anywhere? More to the point, picnics are planned. You go out to eat food on a hill. It's an event to take your lunch out of the office building to a park. But I and all my friends have water-bottles on us all the time, and its barely a detour to get coffee whenever we want it. Drinks are flexible; you can go on a first date to a coffee shop, able to cut line and run after a 20 minute espresso as easily as you can spend four hours over the same glass of wine, falling in love. (Perhaps with the partner, perhaps with the wine. Life is fickle that way.)

Think about this: you chew food. You have to: mechanical digestion is critical to nutrient acquisition, and thorough empirical testing by Yours Truly indicates that you cannot, no matter how hard you try, actually inhale food. But chewing food changes the temperature of it; by the time you can comfortably chew food, it's going to be roughly the same temperature you are, if not a little colder. By the time mastication is complete (you do chew each piece thirty times, right? Good. Neither do I.), you've reduced whatever you just put in your mouth -- hot or cold -- to a roughly 98.6 degree paste.

But you don't have to chew drinks! You can just drink them -- that's the brilliance of it! A drink does little more than corrode your teeth on its way past before plummeting into the core of you, the drinker. A ham sandwich simply can't warm you all the way down: hot-chocolate can. An ice-cold salad is not the same as an ice-cold lemonade -- it's refreshing, sure, but in a different way. With beverages, we achieve a level of (forgive the language) homeostatic contrast. Drinks can be different than we are, whereas food is always the same. It is this effect that both soup and smoothies attempt to capitalize on -- though I don't believe either truly succeed. (It's difficult to get enough substance to a soup.)

Drinks aren't even done with the wonders they can produce! Now that a drink can be hot or cold, it has another trick: many beverages have flavors that change with temperature! You can easily experience this for yourselves at home, using the following simple method: go buy a bottle of Momokawa Brewery's "Pearl" Nigori Genshu sake. Chill the ever-loving bejeezus out of it. Now pour a mug of ill-advised volume and start sipping while you watch Princess Mononoke. About the time Ashitaka is healed by the Deer God, you'll discover that you're drinking something different than what you first poured! Depending on rate, this might be due to general inebriation -- pace yourself, my friend -- but if you were to go pour another (much smaller) glass of Genshu, you'd notice that it, at refrigerator temperature, tastes much different than the mug you've been sipping for an hour-ish.

(I would go so far as to say that, with any bottle of sake, the drinkers first obligation to excellence is to chill the sake, drink it till it's room temperature, then heat it to roughly 192 degrees and sip it while it cools. Every sake has at least one, but maybe two, optimal temperatures. Find them! You'll love sake even more every glass served at the proper temperature. True masters will go a step further and begin matching the flavor of their sake to the kind of glass it is served in, creating an interplay between color, texture, weight, and flavor that I find truly electrifying.)

Asia in general seems to have a very different approach to beverages than we do in the states. Take yourself to an Asian supermarket some day and marvel at the drinks case; you, like I, probably cannot tell any of the drinks apart. I'm told by afficionadi that each of the three hundred varieties of pre-brewed green tea is substantially different from all the others; to be honest, I've never committed the time to find out. I spend my time exploring the mysteries of the Powdered Drink Aisle.

 As near as I can tell, China is the world's foremost innovator of instant drink powders -- and I love them. Conveniently packaged in one-serving pouches, you can toss them into your lunch and shake them into your water bottle for a delectable and refreshing treat. My favorite is Honey Ginger Beverage; the worst I've found yet is Jackie Chan's Insta-Green (do not be fooled! Just because Jackie likes it does not mean it is actually potable!). They are of especial joy to me as a bicyclist; on a hot day, cold water is easy to come by and blood-sugar is worth its weight in gold. Anything that can refresh me and give me more power to bike on is worth its powdery weight in gold.

I started bicycling in Italy, which is one of the foremost places in the world to drink. It flummoxes Americans to learn this: in Italy, you never walk around carrying a beverage! It's highly taboo. Mitigating factors abound: the coffee is what we think of as espresso (in Italy it's just called "café," and there is no drip. No, none. Seriously.), and it's always served at drinking temperature in manageable portions; most Italians get around by bus or scooter, which make to-go cups difficult to manage; and in Italy, you can buy a good café on any street corner, at a bar or tabacchi. (Where do you think Howard Schulz got the idea?). Perhaps most important is this: you never drink (or eat) while walking around (except for maybe just maybe gelato), because it's rude to your drink. If you're walking around, you clearly aren't giving your drink the attention it richly deserves -- why did you buy it in the first place, after all, if not to enjoy it? Only activities that enrich the experience are worth having with your coffee; good conversation, for instance, or a cornuto di miele.

For the Italians, enjoyment is the most important thing. "It's hot; I want it to be cold." my host mother told me crisply while dropping ice-cubes into her San Giovese. I've watched distinguished gentlemen in suits dunk bread directly into their wine in respectable restaurants. At a dinner, I once observed an Italian woman pouring red wine directly into her glass of water. My confusion was plain, and so a venerable pensionatto leaned heavily across the table to address me.

"We never put water in our wine," he instructed me, a finger gliding through the air between us as though conducting my apprehension, "because it would make the wine worse. But we put wine in our water. It makes the water better."

All at the table nodded their agreement to this sage declaration.

Among the many indignities of year-round cycling is Exposure to the Elements. No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to find a way to bike in Seattle without getting rained on. In the winter, the cold chews on your vitality, making it difficult to move, let alone ride anywhere. The chorus with which I sing requires a trip to the southern end of the city once a week, all winter; biking home at 11pm through 34 degree rain is a soul-crushing experience for which I've found three weapons: an iPod, a thermos, and a flask. There are many evenings to which I would have been lost forever if not for Kraftwerk, hot rooibos tea, and bourbon.

My advice to you all is this: slow down! Remember to taste your food; too often, in the rushing crush that is American life, we stop paying attention to the details that make up our daily doings. Taste your latte. Have you ever gotten your cappuccino dry? (Do you even know that they can be dry or wet?) What about your favorite beer -- is it always cold? Try it warm. Do you like it better? Relax. Have your coffee on the porch in the morning. Feel the mug and taste the brew -- try Sumatran Mandeling or Ethiopian Yergacheffe. You're the only expert of your own taste, so pay attention! There's quite a world out there to love.

For the Record: I woke up this morning and drank lemonade and water. I wrote this while drinking a cup of Stumptown Sumatra Misty Valley coffee, a medium-roasted bean dried with some of the cherry still on the bean, giving excpetional fruit and a velvet texture. Later, I had ice water, then Limeade. With dinner, I'm drinking a Val Dieu Grand Cru Belgian Abbey Ale -- rich with notes of coffee, sweet shortbread, and a finish not unlike the best parts of caramalize sweet onion.