HOME COUNTRY
Flames, boiling water, fear needed to have 'real' coffee
SLIM RANDLES

A friend took me to a store that only serves fancy coffee with Italian names the other day. My cup of unpronounceable java ran about a day's wages for a fence builder and there was no refill.

I felt … treated, I guess. But somehow it wasn't like having coffee. I mean coffee!

Real coffee doesn't come with recycled paper packets of pure organically grown brown sugar. Real coffee doesn't have tiny plastic cups full of almondflavored cream.

Real coffee can be served in real coffee shops or in real kitchens, but mostly it is a blessed combination of water at a rolling boil in a blue-andwhite and soot-colored coffee pot over a fire with real flames. It is made when the pot is pulled off the flames, and 10 seconds later someone pours two hermans of coffee into the top. (A herman, of course, being a cubic fistful). Then you wait for 27.2 seconds, give or take, until all but a few grounds hit bottom.

Now that's coffee with the hair still on. Coffee for making memories. Coffee that slaps your face and demands your attention.

And it doesn't cost as much as a new fly rod, either.

Brought to you by www.enamelware. com, the folks who still make real campfire coffee pots.