Until June or July this year, I firmly believed that well-made South Indian filter coffee was the best form of coffee ever. This belief possibly had to do with my conditioning, having been exposed this to this coffee form from an extremely early age, and the belief sustained even in the face of pretty excellent coffees from quite a few artisanal “Aussie style” cafes here in London.
Then, around then, I decided to embark on “intermittent fasting”, which meant no calorie consumption from 8 in the night to the next noon (each day). The diet permitted me to drink coffee or tea in the mornings as long as no milk or sugar was added to it, and that presented a problem.
For South Indian filter coffee can’t be drunk black. The addition of the chicory, which slows down the pace through which water/steam filters through the beans in order to maximise flavour, adds its own flavour, which when unmasked by milk can be pretty revolting. Though I must mention that chicory powder is sold as a separate “health drink” here in the UK (maybe it needs to be marketed such because its taste is most revolting).
That I couldn’t add milk to my coffee meant that I needed to explore other ways of making good black coffee. Counter top space (or the lack of it) ruled out contraptions such as an espresso machine or even a Nespresso machine. There was an old Braun “coffee maker” (which my mother-in-law reportedly procured two decades ago) at home, but that dished out pretty bad coffee (which only Americans might appreciate).
And so I started exploring, asking around coffee-geek friends (not to be confused with the cafe of a similar name in Victoria). The French Press was quickly ruled out on account of taste. I strongly considered the Aeropress and the Hario V60, and in the spirit of “try before you buy” or even “learn before you buy”, I asked baristas at my favourite local artisanal cafe to show me how to brew in these methods.
I quite liked the output of both methods, but found the aeropress apparatus a bit cumbersome and hard to clean (one reason I didn’t want to use my trusty Bialetti Moka Pot to make non-South Indian coffee as well). The V60 on the other hand offered simplicity of making process as well as extreme ease of cleaning. So quickly after I had tried, I had bought the pourover cup from Amazon, and a bag of beans from Electric (they ground it for me) and I was ready to go.
I’ve since fallen in love with this form of coffee, though when I go to a cafe I order an espresso-based drink (Cortado/Piccolo or Flat White depending on the cafe). And though I gave up on intermittent fasting a month and half after I started it, I continue to make this (I’m sipping on one such cup as I type this). And this is because of the caffeine kick.
I think I had this realisation for the first time back when I was still fasting – I drank a cup of pourover coffee just before I hit the gym (on an otherwise empty stomach), and I was astounded by my own energy levels that day. And I have since tested this in several other situations – before meetings, while doing an important piece of work or simply to stay awake. The caffeine kick from pourover coffee is simply unparalleled compared to any other kind of coffee I’ve had (though espresso-based coffees in cafes come very close).
South Indian filter coffee optimises for flavour at the cost of the caffeine. The decoction is frequently stored for a long time, even overnight. The large amount of milk added means that a given amount of beans can be used to make several more cups. And the chicory addition means that brewing is slower and more flavour gets extracted from the beans, though it’s unlikely that the amount of caffeine extracted is proportionally large.
And all this together means you get incredibly tasty coffee, but not something you can get that much of a caffeine kick out of. And that is possibly why we are conditioned to drinking so many cups of coffee a day – you need so many cups to get the level of caffeine your body “needs” to function.
And this explains why South Indian filter coffee in the evenings has never interfered with my sleep, buy any coffee bought in a good cafe after 5pm has invariably led to sleepless nights!
Do you have anything else to add to this theory?
PS: The first time I made pourover coffee, I used Indian beans from Chickmaglur (that I bought here in the UK), so it’s not to do with the beans. It’s the extraction method.