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I’m a coffee lover — have been most of my life and, as I am getting older, I hate to admit that I can’t drink it like I used to. There was a time when I drank coffee all day and into the evening and never worried about it effecting sleep. Not any more. I used to say that coffee gave me the energy to sleep but these days my coffee consumption has to end by late afternoon or sleep is difficult.

What got me thinking about this is a pound of delicious Italian coffee given to me by a client who travels to Italy on a regular basis as part of his business. He represents a line of premium Italian coffees to coffee shops and cafés in this part of the country and, what I have tasted of it so far, is heavenly.

Which brought me to the issue of how one makes coffee. Back when I was a kid, my mother, who thought coffee was some nice warm stuff to dunk cookies in, had this huge old percolator that cooked the living daylights out of coffee. My Dad drank coffee by the pot. I never liked the stuff that came out of that percolater though I do remember with pleasure how it made the house smell.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I began to drink coffee regularly. Over the years I’ve owned a lot of different kinds of coffeemakers and tried every coffee under the sun and I’ve discovered a basic truth — for me anyway — about coffee. The more simply you make it, the better it tastes. When my friend gave me the bag of coffee beans, I got out my grinder and ground a batch and brewed up a pot in my fancy-schmancy designer drip coffeemaker. It was good coffee but I had a sense that the coffee-making method was not doing justice to the quality of the beans. I rummaged around in the cupboard and found two different stovetop espresso pots. There’s nothing that brings out the full flavor of a good coffee bean like steam.

The first one I tried is a beautiful, very heavy espresso pot made by National Silver many years ago. As I recall, it makes great coffee and there is even a way to use the lever on top of it to release the built up steam and froth milk to serve with it. Problem is I can never remember whether the lever thingie goes up or down while the coffee is steaming so I never use it. The other one is an old Mako aluminum espresso pot — the kind you see in foreign movies and that is ubiquitous in Italian summer rentals to confuse American tourists. Mine is at least forty years old — it belonged to my Uncle Custy who gave it to my Dad who gave it to me. Uncle Custy was Italian and the best wild mushroom hunter in Pennsylvania but that’s another story.

There is an Italian tradition that pots like that should never be fully washed, just well rinsed and the rubber ring replaced as needed. But as the pot is used over and over, it ”seasons” and each successive cup of coffee brings with it the legacy of all the coffee that has gone before. So I made a pot of it with my precious coffee beans from Italy and, you know what? It is heavenly.

I just went and made another pot while writing this. It is soft and silky and mellow with a robust underside. Why did I ever spend money on all those damn coffeemakers when I had this little jewel in the cupboard?

So I’m sitting here with the best coffee I’ve had in ages and memories of my Uncle Custy who died many years ago. So far the day is off to a good start. I have a lot of work ahead of me and a car issue to deal with but I also have that wonderful old coffeepot and a bag of beans carried across the Atlantic Ocean for me. And the sun is shining.

Thanks for reading.