Artist Craig Damrauer's Meditative Coffee Routine, Captured At Re:Form

Medium is a publishing platform/community/experiment that is increasingly becoming home to one of just about everything. One of those things is How the Coffee is Made, a slow, deliberate meditation on the simple joys and iconic design of the Italian Moka pot, by artist and writer Craig Damrauer. This content is hosted under re:form, a new design magazine at Medium. Damrauer walks us through each step of his morning coffee, exhaustively, intimately cataloging his most cherished routine:

“When I take the espresso maker off the stove, where it’s been sitting all night, and carry it over toward the sink so that I can begin to make the coffee, I’m filled with the greatest amount of anticipatory satisfaction I’ll find in my entire day. This is one of the only pieces of my life that feels completely figured out.”

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Damrauer clearly loves the ritual he’s settled into, the predictability and quiet focus it starts his morning with, and yes, the cup of coffee it results in:

“I can envision this routine, the actual making of the coffee, happening in the exact same way when I’m in my eighties. There’s no need for improvement, innovation, deviation. This works and it works perfectly. The liquid result is brown going on black and sits in a cup with regal dignity.”

Catalog many a geeky coffee appreciator’s routine and you’d probably hear talk of scales and filters and cleaning, and perhaps even very deliberate concentric circles of pouring water. But for Damrauer, the experience is all about the tactile, inherent sense of the process that builds up over a life-time of repetition. There is a kernel of the same truth in both approaches though: the desire for predictable pleasure in the rhythms and rituals of this meditative habit.

Read the whole piece for yourself over at re:form.