Cafe Nation

what is this?

buy the book

ask a question

send a postcard

traditional techniques

"Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love."
-Turkish Proverb

Ingredients:

Sugar
Coffee, ground to a fine dust
Cardamom, ground (optional)

Instructions:
To prepare Turkish coffee, you will need an ibrik. The sizes of ibriks can vary greatly, making it difficult to provide exact measurements. As a general rule, you can't have too much sugar or too much coffee! Spoon several teaspoons of sugar into the bottom of the pot. Fill the pot with purified or spring water up to the point where the pot begins to narrow. Fill the rest of the space, up to the very rim, with extra-fine coffee grounds (any ground spices can be added to the coffee grounds, or if ground is unavailable, whole spices can be thrown in with the sugar). For Turkish coffee to work, you must grind it until it is as fine as baby powder. If you don't have a grinder that can manage this, just ask your local coffeehouse to grind your beans for you before you go. Be sure to tell them you will be brewing Turkish-style.

Place the pot on your stove burner at a low setting (remember, it used to simply cook by sitting on hot desert sands!). As it begins to heat, you'll notice the grounds becoming wet from the water below. Soon after, it will begin to foam upward. Take the pot off the heat before it boils over, and stir it for a few seconds until the foam subsides a bit. Repeat two more times. Pour into demitasse cups (or, if you're like me, pour all of it into one big cup) and serve. The coffee will and indeed should have grounds still in it. They will quickly subside to the bottom of the cup. Drink until it becomes impossible (which is my general rule for all coffee!).

We have a sort of Mother Witch . . . which are the Coffee and Tea Throwers to tell People's fortunes.
-From Round About Our Coal-Fire, 1731

"If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee."
-Sydney Smith, 1771-1845

Reading Coffee Grounds
The most well-known coffee divination technique is the reading of coffee grounds. The method is virtually identical to tea leaf divination, and both are known collectively by the term Tasseography. To read coffee grounds, you will of course need to prepare your coffee in such a way that there are grounds to read. If you are at a coffee house, the residue from a cappuccino will work nicely as well-just make sure that the cup is not so tall that you can't see clearly all the way to the bottom.

Ask yourself the following question: "What do I need to know about my present situation?"

What do you now see in the cup? The grounds will arrange themselves in random patterns. Interpreting the patterns is a little like a Rorschach test or laying on your back reading cloud formations. What you see and what it means to you will be very individual-two people reading the same cup can come up with very different interpretations, and both can be equally true.

Now, take out a piece of paper and pen, and in a stream-of-consciousness style, begin jotting down your thoughts as you casually meditate on the shapes you see there. Above all, don't edit yourself. If the first thing that comes to mind has nothing to do with the coffee, jot it down anyway. For example, the first thing that enters your thoughts might be the dry-cleaning you need to pick up that afternoon. Write it down, all the while continuing to stare at your cup as if you were lying face up on your lawn staring at the clouds above. As much as possible, don't even look at the paper you are writing upon-keep your eyes on the grounds in your cup. It doesn't matter if your writing is illegible-it will be legible enough to you when you go back to it, if only enough so as to jar your memory to recall what your thoughts were at that moment.

Continue writing for at least ten minutes. This will be long enough for you to enter the first stages of a meditative state, both by the exercise of looking at one thing and by the rhythmic pattern of your free association and the motion of your hand upon the paper. If your mind keeps wandering back to your dry-cleaning let it. Observe the thought, jot it down, and let it pass, moving onward to whatever comes next as you continue to stare at the cup.

When you do readings yourself, you needn't feel you need to read every cluster of grounds in your cup (remember-you can also read the remains of foam at the bottom of your cappuccino cup instead of grounds). If you are drinking Turkish coffee, there are so many grounds this would take you forever! Interpret only what speaks to you. In fact, some of what may come to mind as you do the reading might not seem to have anything to do with what is in the cup at all. There is no right or wrong here. Each of your interpretations are "correct." You really do have all the answers within you. Most of the time we just don't want to hear the real answer. Trust yourself.

--
The Cafe Nation book contains more in-depth instructions on traditional & modern coffee divination methods, coffee history & folklore, and more. Get a free online reading using the Cafe Nation system -- our contemporary coffee divination technique. Just concentrate on your question and click here.

Visit CouponClock.com for online coupons and special deals.