Today I bought some very dark bitter coffee. The beans are black and shiny, like little varnished beetles. The taste is intense, pungent, gamey. It’s described as ‘heavy liquoring’, which means, apparently, it’s thick, almost treacly. Usually, I get a ‘lighter’ blend, with a slight ‘fruitiness’. There is a whole mini-vocabulary which attempts submit the multitude of different flavours to a grid of classification. There are gradations of ‘acidity’ and ‘body’. Language is bent into metaphor – ‘Sharpness’, ‘smoothness’ - in an attempt to render the specifics.
The plane of tastes and sensations referred to here could only really be approached through poetic language. Concepts are just the wrong instruments.
And yet, equally, ‘coffee’ itself is a Concept. All the diverse coffees – mellow, chocolaty, full-bodied – can be said to exhibit ‘coffee-ness’. 'Coffee-ness' is the invariable substratum of all these flavours. Yet there is no blend that simply has only ‘coffee-ness’ as its flavour. If some mad philosopher were to attempt to discard all flavours which were superfluous to ‘coffee-ness’, as if distilling an essence, s/he would be left with nothing, a flavourless container. To paraphrase Althusser, the Concept of coffee has no taste.
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