This story is part of the Register’s special issue on coffee. Read more articles here.

Depending on where you are, that last sip of coffee can be the ultimate sweetness or a mouthful of soot.

Coffee drinking came to me early. As a child growing up in Miami, breakfast, at least on weekends, meant sweet and strong Cuban coffee with hot milk — café con leche — paired with slabs of Cuban bread slathered in butter. In mid-morning and mid-afternoon there was also a Cuban coffee break — black, very sweet and served in little china cups. Like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “I have measured my life with coffee spoons.”

I didn’t know then that café cubano was essentially espresso, just like the Italians drank. Even our stovetop coffee makers were Italian. But we had our own local brands — Bustelo, Pilon, La Llave. Bustelo and Pilon have been owned by J.M. Smucker since 2011. La Llave is still Cuban exiled-owned by the Gaviña family.

The last sip of Cuban coffee was always the best — “el último buchito” as Celia Cruz would sing. The bottom of the cup held all the coffee-flavored sugar that had settled. As kids, we would lick our fingers to get that last bit of sweetness. Years later as a young adult — it was probably at a Greek restaurant — I took that last mouthful of what is called Greek or Turkish coffee and found that it was just sweetened coffee grounds. Not something to enjoy at all. Our coffee was different than theirs.

As a young diplomat, I learned the whole culture of hospitality in the East — a culture that is mostly forgotten in the West — centered around coffee and other beverages. In the Gulf Arab states, there would be that initial bitter, unsweetened coffee, flavored with cardamom (most of which is grown in Guatemala now) in small cups at the top of the meeting. It was a courtesy; you drink it fast and scalding and shake the empty cup a bit between your fingers to show that you don’t want any more. Then during the meeting would come the Nescafé or the “Turkish” coffee (bitter, or sweet, or “mazbout” in between). 

I quite liked the coffee in Yemen — the cradle of coffee and the land of mocha, the port city of Al-Mukha from which the name comes — which sometimes had cinnamon or ginger added to it. 

Sudan was not much for coffee but it was the home of karkadeh, a type of hibiscus tea, only much better whether hot or cold. Attending funerals in the Arab world — important work for a diplomat trying to learn how societies worked — coffee was an important signifier: You would enter the mourning tent, greet the family, sit and engage in a bit of small talk for a few minutes. Once the bitter coffee was served, you could then depart with all the proprieties having been observed. It was in the parking lot, coming or going, that the brazen politicking or influencing would occur, outside the immediate vicinity of the mourners.

In the Bible, there is no coffee, but Abraham in Genesis 18 certainly practices a type of hospitality and generosity that Middle Easterners today would readily recognize as a holy precursor of their own. At Mamre, underneath the great oak that still (barely) exists today, Abraham offers the Three Visitors water to wash their feet, followed by bread, meat, and milk and curds. 

In Damascus, I frequented two historic turn-of-the-century coffeehouses, “Brazil” and “Havana.” Both had once been significant in Syrian cultural and political life — one of them had been the hangout of the conspirators who founded the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party — but had been sadly all-too-modernized when I went to them. 

But it was not in the Middle East but in Spain where I almost went into the coffee business, kind of. It was more a pipe dream than a concrete business plan. We were sitting in the old city of Barcelona, the Barrio Gótico, or “Gothic Quarter,” in one of those new-agey coffee shops favored by foreign tourists and local hipsters. 

The Gothic Quarter was lively but still had plenty of empty, picturesque spaces. What about a Catholic coffee shop in this historic district? Cristo Rey instead of Buddha and Yoga. Playing on that old tale of ancient Yemenis discovering the properties of the coffee bean while seeing local goats eating the stuff getting frisky, what about calling it the Café Goatico, with murals of wild goats among the coffee bushes? We would serve Cuban coffee, of course, and tea and a few pastries — guava pastry would be a must. The place would abound with holy cards, religious pamphlets and inexpensive copies of Chesterton, Tolkien, Belloc, St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila in various languages. You probably wouldn’t make money from it, but maybe you would touch some wandering hearts. 

The Café Goatico never existed, but I still think of coffee as an evangelistic beverage, one that brings people together with good cheer, whether poured from an ornate Arabic coffee pot or a colada like you can get almost anywhere in Miami — a foam cup of just-brewed Cuban coffee and a half-dozen thimble-sized plastic cups to share it in among friends. Indeed, in the Ottoman Middle East, coffee shops were first regarded by the authorities as dens of sedition where weighty, dangerous ideas — in those days, things like politics and heresy — were discussed.

St. Paul wrote, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light” (Ephesians 5:14). Among other qualities, coffee makes you wide awake. What better thing to drink when discussing the great things of the heart and soul?