Prison Cell Coffee
By: Britni Pepper
Tags: Life, Food, Prison, Coffee, Travel

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m from Melbourne and we have high coffee standards here. Proper barista-made espresso coffee.

So it was a challenge to find some coffee-making equipment when I made my first big round-the-world trip. I would be staying in youth hostels and a Texan convention hotel, and for sure none of them would have a barista on staff.

But that’s okay. I was young, I didn’t need sophistication, just caffeine that wasn’t too horrid, and could be made in the common room whenever I wanted, which might very well be in the middle of the night, given the number of time zones I was crossing in a short time.

I settled on an immersion heater and a mug-top coffee dripper. It was cheap and compact and light, and it worked, kind of.

The heater plugged into the mains — and I had to buy a couple of adaptors so that the Australian plug would play nicely with US and UK sockets — had a heating coil, a plastic handle, and a power cord. I filled a mug with cold water, stuck in the heater, and an enormous length of time later the water would boil. I could then pour this through my coffeemaker, which sat on top of another mug.

This was an arrangement of nesting metal cups with mesh bottoms. One sat on top of the mug, and I spooned ground coffee in. Then I fitted the top on, which held a mug’s worth of hot water. Then I poured the hot water from my first mug into the teetering stack and waited for it to drain through.

In hindsight, it was tedious and fussy and messy and made abominable coffee.

But it was coffee, and I could sit in the dark and check e-mails and upload photographs and stuff and enjoy the experience, while my friends and family back home were awake.

And why this?

Some months earlier, I’d encountered a Dutch drug smuggler. He was near the end of his sentence, and was working on some day-release program at a shipyard in Williamstown. He’d smuggle his lunch-time sandwiches into the library, and use the free internet there to contact his wife and family back home, because of course there was no internet in his prison cell.

He was a charming rogue, and absolutely dripping with repressed sex; the sort of activities available to him in prison weren’t 100% of what he really craved, if you get my drift.

For some reason he found himself drawn to me, and we got along fine. I found his tales of smuggling internally-hidden drugs entertaining. “We got off the plane, the pressure inside was building, into a taxi, and felt like we’d pop at the check-in counter. It was touch and go in the elevator, and as soon as we got into the room, we all wanted to use the toilet at once. God, the mess!”

Or advice if detained by the airport police in Singapore. “If they offer you tea when they are questioning you, don’t drink the tea!”

I was horrified, but he could tell a story with such humour that I laughed along with him.

And where does the coffee come in?

This guy loved his Amsterdam coffee shops. Perhaps not for the coffee so much, but he had a fine appreciation of coffee, which was another point in his favour. I mentioned my upcoming trip, and he said, “you want to know how I make coffee without a jug?”

Of course I did.

He looked around the computer area, found some sort of computer cable, tugged at it until it came loose, and inspected it. He then reached into his pocket, pulled out a wicked-looking knife — “It’s for building the boat,” he explained as I raised my eyebrows, “I can’t take it home with me” — and chopped the cable into two equal lengths, stripped the ends, and twisted the exposed wires into loops.

“You have a hairclip or something?”

I did, and handed it over. “A disposable razor blade is what we normally use, but I don’t have one with me.”

He bent the hairclip and attached each end to one of the loops in the ex-computer cable. He now had two lengths of cable joined in the middle with a bent hairclip, with a twisted loop of copper wire at each end.

There was a water cooler nearby, with paper cups, and he filled one, brought it back, and stuck the hairclip in the water, and then to my horror, put the exposed wires into a power socket, and flipped the switch.

I expected the lights to go out, but nothing happened. Except the water began bubbling and a sour smell became apparent.

We both watched as the water in the paper cup turned murky.

“Ah, you never drink the first cup,” he said. “The plastic coating will burn off and after that it’s good. Oh yeah; don’t touch the water to see if it’s hot. It’s hot!”

I could see how such a device would be a handy portable water heater for travel, but I wasn’t sure about the safety aspects, and the version I bought was a fair bit bulkier, but unlikely to kill me.

Britni