Prison Blend -- Where Low Coffee is the High Point of the Day

With the mushroom-like spread of gourmet coffee shops, each offering more exotic blends than the last, it's possible to forget how good it is to just have a cup of coffee. PNS commentator Joe Loya recalls a most ordinary brew leading to most extraordinary pleasure. Loya is a California writer currently writing an autobiography.

Some of the best coffee I ever swallowed was filtered through a sock. This makes it hard for me to understand the big deal with coffee shops -- like the San Francisco friend visiting me in Los Angeles who refused to go to Starbuck's a few blocks from my house. She preferred Peet's coffee five miles away.

She went to the University of California in Berkeley where Peet's was founded. Rah-rah-rah for the home team.

I once tried a flavored coffee when it was offered to me. A friend, another coffee connoisseur, sneered at my philistine pallet.

That's when the sock story came out. I told her she was talking to a guy who, in the Los Angeles County jail, used to drink his coffee filtered through an old, but clean, sink-washed sock. Next to that, I told her, even IHOP coffee taste like the nectar of the gods.

She was stunned. Confused. My tastes were not even a blip on her coffee radar screen. All she could say was, "That's hardcore. You're all the way out there." And, of course, she was right.

In jail, the one cup of coffee at breakfast wasn't enough, but making more required some ingenuity.

Two men drinking coffee in a cell is one of the few ways to find silence and peace in those surroundings -- sitting on the bunk, legs crossed, blowing a smoke ring from the non-filter Camel, and sipping a hot cup of joe, either Cadillac (with milk and sugar) or John Wayne (straight black).

Six things are required to brew prohibited coffee in jail. First, an inmate has to smuggle dry coffee out of the kitchen -- and be willing to sell it for a pack of cigarettes. Then you need a 20 inch long strip of fabric from a sock, t-shirt, or even a bedsheet material, a discarded pint size milk carton, half a roll of toilet paper, one or two matches, and the bottom half of the foot portion of the sock slit at the mid-line with a thin broken-off razor blade.

Rinse out the milk carton real good, punch two holes into the top and then tie the fabric strip rope to both ends so it looks like a cute little milk carton purse. Fill it with tap water.

Wrap the toilet paper around your four fingers like you're wrapping an ace bandage around a bruised hand. Remove the paper bandage intact then tuck both ends into the center so you have what resembles a sterno cup. This is referred to as "the bomb."

Stick a lit match into either side of the toilet-paper sterno -- but note that whichever side you light becomes the bottom by default. Set the bottom of the bomb on the floor. The inside will burn at a high flame without consuming the outer paper shell for a little while. If the bomb burns up too fast, you may need to repeat the procedure

Quickly dangle the milk carton purse over the highest part of the flame. Keep it there for thirty seconds, swinging the carton lightly, teasing the flame so it does not catch fire. Like a marshmallow, the carton will begin to blacken. Just when it appears the waxy carton may burn up, the water will be hot.

Hold the sock tightly like a screen around the top of the cup (or of another milk carton if no cups are available). Pour the coffee onto the sock filter. Then slowly pour the hot water over the coffee and you're ready to enjoy a freshly brewed cup of coffee courtesy of the Sheriff's department.

These days my partner brews Peet's in the morning. I go to my office and drink my freeze-dried coffee John Wayne. As I sip, I think and know that at that same time somewhere an imprisoned man is hosting a friend in his cell with sock- filtered coffee. Low coffee is the jail version of High Tea.

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