They came asking for wine, as they always did. Too many cousins showed up for the wedding apparently, and the bottles were dry before the toasts ended and the feast began.
So in the jugs were brought, fill with what was decidedly not wine, but carried the expectation that it needed to be wine. All because one guy and his party trick…
Everyone thought water could be made into wine.
No one asks to turn water into coffee. Just ask summer is to winter, coffee is wine’s opposite. Where one inebriates, the other awakens.
Coffee isn’t a simple thing. It asks for devotion and time.
The cherries must be taken at the exact moment they turn red, not a day before or after. Then they must be dried, and stripped, and sorted by hands that know the difference between a bean worth keeping and one worth discarding.
And even then, the bean is only a promise, not yet a miracle. It must be roasted and held at the exact heat and exact minute where the sugars inside turn from green and grassy to something dark and bold. A moment too long and you've made ash. A moment too short and you've made nothing at all.
Only after all of that is the bean allowed to become dust, ground fine enough that when water is forced through it, true magic happens.
And only the best alchemists can turn water into coffee.
