Saturday mornings are swim lessons for the boys, and every morning when I get home the first order of business is making a coffee. I'm a pour over man. A filter paper, a hand grinder, and something to hold the paper. Simple. No moving parts. No electricity.
I weigh out the beans to one decimal point, grind them to somewhere close to coarse sand, and swirl in water in precise stages, timed to the second, with a gooseneck stove-top kettle.
I'm often tempted by an electric version. A bit more convenient, holds temperatures, accurate to within half a degree. And, frankly, a bit stylish. The precious, pretentious precision it permits would suit me down to the ground. But it fails The Test — it's more expensive, more complex, and more prone to failure than the dirt cheap, dirt simple, perfectly functional and essentially unbreakable kettle it would supersede.
I grind the coffee, East Ardi late pick grown in Africa and roasted in Geelong, and bloom it in sixty-five grams of water for forty-five seconds, flip the stopper, and drain it. At one-fifteen I close the stopper and fill it to its final weight: two-eighty grams. Then I wait till three-minutes-thirty and open the switch. If I've gotten the grind right it'll be ninety more seconds until the water level reaches the top of the grounds, which should be lying in a perfectly flat bed at the bottom of the dripper. Precise. Manual. Unbreakable. Suits me perfectly.
To my right the sous vide has been humming for slightly under thirty-six hours. In about ten minutes, just long enough to drink the Bellarine's most overthought cup of coffee, I'll pull the chuck roast out of the water bath it's been sitting in since Thursday night. Succulent, juicy, fall-apart tender, cooked without a moment's supervision. The sous vide is from Anova. It is expensive. It is complicated. It is delicate. If I owned a smartphone I could control it remotely while sitting poolside. It fails every test I know how to administer. And I could not live without one again.
I have a test for new purchases. I stole most of it from a Kentucky farmer named Wendell Berry, who in 1987 published a list of nine criteria for adopting any new tool. Some of them have aged better than others. The idea that a new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces is noble, and I try (I check secondhand first, always) but these days the notion of technology becoming cheaper over time, especially anything with a circuit board, is laughable. Berry was writing about horse-drawn harrows. I am writing about a machine that holds water at precisely sixty-eight-point-five degrees for a day and a half.
But the bones of what he was getting at still hold. The criteria I actually use, standing in the shop or staring at a listing, are these:
It should do work that I can't do with my existing tools, or is clearly and demonstrably better than what it replaces. Not marginally. Not theoretically. Better in a way I can see and taste and feel in the finished thing.
It should come from a company I trust to stand behind it. Not a company that builds in obsolescence, not a company that voids warranties for 'using a recipe that didn't come with the mixer'. This is why I don't own a KitchenAid. Useful machines, rotten corporate character.
It should be purchasable and repairable as close to home as possible, ideally by me. If I can't get it fixed without posting it to another state, it's already failed.
It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships. The smartphone fails this one so abysmally that I refuse to own one, which is a position that makes me either principled or insufferable depending on who you ask.
Those are Berry's, more or less, filtered through my own hands. If I may be so presumptuous as to add to the man's list, I would include a tenth criterion, which Berry didn't need because he was a more honest man than me:
It should be something I really, really want.
I wish that one wasn't on the list. I wish the other four were enough. But I've been running this test long enough to know that the person administering it is not entirely reliable. The Test can be passed honestly. It can also be passed by a man who has already decided what he wants and is looking for permission.
The stove top kettle passes The Test cleanly. I don't need an electric kettle. I have some desire for one, but not enough to override The Test.
The sous vide is a different matter. It is expensive, more expensive that the one it replaced, and the one that replaces it will be more expensive still. It WILL need replacing. It is complicated. It is delicate in a way that a cast iron pot will never be. It fails at least half the criteria on any honest reading. But it transforms a cheap cut of beef into something I could charge money for, and it does this while I am at the swimming pool watching my son learn to not drown. I don't have to be present. I don't have to tend it, check it, adjust it, worry about it. I walk away on Thursday night and come back Saturday morning and the work is done. And Anova, for what it's worth, have spectacular after sales and more than once have sent me replacement parts, for something I broke through ham-fistedness, free of charge.
A smoker would pass most of The Tests. Except for the last one: a braise in a smoker would demand my constant attention, and require me to miss swimming lessons to tend to its needs. Hours of tending the fire, adjusting the vents, reading the temperature, being there. That is exactly the kind of slow, present, embodied work I'm supposed to believe in. And I do believe in it. I also don't want to do it. Not this week. Not with swim lessons and daycare and the workshop and the garden and everything else that needs carrying.
That truth - that I just don't want to do it - is one I've been avoiding. Not because it's shameful: it's practical, it's honest, it's what any sane person with young children would say. But it cuts against the story I tell about myself. The story where I'm the man who chooses effort, who picks up the heavier thing, who measures his coffee by the decigram and planes his timber by hand and refuses the smartphone on principle. That man would use a smoker. That man would tend the fire.
That man is also a fantasy. Useful, maybe. True, partially. But a fantasy.
A close friend of a writer I admire lives in a house he built himself. It has no electricity. He refuses to be photographed, and refuses to 'appear' on the internet. I know almost nothing about his daily life except that it involves books and silence and the absence of everything that plugs in.
Oh, if I could live my life again.
I am drawn so intensely to this way of living that it aches. Stripped to the essentials. No screens to be disciplined against. No algorithms to refuse. Nothing that needs a firmware update. The appeal isn't simplicity, it's purity. A life where The Test is never needed because there's nothing to administer it to.
But I couldn't live that way. I know this about myself with the same certainty I know the grind setting on the 4 kinds of coffee bean I have on regular rotation. I have tried to want less and I am not very good at it. What I am good at is choosing: sometimes well, sometimes self-servingly, often both at once. The kettle, yes. The sous vide, yes. The smartphone, no. The dehydrator, yes. Instagram, no. I can explain every one of these decisions and I can defend them all, and I am certain that the explanations aren't just a well-built jig for arriving at the answer I already wanted.
Berry didn't have this problem. Or if he did, he never wrote about it. His criteria were published as a challenge to the people who told him he was a fool for refusing a computer. He pointed to the life — the farm, the pencil, the horses, the sixty years in one place — and the life was the answer. He didn't need to wonder whether The Test was honest because the life itself was the proof.
I don't have sixty years of anything. I have a kitchen with a pour over dripper and a sous vide and a dehydrator and a vacuum sealer, and a workshop full of hand tools and power tools and jigs that blur the line between the two, and a garden where I hammer nails by hand while thinking wistfully about a gas-and-lithium-powered Paslode.
The Test is real. I believe in it. I also know I can't be totally trusted to administer it cleanly.
The chuck came out of the bag at ten past eleven. It got shocked in ice water, then refrigerated uncovered to dry out and cool completely. Then it was roasted at 230C until the salt, pepper, paprika and coffee rub turned into a thick bark. Then it was 'smoked' for a second time in bowl with one of those battery powered smoke infusers, another bit of techno-substitution-for-effort.
By one o'clock the roast was on the board, sliced thin, the colour of it almost obscene: a deep crusty brown rim passing instantly to perfectly pink, the fat rendered and the connective tissue dissolved into something so soft the knife can't even cut it. Thirty-six hours of patience that wasn't mine. The machine did the waiting. I just pressed the button on Thursday night and went to bed.
The older Harper boy ate half his body weight in chuck roast. He didn't say much. He didn't need to: he went back to the board four times and each time he loaded his plate like a man filling a wheelbarrow. His mother caught my eye and mouthed sorry and I shook my head because this is the whole point. This is what the machine is for. Not efficiency. Not productivity. Not the optimisation of my Thursday evening. This: a thirteen-year-old boy who appreciates it, and shows it with his hollow legs.
After lunch I walked out to the garden. The chicken run needs modifying: I'm going to tack the laying box on as an ante-room, and build a roost above ground inside. I have a bag of nails and a hammer and a stack of off-cuts from the workshop.
And as I reach for the hammer, I'll think wistfully of a gas-and-lithium-powered Paslode.