True brew.

 There’s one thing without which no home is complete. A roof, I hear you shout. Certainly, in a purely physical sense the roof is very important, but I’m talking about something that turns a house into a home. Television! Close, but no free cable subscription. Kids! Desirable but not essential. It’s coffee.

 This tasty little bean is increasingly making our world go round. If you live in one of the inner suburbs which are currently being bought up and renovated by young couples, you will be very familiar with coffee. In fact, the only businesses in the main street of these up-and-coming areas are coffee shops and picture framers – two career options they didn’t tell us about when we were at school.

 Coffee is much more than a drink these days. No barbie is finished until you’ve had one. Some of us can’t wake up without one. People actually meet only ‘to have coffee’. (The pretence is that it’s to have a conversation too, but in most cases it’s just to get close to a skilled coffee professional and his or her gleaming, hissing, espresso machine.)

 If it’s so good, you ask, then why is it called ‘The Devil’s Brew’? Please, that was centuries ago. People who called it that thought potpourri was a cure for the bubonic plague! I’m not denying it’s a stimulant, but if you don’t have blood pressure-problems and only read the favourable medical research, it’s actually good for you. There’s certainly no denying it has powerful laxative properties.

 I’m sure part of the reason for coffee’s increased popularity is the intimate relationship between coffee and chocolate. The after-dinner mint tastes good with no other beverage – surprisingly, not even peppermint tea. Cafés always serve, at bare minimum, chocolate brownies and usually there’s a mud cake on offer too. The ultimate combination is, of course, the chocolate-coated coffee bean. A bagful of these and your tastebuds have the party of a lifetime. Sure, you won’t sleep for a week, but it’s worth it.

 And your house sells more easily with coffee. Admit it; a home looks better during an inspection if the smell of fresh coffee is wafting through the rooms. Like magic, it makes you see things through rose-coloured glasses. It’s like alcohol only you’re safe to drive. So if you’re selling a house, get yourself a really good Lavazza bubbling in the percolator – the way the market has been, it could earn you a few extra thousand. The buyer could well be one of those picture framers.

 Up to about 15 years ago, most of us contented ourselves with the instant, freeze-dried variety of coffee. In fact, a lot of us were tea drinkers. But today there’s a lot less jiggling and a lot more plunging going on. I reckon that plungers are so popular because they look stylish; the glass pot with the chrome or gold holder. Let’s face it; it’s the same way you make a pot of tea but with a really great strainer.

 Serious caffeine addicts own a mini-espresso machine. They also dress entirely in black, live in café suburbs and ragroll their walls. They’re extremists – don’t befriend one unless you like manic phone calls at three in the morning to help with a crossword clue.

 My friends tend to be dyed-in-the-wool drip-filter types. They say there’s just something about it. It takes skill. If you don’t get the filter paper absolutely right in the filter, it can fold over and cause a disaster. The water doesn’t drip into the coffee; it fills up the filter, washes coffee from the paper and blocks the hole in the bottom. You end up with a filter full of coffee-grounds soup. Only the most desperate would attempt to drink it by filtering it through a sieve.

 Last and certainly not least, there’s the percolator – very Italian, very trendy and part of a whole set of equipment. Did you know that there’s a special little saucepan for reheating the coffee once it’s cold? That’s because leaving a percolator on the heat once it’s perked isn’t a very good idea unless you want a hole in the kitchen ceiling and your percolator showing up on airport radar screens. A friend of mine (new to the whole percolator scene) recently filled her percolator with coffee and left it on the hot plate. After a while, a very strong smell of burnt coffee was all through the house. Yes, she’d forgotten to add water. The place still smelled a week later, and not in a good way.

 That’s coffee for you. Nobody said it was going to be easy. But you know what they say – can’t sleep with it, can’t stay awake without it.