Dale Cooper, yes, the fictional detective from David Lynch’s beloved 1989 series Twin Peaks, was apparently 15 years old when he had his first cup of coffee. He was hitchhiking home from a boy scout festival when he stopped at a diner on Pennsylvania Route 487. he had cherry pie and two cups of coffee. as legend has it, according to the autobiography of the f.b.i. special agent dale cooper by scott frost, published 1991 — cooper said “i think i’ll count this as my first experience” on the reel-to-reel tape recorder he had been dragging. Dale Cooper was a weird kid.
dale cooper is no less strange as a man, essentially a brylcreem ad in a perfect copy of amazing stories with strange science to life, clark kent in a fritz lang film written by herman hesse. It’s as if series creator David Lynch wrote his personality on a notepad with bright pens and invisible ink. As much as Cooper is a true blue company man, the core of vigilance and high efficiency in him has thick veins of spirituality and philosophy running through him, right to the heart of him. He’s a Jungian Sherlock Holmes in a show full of archetypal characters that lean toward the surreal. In Twin Peaks, the a+b=c simplicity of an investigation (Cooper, of course, is the head of the investigation into the murder of Laura Palmer, a student at Twin Peaks High School) is so full of symbolism and duality that you need a system of linear equations just to figure out what a is.
Reading: This is a damn fine cup of coffee
but cooper is a man who seems to see as much as possible but continues to search for more, even if he has to search different planes to find it. this is also a man who likes to give a fervent thumbs up.and a man who loves a good cup of coffee.
Because coffee and Dale Cooper are so inextricably linked, I came up with this idea for a brilliant mind to answer what kind of coffee he liked, what he considered “a very good cup.” I would base my reasoning on his life as a civil rights-era child, born in 1954 in Pennsylvania and raised in Philadelphia before enrolling in the FBI Academy in 1977.
I would look at what life would have been like in San Francisco, where he was assigned to a field office and enjoyed coffee with Chinese donuts earlier, in the related books published during the show’s second season, at least. He took on the murder of Teresa Banks in Deer Meadow, a small town in southwest Washington.
He would examine Cooper’s research as he was whisked up the West Coast and to Twin Peaks, where he had a “damn good” meal and a “damn good cup of coffee” at the Lamplighter’s Inn and the Great Northern Hotel. he would look at the coffee being sold at roadside restaurants, inns, and hotels. I would look at what coffees were widely distributed throughout the northwestern united states in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I would see what blends would have been found aging in the rows of jars in the warmers that stood along the counters at wawa coffee shops in his home state of pennsylvania and then filter all that information through the matrix of his singular personality.
oh, the formulas I could have written, the whiteboards I could have scribbled on my self-elected paper as goddamn coffee-hunting goodwill. but emails went unanswered, calls went unanswered. It turns out that no one wants to see sales data from the era of dot matrix printing. Besides, I’ve never seen goodwill hunting.
Here’s the thing, though: The way the coffee world was changing when twin peaks aired it looks now , if not kismet, then at least a great match to use as the basis for a case file.
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In the years prior to Dale Cooper’s FBI career, the world price and supply of coffee had been fairly stable. It had been that way since 1963, when the International Coffee Organization was established to oversee the International Coffee Agreement, which dictated export quotas for the world’s coffee-producing countries. The first iteration of what became that agreement had been developed during the second world war, not only to stabilize prices but also to stabilize economic relations between the us. uu. and Latin American countries.
when those countries were effectively deprived of exporting to europe, the resulting economic stress could have left them tempted by sympathy for communism or, worse, the nazis. so the usa strengthened their relationships. and it worked. During that mid-century period, coffee was generally affordable and plentiful, according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. supply easily met demand, and demand remained high. people loved coffee!
and then, boom! 1975 arrived and soft drinks began to take over. Not to mention that coffee is gone altogether: by the 1980s, the average amount people drank had dropped from three cups a day to two. but competition from soft drinks was actually one of the main motivations behind the rise of the second wave of coffee, a push for consumer awareness and appreciation of higher quality beans, expanding beyond the can market, highlighting the more delicate arabica over the vigorous robusta.
But Reaganomics also meant a push for a free market. In 1989, the year that Twin Peaks began filming, things really changed: the political landscape had changed, and the US. uu. he no longer felt the need to protect past economic relations, which led to the international coffee agreement falling apart. supply was outstripping demand, and the price of coffee took a hit. More countries exporting more coffee led to a drop in market share for Brazil, which refused to cut its shares as its share of global coffee sales fell. When Twin Peaks went off the air in 1991, Colombia managed to overtake Brazil as the world’s highest-earning coffee exporter.
Most Americans didn’t drink coffee as devotedly as Dale Cooper in the early 1990s. As coffee exports bottomed out, soft drinks became the most popular drink in restaurants and coffee shops. in 1990, the average coffee consumption among regular drinkers was less than two cups a day.
That makes Dale Cooper a coffee-drinking anachronism, a well-cared look at the simplicity and stillness of the past as the steam evaporated from people’s love of coffee. This cultural shift actually plays beautifully with Cooper’s retro character. With roots in film noir, Twin Peaks tweaked the timeworn formula by swapping cigarettes for coffee, shady alleys for moonlit forests, and seedy detectives for the steadfast, incorruptible goodness of FBI agent Dale Cooper. it was basically soda-pop noir.
That said, coffee was not out of the picture in the early 1990s: Folgers and Maxwell House were absolutely a part of everyday life. When Cooper was on Twin Peaks, Folgers claimed that it was the “best part of waking up.” Maxwell House continued down the path of the catchy pop culture tyranny he unleashed with his “Hugga Mugga” catchphrase. taster’s choice had anthony stewart head and sharon maughan playing a slow romance.
The only variable that I felt I could realistically guess at in my construction of Dale Cooper’s coffee preferences was the bean. I originally reasoned that you would like the robusta, assuming you would appreciate the robustness and hardiness of the plant. I also thought he might enjoy the lower acidity and nuttiness of that bean, but then, I reconsidered, I couldn’t quite account for the smooth fruity roundness of the arabica. I can’t imagine Cooper worrying about being able to savor notes of pop rocks or dirt or whatever third-wave coffee sommelier shit they’re selling us these days with some of the light, milk-curdling roasts I’ve had. but he also has the soul of a poet, so I definitely can’t see him craving the flatness of a dark roast.
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“what coffee would taste better if it were as black as a moonless night?” I asked myself. and the answer finally came. but the response has sapped all the fun out of those exhaustively constructed constructs, based on nothing more than internalized fanfics. He’s taken my theories, wrapped them in plastic, and dumped them at the bottom of a lake.
This is what I now fully believe to be true: Dale Cooper doesn’t mind coffee.
Because good coffee, that “excellent cup of coffee” Dale Cooper talks about, has nothing to do with coffee. it’s about the experience. it is an encounter. it is chance and illumination. it is simply being present. sometimes it’s not great, sometimes it’s filtered with fish, but it’s always an experience.
There can definitely be romance in a thoughtful cup of coffee: Delicate flavors in a well-poured cup can be evocative as both launching pads and landing pads for memories. but that’s just one kind of experience. wrapping your hands around a cup of food at a lunch counter can also be a communal experience, a comfort, a touchstone of conviviality, a moment of community on a lonely road trip.
dale cooper is a man seeking connection, who is at his best in that place where curiosity and community intersect. and coffee helps you make that connection. so it doesn’t matter what’s actually in the cup. what matters is where he is, who he is with, what he is doing, that he is present. and there’s something to be said for having no expectations beyond the experience, for finding pleasure in the simplicity of a very human interaction involving some water, some beans, and a cup. or maybe two.
“Harry,” Cooper says in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. “I’m going to tell you a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a gift. don’t plan it; don’t expect it; just let it happen. it could be a new shirt at a men’s store, a nap in his office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.”
give yourself the gift of dale cooper. whether it’s observing him in the original series, discovering him in the new series, or even delving into the character in an absurd attempt to pin down how a fictional character would cross paths with a real-life cup of coffee, Dale’s character. Cooper, in itself, is a valuable experience.
melissa buote writes about food and culture from a small apartment in the small town of halifax in the tiny province of nova scotia, where she is a contributing editor at the coast.editor: erin dejesus
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