As if it wasn't complicated enough.

Sometimes I think that coffee is more complicated than wine.  Forget about the up-front factors, like location, weather, ripeness of the fruit, processing, aging, etc.  They both have those things in common.  I'm just talking here about the final enjoyment.

I was born and spent my pre-teen years on the island of Trinidad, in the Caribbean, and I have fond memories of coffee.  Not the beans, the fruit.

For some reason, we never had real coffee in the house.  My mom drank something called POSTUM, which was a kind of fake substitute made from ground-up car tires, or something like that.  At least it sure smelled like it.  With apologies, of course, to the POSTUM people, because I believe it's still on the market.

I'm confused about this, and I've been confused for a VERY long time.  What's with the little piece of lemon peel that gets dumped on the side of my cup of espresso in restaurants?  By the way, "espresso" is the modern word for "demi-tasse" among us older folks.