Those who read this column closely will know that His Holiness the Pope and I sometimes do not see eye to eye.

Letting his Vatican people tell the faithful in the middle of an AIDS epidemic that condoms don't work is a case in point. But this is not the time for that kind of quibble.

What I wanted to mention was that he did something a few days ago that I thought was splendid… long overdue and to his great credit. He made Marco d'Aviano a saint.

I suppose it is just possible that there are people who are not familiar with that name, so I'll explain.

A huge Ottoman Turk army marched on Vienna in 1683. They were opposed by a much smaller Christian army. The Pope was worried about their fighting spirit, so he sent Marco d'Aviano, who was a Capuchin monk, to buck them up a bit.

When d'Aviano arrived, he got all the Christians together for what must have been the mother of all prayer meetings, because right after it, they went out and just walloped the Turks.

The Turks fled, leaving behind some sacks of coffee. Being soldiers, the Christians brewed the coffee up in a flash. It was a little bitter, so d'Aviano added honey and some milk to it.

Sacre bleu, they said! (All right, it could have been something else… just humour me a little, will you?) Had they been English, what they would undoubtedly have said was Gad! What a miraculously tasty drink! (Miraculously tasty - see where we're going with this?) The victorious Christian army was so impressed that, on the spot, they called it Cappucino, to honour d'Aviano and his order of monks.

It's true that Marco d'Aviano did some other stuff as well, curing the physically challenged and so forth. But that's what saints do, and in this case, there's no question in my mind that His Holiness knew what the deal was.

What do you think he drinks in the morning, tea? You have to understand the relationship of the Italians with their coffee. They drink 70 million espressos a day. Forget the cappuccinos, forget the machiattos, forget the lattes, this is 70 million cups of espresso. And when you figure there are just shy of 58 million people in Italy, and some of them have to be either too ill or too young, poor things, to hold a coffee cup, you have to admit the Italians are serious about this beverage.

Here's a little proof. At about the same time as the Pope beatified Marco d'Aviano, the Pharmacy Department of a university in Naples, the Italian city most famous for its coffee, put the stuff on trial.

In this trial, they charged coffee with the following: Attacking the nerves, being bad for the health, disrupting the workplace by encouraging people to take coffee breaks, aiding and abetting sugar and, occasionally, alcohol.

In addition to those crimes, the prosecution said, coffee drinking can provoke anxiety, irritability and, in extreme cases, shakiness and headaches. It stops people sleeping, and promotes time-wasting.

The defence stressed the benefits of the stimulating effect of caffeine. It wakes people up and makes them more alert, they said. And it protects against some kinds of cancer, including colon cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's.

Fourteen expert witnesses were called and gave testimony to the court. In the end, coffee was cleared of all charges, although the point was made by the court that as in all things, a habit of moderation is wise. The court endorsed an intake of three cups a day.

Only in Europe! But think about it - cleared of all charges! About how many kinds of food or drink in the world today can we say ‘this is good for our health'? Not many and frankly, just about all of them fail the taste test.

Tasty things seem to induce cancer, not protect against it. So coffee really is a miraculous drink. There is a caveat to this. We're talking about real coffee. We are not talking about the bitter, dark liquid that is merely passed off as coffee in some places I don't think I have to mention by name.

Making good coffee is like making good anything - it's done with the best and the freshest ingredients, to order, and with care. Would you order a steak in a restaurant that cooked 50 at a time and kept them waiting for you on the top of the stove? Not even the army would do that. In the same way, coffee kept on top of a stove reacts quickly with the oxygen in the air and turns bitter.

There are some restaurants and coffee houses in Bermuda that sell good coffee I guess, and some that don't. I'm not making any recommendations as to which are good and which not because… I just don't know.

I seldom have coffee anywhere except in my own kitchen. But I can offer up some recommendations that will be a help to people who, like me, want to make their own. The first is that you should be aware of a couple of basic rules about coffee.

Coffee is best fresh, and it doesn't stay that way long. Freshly-roasted coffee beans keep their peak flavour for only about a day. If you store them in an airtight container, you can keep the flavour going for a week or ten days.

But when you get to two-and-a-half or three weeks after being roasted, those beans will have lapsed into tastelessness.

So be careful to buy the freshest coffee you can. Best way of doing that is to buy from a coffee roaster, and know what day he or she does the roasting. Buy in small quantities and buy often. If you're getting coffee in those bags that have been flushed out with an inert gas to get rid of the oxygen (which do work very well), try to make sure you buy within six or eight weeks of the roast. Otherwise, it'll taste fine when you open it, but the taste will vanish very quickly thereafter.

You need some idea of the different roasts that are available and what they do to the taste of coffee. The lightest roast you should be using is what is called a Medium roast… sometimes also called an American roast, or a City roast. You'll get a taste of acidity (as opposed to bitterness) and greenness in that bean.

If they're roasted a little longer, you get a Viennese roast, also known as a Full City roast, a Light French roast or a Light Espresso roast. The acidity and the green taste are more muted in this, and joined by a bittersweet flavour. This is very much the most common roast. In the north of Italy, it is used for espresso.

Notch it up a bit and you get a bean with a shiny, oily surface. This is called an Italian or a French roast. Acidity disappears, and the taste is bittersweet with charred overtones. Peet's Coffee, which is a well-known American gourmet brand, sells it roasted to this degree.

There is a yet darker coffee, called a Dark French roast, or sometimes a Spanish roast, but this is an acquired taste - only for people who've been smoking Celtas and Gauloises all their lives.

If you're a neophyte at this sort of thing, start with a Full City roast and experiment with the lighter and the darker versions before you make up your mind which you like best.

Buy coffee in beans, and do the grinding yourself. There's an old Scots saying that applies to grinders as much as it does to just about everything under the sun - ‘buy cheap, buy dear'. That means that if you try to pinch pennies, it will cost you in the long run.

There are two types of grinder available. The first and less expensive type is a blade grinder. The difficulty with them is that it is very difficult to control how finely the beans are ground. The better, but more expensive, solution is a burr grinder, in which two corrugated steel plates are used at varying distances to produce even, well-defined grinds. You shouldn't expect to spend less than $200-$300 for a good one (the prices I'm quoting in this article are US retail, exclusive of shipping and duty). Whichever one you decide to buy, it is best to grind coffee only when you need it.

The next expensive piece of kit you need is a coffee-making machine. There are dozens and dozens of them, in all kinds of configurations, and sold at all kinds of prices. If you're going to use it every day, get a sturdy countertop pump espresso machine from a reputable manufacturer, one that is known to work well. This is an item that will run somewhere between $350 and $800.

A lot, you say? Well, I'm assuming you want good coffee every day, not just on weekends. It's a heck of a lot less than a boat. So stop kvetching. Information about coffee and the machines you need to help you make it is available all over the internet.

If you want to do some homework and don't mind taking your time, I suggest you lurk for a while in a newsgroup called alt.coffee, ask questions when you've got the hang of it, and spend some time at Ken Davids' website, www.coffeereview.com. He da man.

gshorto@ibl.bm.