"Bitter like death and hot like love"

Part of enjoying reading Muhammad Asad (not the Prophet Muhammad's) The Road to Mecca, the story of his encounter with Islam, is picking up many tidbits of "local color," such as this one:

...in Arabia coffee is freshly roasted for every pot. As soon as the beans are lightly tanned, he [his friend Zayd, his traveling companion in the 1920s] places them in a brass mortar and pounds them. Thereupon he pours some of the boiling water from the larger pot into the smaller, empties the ground coffee into it and places the pot near the fire to let it slowly simmer. When the brew is almost ready, he adds a few cardamon seeds to make it more bitter, for, as the saying goes in Arabia, coffee, in order to be good, must be "bitter like death and hot like love."

Mr. Asad is the author of a work I have mentioned: The Message of the Qur'an, a twelve-pound tome of almost 1,200 8.125" x 11.25" pages, which I am blessed by the good graces of a dear friend to have as a reference.