The High Price Of A Cup Of Coffee

I love coffee. I love GOOD coffee. I love coffee in its simplest form without adulteration/s of any kind; no sugar, no milk, no flavouring. I had a brief liking for one flavoured brand but this soon passed. Quite a few years ago I worked in London in an office adjacent to Soho and had to visit several other offices throughout the day. As my 'break times' were random I tended to grab these on the go. One visit might take a few minutes whereas another several hours and this often spanned the normal lunch or break times so I would grab a sandwich or meal in-between whenever I could. There were many old style Italian coffee bars which served good food and in most instances really excellent coffee. I say most instances because one of the larger establishments was split over two floors and was always busy. It took me a while to note that sitting at a specific table meant you got coffee only from one of the three or four machines and not the others. It was clearly better to sit at the lower tables where the machine producing the coffee flavour I preferred was served and I often passed up a good meal simply because a table served by the machine was not available. It almost became an obsession to the point where I logged in a note-book the type of machine each cafe had and which served (for me) the best coffee. I took to watching whenever the machines were filled or cleaned to note the brand of bean used and even stopped going to one cafe when I noted the waiter wipe the counter top with a cleaning cloth only to turn around and 'clean' the steam nozzle with the same cloth. Perhaps this is why I stopped having milk in my coffee.

Times change and so did my job and I ended up working in Brussels where during my times away from my apartment I drank many excellent coffees in and around the city. Oddly enough for simplicity, and due to the simple nature of my apartment, all I had in the kitchen was a basic kettle and I used instant powdered coffee. Looking back I cannot think for the life of me why I did this but it was just one of those things where maybe the previous tenant had left a jar and I continued to use this method.




Some time later I moved to Munich, Germany, and became the owner of a Jura S-90. For the first couple of weeks I had a permanent headache due to the excessive amounts of good strong coffee available to me at the simple touch of a button (plus the cleaning, water filter changes etc but that is a different story entirely). I loved the machine and I loved the coffee it produced. I then moved to Spain. Some of you reading this who are coffee aficionados may think what I say next is pure heresy. It is my opinion that Spain serves some of THE best coffee in Europe. Forget France and Italy, you can always find a cafe serving good coffee whether it be in a city of a small village.

After about 5 years of constant use I had my Jura serviced. The ONLY place I could get this done was in Germany and a good friend of mine who had driven down from Frankfurt offered to take it back with him and return the machine on his next visit. Which he did. Sadly, after a few more years of good service the machine developed a leak and I decided it was simply not worth going through the rigmarole of sending the machine off and paying a large sum of money which would be better spent on sitting in a cafe and having someone else serve coffee.



For home use I switched to either a cafetiere and/or one of the Italian style machines where the water boils up through a permanent metal coffee filter.



Incidentally, I soon learned to avoid the mass produced aluminum Italian versions due to the tainting which can occur due to the acidity of the coffee corroding the metal and bought an expensive stainless steel jobbie which has lasted for about 5 more years with only one change of the rubber gasket.




I still have this device and it has (and will continue to be) my primary method for home coffee making. This is despite having recently moved to the USA where I can buy a filter coffee machine for about $5-$10. It works. Going out for coffee in the States is a truly hit and miss affair. I avoid 'branded' cafes (Herman Melville must be turning in his grave), loath 'sippie cup' coffee with plastic lids, and can see no logic to walking around with a waste basket size container of coffee. THE worst coffee I experienced was a few years ago when on a road trip from Ann Arbor back to Philadelphia. We stopped at a Popeye's out of sheer desperation - toilet and petrol break. Here I learned that chicken and fish do have an afterlife and occupy themselves by swimming around in grease. We avoided eating there and grabbed coffee to go as we were driving ahead of a fast approaching severe snow storm. It was not until in the car that I tasted the coffee. Bleh! Fortunately, the wiper washer water bottle had frozen so the coffee was put to good use ensuring the windscreen was kept clear of winter road crud... never again.

Diner coffee too can be extremely unpredictable and you soon learn to choose your diner by the number of cars outside. Not only is the food usually excellent, the coffee will be too.

But I digress... I meant to make a brief comment regarding what I consider to be coffee abomination. Namely the rise of the cartridge based coffee machines whereby you pop in a single shot coffee cartridge. These are brightly coloured, normally with an odd gun-metal hue, invariably flavoured and with a jolly sounding name to make you think that they are freshly picked from a coffee cartridge bush rather than auto-stamped from a scrapped car bonnet and filled with rancid yak butter. Add to that the ridiculous prices being charged for them too... not quite up to the levels of coffee beans which have been pooped out by an Indonesian civet, but pretty darn close...

The New York Times has an article about this very subject. Here.

After that little rant, I need to have a coffee. Straight to the press.