Welcome to the coffee page! Here are some thoughts on coffee, which will hopefully slowly accumulate into a vast encyclopedia of knowledge and thoughts on the subject.
Making Coffee:
Quantities
Making real coffee at home is a delicate, troublesome process. Making consistently good coffee is practically impossible, and when you do achieve a really nice taste you usually have no idea how you've done it, and why it's tasted like dirt the last three times you made it. This is particularly true of cafetieres. Cafetieres are bastards, pure and simple. Coffee grounds slip up past the plunger - which itself is a nightmare to clean and smells like an ashtray - and the bottom cup tastes like it's been swirled in dust and creosote - which is not that far from the truth given the generally fairly evil properties of coffee, which I prefer not to dwell on. Filter machines are easier, but smell like petrol (again, with good reason) and tend to be messy. Filter machines accumulate as much detritus under and around them as a toaster, but instead of dry crumbs it's old coffee grounds, milk and water. If you use the milk frother on your machine then it's almost worth putting newspapers down on the worktop before you start, it'll really save time.
Milk
Whether you're using a cafetiere or a machine, you usually have to heat the milk a little or the coffee is not hot enough. For a while every time I did this little bits of thin milk-skin appeared on the surface of the coffee. It drove me crazy. Eventually I asked someone in a coffee shop which left me none the wiser and in a considerably worse mood - but more of that later.
There are few things in this world I love more than a hot cup of coffee, but I am totally grossed out by cold or luke-warm coffee. For me watching someone drink it cold is an experience akin to watching someone have their gums licked by a dog, although from what I can tell I'm in the minority in this respect. My brother is quite happy to leave a cup of hot coffee to sit for 20 minutes, then rediscover it during a break in a TV show or one of those snatched moments when he's not glued to a game of online backgammon - and slug down the cool remnants without a shudder. I remember once being in a new-age-acoustic-misery -tent at Glastonbury, whose crockery-only policy meant that we could'nt leave until we had both finished our drinks. While we waited for Neil's coffee to go cold we were subjected to almost half an hour of an aggressive hippy playing ‘real’ music, punctuated by comments like “Listen yeah, if anyone else complains about the rain today, just tell ‘em ta fack off”. During the set a man with dreadlocks and a nose ring got up and danced maniacally, a side-show that all present seemed to think was ‘great’. Hopefully the drugs have killed him by now. As for froth, personally I'm not that bothered about it. The experience I have had with frothing as mostly been frustrating, messy and punitively expensive. Frothers on machines are without exception positioned so that if you do fail to spill the milk jug while jockeying the nozzle into it, you will certainly succeed in doing so when you tilt the jug to take the nozzle out. Most machines acknowledge this universal truth by putting a drainage basin under the nozzle, in which the milk can fester and congeal until finally, after a year or so, it becomes one of the clutch of factors that will convince you to chuck the machine in the bin and try a cafetiere. There are other frothing options - the plunge-jug, the electric hand-held frother, and the laughable manual frother, which resembles a miniature egg whisk and must surely have been released for sale one April 1st. Anyway like I say, I'm not that bothered about froth - and frankly, I have enough trouble in other areas as it is.
Commercial Outlets:
Baristas
The 'barista' at my local coffee shop - as well as being generally a tool - pronounces the word coffee in an unsettling way. It comes out as ‘COFF-eeee’ (the 'ee' is prolonged self-indulgently, and at a much lower pitch than the 'coff'). It's very difficult to communicate it on paper, and would probably have to be heard - but for what it's worth it always gave to me suggestions of gluttonous, dark practices, possibly in the presence of dead bodies - to the point that I actually reconsidered my devotion to coffee after my first visit to his shop. It made me feel like I was in the wrong business entirely. Its effect was such that ever since, I feel like I can hear aspects of it in my own pronunciation of the word ‘coffee’ - as if the word has been forever tainted by an unsettling, vaguely shameful association. I also think it’s telling that on the said occasion I was after a mini milk-frother, and have never bought one. Still, no-one should not be ashamed of drinking coffee, so let’s say no more of it.
Wales
In Wales, coffee is sold in two forms: a) brine, and b) baked milk. I usually go for the former (‘filter coffee’), but often find it hard to finish a whole cup without making involuntary clicking noises with my cheeks. The alternative or baked milk variety is referred to as ‘milky coffee’.
Now, rather than descending into ethnic slurs, it would be nice to put these crimes against beverages - many more of which the Welsh are guilty (hot chocolate = baked milk and water) - down simply to a national disinterest in coffee. If that was the case, however, there'd be variation; a Bethesda cafe might serve you a full, rich, characterful blend, but then you would stop two hours further on in Aberystwyth and be presented with something decidedly mediocre, and then upon reaching your journey's end in Pembrokeshire, taste coffee so bad that you feel you have been deeply insulted, and start to weep openly. Such a journey would never happen in Wales, because there really isn't that much variation in the actual standard of coffee - the brine/baked milk versions are rigidly adhered to across the country. Having said that, I find it really hard to accept that anyone could make something as foul as a 5-part milk, 1-part Mellow Birds 'Milky Coffee' deliberately. As a friend of mine once profoundly stated: “Iain, it’s Friday afternoon, and we’re in Wales.” If you're wondering what he meant by that, you've obviously never lived in Wales.Starbucks
Alright they're a bit scuzzy, and they're certainly expensive, but have you tried their chocolate cheesecake? I've never really known what the specific complaint is about Starbucks, apart from that they're a very large company. Admittedly I don't read the papers and know relatively little about what goes on in the world, but I generally assume that people who hate Starbucks are the same kind of people that spend their summers irking the already long-suffering people of South America and of various struggling developing nations across the globe - a social group to whom I feel much more comfortable in opposition.
I heard recently that Bob Dylan has released an album exclusively available at Starbucks. Strange, isn't it? I wonder if he gets a discount? Avoid the egg-nog lattes, Bob - curiosity killed the cat.