On Coffee

Ah, coffee. As a Melbournian by choice, conviction, and happenstance, coffee is a special topic that leads to strong opinions. And rightly so. Like wine, coffee can be anywhere on the range from divine to atrocious. And that is only the coffee. How you accessorize your coffee then becomes an almost religious debate, especially amongst Melbournians.

Black coffee… early memories tell horrendous stories of something called Jakob’s Krönung - Jacob’s crowning. Filter coffee, highly acidic and burned, completely unbalanced, and usually - by people from a certain generation - enjoyed in a weak form that Brazilians would call cha-fé (how ever you write this). Cha is tea of course, and I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination.

You can see, my coffee journey started with trauma. Therefore, when I was older - and especially traveling (physically, spiritually, and epicurean-ly) internationally as far away from the “Crowning” as humanly possible - my first instinct was to drink coffee for the caffeine it contained and the taste drowned out by MILK. This continued for a while and in Melbourne I learned about the differences of lattes (my first choice then) and flat whites (my choice later)¹. But what Melbourne also taught me is that there is delicious black coffee. Be that as a long black (not an Americano, google the difference) or as filter coffee. High quality in, high quality out - as they say.

Black coffee requires perfection in all aspects of the coffee making, from the farm to the skills of the barista. If you get this, black coffee is unbeatable. If you cannot get this, add milk. Or so I thought then. As I said, strong opinions.

Now, after almost 1.5 decades of drinking primarily black coffee, I am starting to enjoy coffee with milk again. Not to mask the taste as earlier in my life, but because I like the balance. And sometimes, to mask the taste, because atrocious coffee is still around.

Sugar. I need to at least mention it. Don’t do it. Find proper coffee.

Thun

So today, I had a very early morning to get to Thun. In Thun, there is a wonderful coffee shop called Mani’s. Coffee and bagels and they have a coffee roast called a Ferrari Coffee - roasted over coal. Excellent - especially as a double espresso. As the Guide Michelin would say: worth a trip.

However, I was there at 6.30am and no self-respecting coffee shop is open at that time, so the choice was between Spettacolo (hint, misnomer) and Starbucks. Yay. Against better judgment I took an espresso in the former. Wow. So bad. So I had to get rid of the taste and went into Starbucks.

Sidebar on Starbucks. When I was still living in Melbourne and on the occasional travel to St. Charles, IL, I of course had Starbucks coffee. And in the US, they made a major fuss about how they now serve flat white. So I had to order that at least to check it out - and it was latte.

So, Starbucks in Thun. They had Flat White on offer. And when I heard the barista slam down the milk, I had hopes. But in the end it was a slightly stronger latte. Shame. So much potential.