Coffee is the second item in this blog’s tag line, yet I feel that I haven’t mentioned it much lately. This is mostly because I believe that, after 10 or so years experimenting, we have settled on a decent routine of 80% pour over, 15% home-made espresso drinks, and 5% drinking out when traveling because bringing the coffee-making aparatus with us was not worth the hassle.
These 5% are killing me, because “take-out” cofee in America is too expensive for what you get.
Note the quotes in “take-out”. In most of the world, a coffee shop is a place where you sit down to get a cup. A waiter or waitress comes in to take your order, and then brings it to your table in a proper ceramic vessel which you sip while sitting down at a table chatting to your friends, reading a book, penning the great Spanish/Greek/Serbian novel or what not. Ordering at the counter and having it poured in a plastic-lined paper cup is gross. Sipping a drink through a platic lid while rushing down the street to get to your next meeting is even worse.
But these are factors tied to culture, economy and lifestyle that may not be modifiable. What can be changed is how Americans view the humble capuccino. Anywhere in Europe, a capuccino is a drink made of crappy beans that you adulter with plenty of milk foam and some cocoa dust on top for added aroma and taste. The cost is around 1.5 to 2 euros, or around $2-2.5. In the US I have been served a mediocre latte with a thin layer of foam, beans that were way too good to be in a capuccino with too much milk and a thicker layer of foam, overroasted beans with luke-warm milk and no foam, and even a concoction poured over ice, all under the name of “capuccino”, served in a plastic cup and meant to be drunk through a tiny hole in its plastic lid, all well over $4 and up to $7 for a bucket of that slop called a “venti capuccino” at an airport Starbucks.
I mean, what are we even doing here?
Yes, if you use your single-origin organic beans from Ethiopia it may take $5 per cup to break even. But the point of the mily espresso drinks is to use up the mediocre over-roasted beans you have to make something people can enjoy. Save you expensive light roasts for pourovers and aeropresses.
On the opposite end, Starbucks, your beans are perfect for a capuccino but what this drink also neads is foam. And good foam requires a tiny modicum of attention from the barista who should not be handling five other orders, most of which are for oversweetened beverages which have nothing to do with coffee.
To be clear, the quality of coffee an American can get is over and above anything available to the average European and I would rather be a coffee enthusiast here than anywhere else in the world. OK, maybe Colombia, but that has its own risks. But Americans are yet to experience the affordable capuccino revolution and I hope that it happens in my lifetime.