Let’s talk about coffee, Part 1.
So firstly, I want to be upfront about this, I am a tea drinker. I always have been a tea drinker, and I always will be a tea drinker. Tea, I feel, deserves its own post, but for the sake of clarity just know that if I’m visiting your house and given the option between tea or coffee, I’m much more likely to pick tea. And the reason is very simple, I believe it is much easier to make good tea, than to make good coffee.
Let me explain.
I am a proud Welshman. I come from a typical working-class home. My father is a tea drinker, my mother is a coffee drinker (although in the last few years she seems to have transitioned to hot chocolate, which you have to respect).
As a child, the coffee in our house was always Instant, and it varied depending on what was on offer. As I got older, my parents invested in several pod machines, but none of them really caught my attention.
When I was in my teens, my parents bought me an American style drip coffee machine one Christmas, and that was my first foray into tasty, fresh, strong coffee. I was regularly up till 3-4am bouncing off the walls, the smell of freshly brewed coffee emanating from my bedroom. Until one night I clumsily smashed the pot, spilling coffee over my bedroom carpet and permanently staining it.
Fast forward to my first job out of university. I worked alongside a woman whose parents in law owned a coffee plantation in Kenya, and she offered me 2 bags of ground coffee and a cafetiere for free because “she just preferred instant”. I was ecstatic and gratefully accepted.
Now, maybe I should have been suspicious, maybe it was wilful ignorance, but I never questioned why she wanted to get rid of all this coffee. I also don’t think I ever appreciated that coffee expires. It’s just something that sits on a shelf right? So these rather large bags of coffee entered my home. She had owned them for at least 2 years before they came to me, and, after trying to brew with them, I still had them 5 years later. Why? Because the coffee I made was bloody awful, but they were a gift so naturally it would be “wrong” to throw them away. (This is a mentality I have fought tooth and nail to get out of, thankfully they have since been disposed of)
But, what I did discover from those early days of coffee brewing was that I rather enjoyed the process, and I knew in my head that fresh coffee could taste amazing, I just had to work out how.
So, fast forwards a year or so, round two of coffee exploration went like this:
- I got the urge to try again. I bought new coffee, and being inexperienced in this world I bought some coffee from an Italian chain restaurant, because I had tried the coffee in house and enjoyed it.
- I tried brewing it in the cafetiere, and it was OK but weak, my methodology needed tweaking, it was nowhere near as good as the stuff I had tried in the restaurant.
- I bought a Moka pot thinking maybe this method would give me a stronger brew. Plus, Italian coffee brewed in a classic Itallian method seemed logical. I was right, The stuff I brewed was like drinking burning tar. You could have paved roofs with it.
- Then, my downfall, convenience. A close friend of mine introduced me to “Douwe Egberts Pure Indulgence” at the same time that my workplace installed Nespresso machines. Suddenly, on the back of two failures, I could have “good” coffee without the fuss or effort.
And for months that is where I’ve been, contented to stick with the standard Instant coffee lifestyle when the temptation occurred. Until this week happened. To be continued in Part 2.