Maybe just fuck off.
I buy fresh beans, I grind them before I add water, and I drink it black. Up here it costs me $9 a pound. In LA I pay as little as $3 a pound.
I just spent 12 weeks commuting with a thermos full of coffee because you know what? Sitting there doing student shit with coffee makes me feel like an adult rather than a child. It's a ritual and a comfort that doesn't touch any of these points in any places and the hatorade is entirely uncalled for - coffee is a victimless crime if ever there was one and it's not like my vape smoke is washing over everyone else in traffic.
The only special shit I do to coffee is a French Press. I guy the lowest tier fresh stuff, grind it at the house and french press. I even bought a kettle.
The stuff at work is the cheapest garbage that they could find and still legally call it coffee. I have to put a hit of half-and-half in it to mask the taste of the used socks I am certain they add to the grounds.
The best coffee is free, the next best is hot. And yea I am addicted and need the drug to be able to deal with people.
I may be mistaken but I think the trash brands cut their mix with Robusta, which tastes kind of like hickory-roasted Goodyear.
I've been known to survive on white trash mochas- a pack of Swiss Miss in the cup before you add coffee. But aside from that really, really shitty gig on the mountain it's been a decade and a half since resorting to such depravity.
- white trash mochas
I first heard that term in Alaska. we would write home and ask friends/family/strangers to send us as much hot chocolate packets as they could. We traded them with other ships for everything from branded caps, fresh potatoes, live crabs, etc.
Robusta. That was the word I was looking for. Comparing that trash to Goodyear is insulting Goodyear!
This article could be biographical of me though. I have indeed gone many times to a quasi-legal coffee roaster based in an industrial garage (until they got booted). They did indeed treat their beans the way the article describes. They even had a rare batch sourced from one of the few growers in China. I make a Chemex pot, like, every day. If I can’t find other people at work to give it out too I end up drinking a whole pot myself. Snark aside this article is the millennial coffee experience.
Bah. You can let go of that shit.
Good beans, freshly roasted, freshly ground, done drip. That's it. I used to do mine through a filter holder into a thermos (per Alton Brown) until it became way too handy to have that pot done at 5:30am so now I have a fancy-pants Quisinart but all it does is drip hot water on grounds and put it in a carafe. That whole Chemex thing is dumb. So long as you're using fresh beans and you're grinding them close to when you're using them everything else is theater.
Sucking in cgod and ButterflyEffect for reinforcements.
I'm with you. I use a £20 hand grinder to grind some fresh beans and make a pour over in 3/4 minutes. I do it by eye, drink it black and enjoy it.
You can be pedantic about anything, I guess. But I live in one of the 'top ten hippest areas in Britain' and haven't experienced anything to level that this article is mocking, even in the most trendy of coffee places.
Dude, right? Fuckin' Super King Armenian. Roasted, like, 20 minutes ago, go half dark roast half light roast like a native.
Super King is the one good thing about where I live. I head over there and buy cheap-ass coffee, a dozen or so $1.59 ea 20Oz Baltika 7s, impossibly-cheap nuts'n'shit and these crazy nut'n'sugar treats that look like dog chews. And the off-cuts from their cheese counter for $2.99/lb.
- barista said that the acidity from this coffee is "really wonderful and fruit-forward, like Hawaiian Punch micro-dosed with LSD."
- and how it was processed, because you don't want any of those weird or off flavors you get sometimes with natural coffees, which would ruin everything.
Ya know why your coffee is "really wonderful and fruit-forward", probably because it was either a natural or honey processed coffee.
- As long as the grind is perfectly dialed in, the water correctly heated to the precise temperature, and your drip technique as graceful and measured as the lines of the gooseneck kettle you're pouring water from, everything will turn out just fine.
Yeah, so, this really isn't that hard of a thing if you really give a shit about it and have the budget. If you don't have the budget but give a shit it'll still be good coffee, and if you don't give a shit, you don't give a shit.
- Sure, the barista who you see every time scowls at you, and he always asks if you want milk and sugar in your coffee, and it’s not because he's trying to be chill and accommodating to regular people who just want some coffee the way they've been drinking it their entire lives, but because one time a friend of yours gently asked if she could have some of the shop's flavored syrup in her iced coffee, thereby obligating the barista to explain that a cup of coffee is the singular and miraculous end product of a process that involved the labor of dozens of people stretched across an extraordinarily long supply chain that reaches halfway around the world, and it shouldn't really be covered up with sugar syrup, which is only on the menu for the rubes, anyway.
Is this a real thing that happens? Is this, like, specific to LA or something? Because I've never actually had this kind of experience, third wave shop or otherwise.
- but he just mumbled that it wasn’t dialed in and so he wouldn’t serve it, and you’ve been beaten down ever since.
See above.
- But the lines are so long, and you're right, you don't have thirty minutes to waste looking at Instagram while you wait for that guy to dourly make your coffee.
Uhhh I think the longest I've ever waited for a coffee was...10 minutes? At the original Verve in Santa Cruz, and it's because I was the guy ordering the super-special $8 cup of coffee" and you know what??? It was an amazing experience, and maybe one of the most complex coffees I've ever had.
You know what - fuck this article. If this is the "millennial" experience when it comes to coffee then I am clearly missing something, because this is not even an outlier experience for me. Even at a Starbucks, local third-wave shop, you name it. Does it exist? Yeah, probably, but who the fuck cares. Drink your coffee, shut up, stop overthinking it, and enjoy it.
Jesus, this article annoyed me on a level that makes me relate to kleinbl00. The one thing I disagree is the Chemex being dumb - it's a great way to make coffee. But so is everything else if you have fresh beans and the right grind.
I take umbrage with Chemex because it's effectively this but without the advantages of being dishwasher-safe and easy to clean.
I'm the worst kind of coffee snob - a basic bitch that values beans.
- Is this a real thing that happens? Is this, like, specific to LA or something?
My experience, even at shitholes like Intelligentsia, is that they'll happily sell you extra shit because it means they can charge you more which means their tips are bigger. But then, everyone in LA is slinging coffee while waiting for their agent to call back so they aren't true believers.
These guys are true believers.
Looking back on it, I've come around to the theory that the barista there took one look at me and told herself "Oh shit this guy is going to HATE our coffee" and was fighting a defensive battle from the get-go.
- Uhhh I think the longest I've ever waited for a coffee was...10 minutes?
I waited 25 minutes for my girlfriend's latte at the time. The original coffee shop that had been there ten years had died ignominiously and Starbuck's had totally taken off (side note: dated a girl from Tacoma back in New Mexico and we went to see Sleepless in Seattle together; she pointed at the Starbuck's logo in one scene and said "you'll be seeing a lot of that soon") but Los Alamos didn't have one yet so this earnest old pharmacist wrestled a brand-new Gaggia for easily four songs trying to coax this miraculous new form of beverage from it. They were so eager it was endearing. Well, to me, anyway. The girlfriend had no idea why it took 25 minutes to make a latte.
Oh man, I didn't think people would find this parody so alien. It's a hilarious summation of basically every artisan coffee place in southern CA. It's a caricature, sure, but I've witnessed some variant of every bit the author takes a potshot at.
But I guess if you're saying
- Even at a Starbucks
then this will probably be unrelatable.
You can key in on the one mention at Starbucks, or you can key in on the 95% of the response that relates to either making my own coffee or going to what should be the same kind of shops as the author of this article.
But, maybe that's just SoCal for you.
Yeah, I don't know if I buy that really.
I'm 99% sure that if I showed this to the "remarkable local roaster who operates quasi-legally out of a sick loft and specializes in light—but not too light!—roasts" that I know, he'd get a kick out of it.
It seems all the coffee aficionados that eschew pompous coffee culture have their panties in a bunch about it, though.
Ack, there are people who are obnoxious about coffee, and people who are obnoxious about the obnoxious coffee people, and it turns out it's not the coffee, it's just the obnoxiousness, part of the great circle of shite. And then everyone else is sitting over here drinking coffee, or not.
It's strange how incredibly in to something people can get. We all have passions, I suppose, even if coffee is one I don't understand (and full disclaimer, I don't drink it at all). That said, there's a difference between passionate and self-important, and I'm not sure the author (unless this is actually satire) can still see it anymore.