I am a grumpy old man and chase hipsters off my lawn, but this point ain't from them.
Americans just have different tastes/cultures regarding coffee in general. Many of us (including myself) prefer a dark roast, it's nostalgic, consistent, and goes good with a generous amount of milk. I don't care if it's "hiding the flavor of the bad coffee" or whatever, I just like it. I've had coffee all over the world but I grew up with shitty burnt gas station coffee and instant coffee (or even cowboy coffee) made in a tin can over a campfire, and that's just as legitimate a culture as whatever the Italians are doing with their fancy espresso machines.
There are varieties with cardamon or mastic but they are very rare.
I recently had an unwitting encounter with medium roast (at the same "semi-fancy" price point as I typically buy) when my wife put some fresh beans in our coffee container. First cup I made, I was wondering why the coffee tastes so bad, bad enough for me to dump it. There were all those weird sour/almost soda like notes that should not be in coffee. Then I got suspicious about the look of the beans, then I asked my wife... "I decided it would be good to try something new" ;)
Medium is my comfort zone though!
Simple overview here: https://coffeechronicler.com/grind-size-chart/
I roast some coffee that could be considered to be 'light' from a color/roast temp perspective but has absolutely none of the floral/citrus notes that you talk about. It depends so much on the beans. It ends up chocolatey and vanilla, with a medium body. Very little acidic taste. On the other hand, there's plenty of coffee that is just a punch of acid.
As others have stated, you lose so much bean origin character the further into the roast you get and lose what makes the bean itself special.
Every "hopocalypse" type beer is utterly forgettable. It's like when you go to some tourist-y small town in the Midwestern US and the gift shop has five hundred different INSANELY HOT SAUCES no one's heard of.
I guess "hoppy" is a powerful, accessible flavor that anyone can easily make, like squeezing a bottle of Sriracha onto some noodles.
But I’ll also admit that heavily browned beef has a distinctive flavor and quality very different from barely cooked steak. Imagine a sandwich with slightly crispy, well cooked beef and all its drippings. Now imagine one with a slice of meat that’s rare and soggy.
Coffee is similar. Different roasts for different desires and uses. There is a point where it is objectively burnt, but not all dark roasts are burnt.
I usually like my steaks straight up raw, but most steak snobs I know insist on medium-rare as the "perfect" temperature. Truthfully, I won't usually complain about anything from tartare to medium, and you're right, the different amount of doneness has a drastic effect on flavors and sometimes you just want one flavor profile or another.
Bit of a false dichotomy here. I would take a medium sandwich here. Medium gets you the firmness that you’re hinting that you want for a sandwich without turning it into beef jerky.
you mean a stack of thinly sliced bloody sheets of rare roast beef? I don't know what you're talking about, it makes an excellent sandwich.
Dark roasts and light roasts and everything in between are common here in Australia, where we have a fairly rich history with espresso coffee.
Notwithstanding that this isn't measured whatsoever, it also develops flavor. It's just that it becomes more one-note. You won't taste fruitiness or other delicate things, but I don't want my coffee to taste like fruity tea. Neither do most people.
You like it because it gets you more high.
Removing some flavours and adding others. The fact that you prefer the initial flavours is subjective.
Italy has, in general, people who know how to make better coffee as they treat their machines and the procedure with more care. The coffee isn't all that better. Both Lavazza and Illy are robusta blends.
Turkish coffee has nothing to do with espresso coffee, or filter coffee for that matter. It's my least favourite one as the traditional method of preparation basically includes boiling extremely finely ground coffee in a small pot called cezve. It's over extracted, burnt and usually has to be tempered with a ton of sugar and/or sweets.
However, none of these coffees are nearly as bad as what the US folks, Poles, Germans or Finns drink. The coffee is basically old and overburnt. I guess it also goes hand in hand with preferring filter coffee.
In Croatia, Illy is basically the only coffee brand which serves 100% arabica in cafes.
And yes, the first time I had coffee in America (I think it was from Dunkin Donuts) I couldn't believe how much worse it was than anything I'd ever tasted in my life.
[1]https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/a-brief-histo...
Singapore has some really good coffee these days (but also plenty of not so great one). We just had lots of good coffee in Chiang Mai in Thailand, too.
I agree, I traveled once from Italy towards Austria. And the difference could not be bigger. Also aggravated by the fact I payed a ridiculous amount for it (IIRC 4 euro in Austria, 1 euro in Italy)
In the rare case somewhere only does made-to-order, you want an Americano. It’ll be fast and good and what you want.
They always figure it out.
Sisters Coffee Company is my favorite Oregon brand so far.
I can’t look at them the same ever since.
If anyone is looking for recommendations, Clinton St. Coffee House has never once served me a sour cup of coffee.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PWqoq4UQtQc
Link is more of a comedy sketch, not a song.
The worst espresso (machiatto) I ever had was from Fabrique in Stockholm. It tasted like straight vinegar.
That actually holds true for coffee in parts of Asia, too. If you buy from a street vendor in Vietnam or Singapore, to name two, you get some cheap-ass Robusta mix that was roasted to hell, brewed for hours (or days) and then fixed with a big dollop of condensed milk. My wife describes the flavor as burnt tires and old motor oil. But personally, I love it.
I do appreciate the specialty roasters we have here.. but i don’t need to hate on starbucks - other than the ones that treat their employees like crap
There's a good reason that the most interesting espresso machine you can buy right now was from a successful Kickstarter, manufactured in Hong Kong and is controlled by an Android tablet(https://decentespresso.com) and some of the more interesting coffee nerdery or equipment is coming from the UK, Australia or the US.
Everyone has been doing classic medium dark espresso roasts and hitting the cocao, caramel flavour profiles since forever. Or getting really dark till you get the burnt and rubber notes. The point of lighter roasts and all this nerdery isn't to tell you what to drink. It's to show what's possible with the processing of green beans, roasting and brewing, and to bring potential new drinkers in.
Snobbery in any past-time sucks, but discounting things based on that snobbery is also a bit silly.
I wholly agree with this statement. I worked in the coffee industry for a long time for a roaster that purchased some amazing coffees. We were buying top quality coffees at a time when most of our "specialty coffee" competitors were too cheap to pay for it.
Some people really do not know what they are tasting and are so prone to suggestion. Some people also like to assume the identity of the coffee snob to feel some type of superiority to others or feel some type of belonging to a group.
Personal taste is subjective. Some people like dark roasted coffees because they dislike acidity and like smokey flavours. To me a dark roasted coffee tastes like an ashtray. Taste itself and by taste I mean sweet, salty, sour, umami is not subjective however different people taste these in varying intensities. I happen to be sensitive to acidity so what tastes sour to me might not taste sour to another person. Aromatics too are not subjective with the exception of coriander or with people that suffer neurological taste disorders. Smell is an undeveloped sense in most people though so without visual cues a person might not be able to articulate what they are tasting or may generalise eg saying citrus instead of tangelo.
Like the author I always took the opportunity to drink bad coffee whenever it was the only coffee available. To me it was a recalibration. Nowadays I drink the house espresso blend of my old workplace though an aeropress. It's funny to think I would drink up to 20 coffees a day and now I just have one a day. I brew the aeropress with the same recipe every day. It works out probably 75% of the time producing a nice simple chocolatey cup of coffee.
For example, why do people dump on pop music and think of jazz as "real music"?
Because jazz+jazz=jazz
As a side note I once had a conversation with the head roster of a place I worked at. I floated the idea of accentuating certain characteristics of brewed coffee by microdosing i.e. adding minute amounts of long chain starches to increase natural sweetness in the cup. The head roaster saw this as being fundamentally wrong and unethical.
Maybe it was an egotistical response but in his mind the roasters job was to present the best possible unique expression of the green beans and doing what I suggested would be interfering with this.
It's in part exploring different kinds of drinks that can be made from coffee beans.
You can also get a different kind of espresso, but it's wasted if it's going to be mixed into a milk and sugar concoction.
At the time I didn’t even know what light roast was, but I sure as hell liked it.
(Providing this anecdote since many others here are hating on light roast)
(this is really in support of your overall thrust, I suspect)
Didn't it start in Northern Europe and flourish in Australia?
I don’t know why they think this because it seems to be exactly the same as Seattle in the 2000s.
Many people have taken that experience to mean all dark roasts are bad, when in fact it's not the same thing as buying a fresh darker roast blend from a local roastery.
I mean there's a reason café americano is a thing: Take a perfectly good espresso and dilute it down.
I like how James Hoffmann phrases it. He describes specialty coffee as different. Not necessary better or worse. Just different.
"Mainstream" ones like Black Rifle Coffee (which is trying to lose its political image and focus on being coffee for our military, now that it is big wants to be able to keep growing by "selling across the aisle")
But also a whole range of farther-right ones -- Liberty Coffee is one, Stocking Mill Coffee made a bit of a name for itself by commenting over the Kyle Rittenhouse controversy, Thrasher Coffee is another, and then there are a bunch more I can't remember the name of that make a "1776" or gun-themed roasts.
I've tried some of them -- like I said, they have dark roasts. Some are kinda trash and are clearly just trying to trade on the backlash against liberal coffee, others have pretty tasty dark roasts.
I just find it fascinating how dark-roast-focused the right-wing coffee scene is and how ultra-light-roast the left-wing coffee scene is these days.
I personally find "food partisanship" in America generally to be a fascinating topic, so I tend to go out of my way to experience some of the "controversy"
