The Coffee Bloke

A Guide to the World of Coffee and Coffee Making by Michael Komorowski.

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Location: Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

The Cost of One Bad Cup of Coffee






Apologies to my readers for the delayed posting but I have been away in France for the last ten days indulging in my other passion, wine. My wife and I went with some friends so we could show them around the Burgundy/Beaujolais wine area. Our friends like their wines but are generally unadventurous and, as I am a qualified wine taster, we thought we could help them to understand more.

After a few days of tasting wine I was given the nickname Mystic Mick – I like to think it was in honour of how well I was able to pick and accurately described most of the wines we had. My wife suggests it has more to do with looking into a crystal ball and predicting how many years the bottle could be kept! Whatever the reason, as I said to our friends, it is important to describe accurately as possible any wine on offer. If you come across a wine you don’t like then you need to pick out what it is you don’t like as much as what you do. Good wine is often a complicated mix of fruit and wood characters and this information helps you decide what to try next.

Drinking coffee is not much different to wine tasting. You need a vocabulary to help you to describe the brew. Words like Earthiness, Mouldy, Sweet, Nutty, Fruity, and Balance are words that can be used in the description of coffee and wines. Another crucial part of wine tasting – the smell – is also vital in tasting coffee. This can help you to avoid making the mistake I made on the trip back home.

My wife and I like to take the Eurotunnel back to England as it means we can bring back plenty of wine. We decided to stay at a hotel not far from the departure point. It was modern and clean and our evening meal was spoilt only be the fact that my wife’s steak was over cooked. After a night’s sleep, we readied ourselves for breakfast. I made the choice of starting with a light breakfast, while my wife decided to do the opposite. She got herself a cup of coffee from the filter pot, and I asked her if it was any good. ‘I little strong’ she said but confirmed it was okay to drink. Having finished my small portion I too made my way to the coffee pot. Seeing it was full to the brim I thought how lucky I was to be getting a fresh brew.

I sat down to enjoy my cup, but no sooner had I had a mouth full and swallowed then I realised that it was instant coffee. To me instant coffee has the taste not too dissimilar to that of gravy. When I told my wife that my coffee was instant she was puzzled. She smelt it and confirmed immediately it was instant and hers was not. It would seem that someone in the kitchen was too lazy to make a fresh pot of coffee and thought that the guests wouldn’t notice the difference as most of them were Brits anyway!

In future we will not be using that hotel chain. One lazy person in the hotel thought that their guests were not important enough for one decent cup of coffee that morning. As a result the whole chain has lost its previously good reputation.

‘Life is too short to drink bad wine’. Anonymous

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