The frothy Nescafe experience was in 2001. There were coffee shops in city centres, but they almost never had brew, just espresso. (It was living in London that finally made me into a Starbucks fan.)
The last time I went (in 2006) I still had a whole pile of trouble buying a brewed black coffee, because all the places seem to make only espresso drinks. And when I landed at Gatwick at 6 am and wanted nothing more than a coffee, I went into about six different places and had an exchange something like this:
Me: Do you sell brewed coffee? Not out of that espresso machine [points], I can’t drink milk and I do not want an Americano, I would like a brewed coffee out of a drip coffee maker [demonstrates a drip coffee maker using hand gestures]. Do you have that?
Coffee shop person: Sure. Here. That’s one pound, please.
Me: No, I just saw you draw that out of the espresso machine and add hot water to it. Don’t you have a drip maker? I don’t want espresso.
Coffee shop person: This is still coffee, though, it’s better than brew.
Me: No thank you, I do not want that. [walks away]
Coffee shop person: [mutters] crazy American!
[repeat ad nauseum]
For love or money there was no drip coffee to be had.
As a coffee snob I do love me a short espresso, and once I was so desperate I ordered one. Now, a short espresso is something like the fugu of the coffee world; it takes some skill and training to make one right, and there’s not a lot of margin for error because there’s only 1-2 oz of liquid. Where I come from (i.e. the snobby coffee shop that trained me), it is the customer’s right to send back a short espresso until it is PERFECT. Thusly, I not only know what a perfect short espresso tastes like, be assured that I will send it back until it is right.
This does not fly in England, especially where hundreds of thousands of brand new baristas have appeared in the last five years, very few of whom had the training to appreciate a short espresso, let alone make one.
So that is why I expect to always switch to tea in England.
You’re right - it doesn’t make sense. The boiling the water in the pot vs. the kettle is a mental thing more than anything else. It’s the way my husband always makes it for me. He’s not the greatest cook, but he tries very hard. The best thing he makes is tea - it’s not really cooking, but it’s one of those things he does when I’ve had a hard day and he wants to show me that he cares. Every time I try to make tea, it never tastes as good as when he does it.
And thanks for catching the misspelling of Early Grey’s - I wasn’t paying much attention while typing.
Fair enough; drip-brewed coffee has all-but died out over here, though it never really lived. Personally I don’t think brewed coffee is as good as a bad espresso, but it’s all a matter of taste.
I love tea, good tea, and good teahouses are starting to appear in the US, (think the magnificent Tao of Tea in Portland, Oregon) and I’ve had excellent tea in Canada. It is worth paying for good tea, but unfortunately restaurants don’t know a damn thing about it yet. So I brew pots of it at home, and drink it there.
Sometimes I drink coffee, but only with a lot of milk and sweetener. If I brew it myself, I add huge amounts of ground cardamom to the coffee grounds and sweeten it with maple syrup. If I have too much coffee (a little bit is too much) however, I get jittery and then exhausted and crash – I hear that something in coffee is hard on the adrenal glands, and I believe it.
Tea never makes me jittery or tired, just as if all is right with the world.
I love coffee as well as tea, but if I can only pick one beverage to be served during my stay on a uniquely stocked desert island, I’ll take tea.
It always amuses me to see self-proclaimed tea snobs declare “The tea bag must be in the cup before the hot water is added”. In my world, no self-respecting tea snob would ever need to use the word “bag” in their instructions on how to make the perfect cuppa. My father is the worst tea snob I’ve ever met and he insists tea bags are filled with the scraps swept up off the floor. My ex never believed that there was any flavour difference between tea made with a tea bag and loose leaf tea made in a pot, but any* member of my family can tell the difference with a single sip.
Hm, I never knew that one, is there a logical reason for it? Personally, when I do have to use a tea bag, I usually put the water first. Otherwise the tea bag doesn’t sink to the bottom.
Brewed coffee is only papatable when it is really fresh. If it has been sitting around a while on a heat source it quickly gets nasty.
The beauty of espresso and the various drinks based on it is they are made as needed and so are always fresh as can be.
In my experience really good, fresh drip-brewed coffe does rival espresso but the reality often falls short of the ideal, at least here in the US.
As for me I drank lots of bad coffee and decent tea in college, but since then I have drank less and less tea and mostly drink coffee now. I usually don’t do espresso-based beverages anymore because of the cost (I’m that much a cheap bastard).
Thanks to someone on this board I bought a tea filter and some loose leaf product from Stash Tea of Portland, OR.
Since then starting the morning with a good Ceylon Breakfast or English Breakfast…winding up an afternoon with an Earl Gray and relaxing in the evening with a green jasmine makes the day.
If you tea snobs hate tea bags so much, then what do you care if the bag goes in first or not?
For me, tea is for every day, while coffee is for special occasions, or when I really need an extra caffeine boost. Coffee tends to give me the jitters really bad - I’m very sensitive to caffeine.
I really don’t like the smell of coffee. If I need caffeine and it’s the only thing available, I have to add huge amounts of milk before it’s palatable. So, tea for me. My favorite kinds are Japanese tea, jasmine tea, and Thai iced tea (and if you think that’s not strongly flavored, there’s something wrong with your tastebuds).
Personally, I avoid making tea with bags. It’s too hard to be sure that you’re getting some proper leaves, rather than fannings, or even dust, which have so much surface area, it is nigh impossible to extract the good stuff without also getting a nasty cupful of tannic acid.
Don’t get me started on people who re-use tea bags, or *boil *tea bags in a pot of water. What you are making is fit for killing dust mites, not for drinking! (I also read about people who reuse coffee grounds, and I think they must be just as tastebud-deficient.)
The other nice thing about loose tea is you can pick and choose which kinds you like. The selection in bags tends to be “mystery black tea” and “mystery black tea with flavors.” Maybe you get some English and/or Irish Breakfast. Many people who (like me) would adore a high grade Keemun or something are going to be disappointed by supermarket tea.
Not that I’m dissing coffee. I do tend to like mine very light and sweet, but a good coffee is divine. Also, so far I’ve found it possible to find a decaf coffee I like (The Peruvian shade grown at Whole Foods - costs an arm and a leg but it’s worth it), while decaf teas tend to be flat and insipid to my palate.
Why do I have to choose? I like both. I like, no, must have coffee in the mornings. I like to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, as things are winding down at work. When I was a kid, my mom let me have a little instant coffee with warm milk sometimes, and that was my idea of coffee until I went to college and made friends with a girl who worked as a barista. She educated me on what real coffee is supposed to taste like. Now I like a medium roast, but don’t turn up my nose at Folgers on account of that’s what they make at work, and otherwise I’d have to walk to Starbucks every morning. As for tea, I prefer green, hopefully with mint in it. Off to the Stash website to order some Moroccan Mint!
I switched from coffee to tea several years ago, but I can’t remember why. One of these days I’d like to have some tea properly made English-style, and Japanese-style, too, so I can compare the taste to the tea I make for myself.
I’m probably wrong to leave the bag in the cup while I drink my tea, but I like it strong.
I agree that one should never let one’s coffee sit around on the burner. Best is to pour what you don’t drink right away into an insulated carafe or thermos; second best is to turn the burner off, and nuke it when you want to drink it later.
Nothing like a grind 'n brew coffeemaker to start the day off right. Put in your beans and your water the night before, then hit the button when you stagger into the kitchen in the morning. By the time I’ve retrieved the paper, fed the cats, and turned on the 'puter, I’ve got fresh coffee brewed from freshly-ground beans.
But even as somewhat of a coffee snob, I’ve got to say that the ubiquity of Starbucks has caused most places to raise their game to at least tolerability in the coffee department. Was it Heinlein who characterized the five levels of coffee as coffee, java, jamoka, joe, and battery water? Even the fast-food and convenience-store chains, which used to consistently serve battery water, are mostly falling into the jamoka-to-joe part of the spectrum these days.
If you don’t like tea because it’s not like coffee, I think it’s safe to say you just don’t get it, so just carry on doing whatever you’re doing, minus the bloody annoying whining about tea.
In our house, there’s hot coffee keeping in a carafe if any adult is awake. We do the grind/french press on the weekends, once in a while we bust out the espresso maker for lattes but it’s a PITA to clean and takes up to much counter space so that’s a rare treat.
There’s always iced tea in the refrigerator, part of doing the dinner dishes is washing the pitcher and making a fresh batch. I think of hot tea as a palliative thing though, good for giving to the kids on a cold snowy day and everyone drinks boatloads of it when we’re sick. Hot strong tea with honey, a drop of lemon and a tot of whiskey, herbal teas (the horror!) with honey for sore throats that need hydrating, etc.
I grew up on iced tea, of course, but I have never liked coffee. I can hardly stand the smell of it. I only started drinking hot tea a few years ago, as a caffeinated alternative to a cold coke on winter mornings. It’s English Breakfast in a bag, but it tastes pretty good to me.
