The case for bad coffee (2015)

Great coffee can be commonly had, just probably not provided by a single vertically integrated entity. Here in Australia, we have hundreds of independent roasters, each supplying anything from a handful to hundreds of independent cafes each.

It works well - you don’t go to a chain here expecting good coffee, if you’re somewhere you’re not familiar with, you just jump in Google Maps or something to find a decently rated cafe nearby and you should get good coffee.

In terms of home prep, when many cafes are selling great beans all around the place, you can easily always have great coffee. Once my machine is warm it takes something like two or three minutes from bean to cup, including grinding, steaming milk, etc… I’ve only been doing it for 15 years but don’t see myself getting tired of it anytime soon. I enjoy the tactility, the smell, the feel, and of course the end result. It’s a nice break from mentally taxing work!

I turn on the news, and inevitably an ad appears. On one side of a split screen, a hipster-looking guy in an apron with a deep look of stress on his face is agonizingly bungling an attempt to measure coffee beans out into some kind of overly complicated apparatus. On the other side, a serene looking woman is pouring some powder into a mug and adding water. "Here you go honey". She passes him a cup. "Nescafe. What else?"

I'm starting to think some kind of viral marketing campaign run by instant coffee makers is being waged here...

We live in a world where fast food and TV diners are doing their level best to extinguish the homemade meal. Cooking is hard and time consuming. Why not do things the easy way? It would appear that instant coffee manufacturers are now trying to repeat this operation the simple cup of joe.

Here's the thing. Making good coffee isn't time consuming, expensive, or hard. Sure, lots of people do go through "The Quest" stage when learning how to do something that's new to them. You strive for the best cup of coffee that human hands can make and go to increasingly exotic and difficult ends to achieve that end. It's like how, when cooking, you might keep chasing Michelin star worthy fare every night and just burn out.

Embrace the quest for what it's worth. You learn a lot in its punishing tutelage, but there comes a time to settle for what is merely good. The quest begins with rapid advance up an logistic curve of quality vs time and effort, but the perfect result requires infinite effort. Pick a spot before the slope of that curve levels off too much and you can get great results with comparatively little effort.

Recognize that the results axis of this curve are personal and subjective. One person may indeed decide to jump off the curve at the level of instant brew, while another will jump off with an espresso machine in their kitchen. You don't need articles like this to tell you where to jump off. Learn how to make coffee that's good enough for you with just enough time and effort to be worth it, and then be happy with that.

I'm not trying to tell you where to abandon The Quest and jump off the curve. I'm just saying that, for most people, that point will probably be a little bit beyond instant coffee.

I love instant coffee. I don't care about coffee but I want coffee, instant does the job.

Go to a McDonald's next time. Would you ask for the Applebee special at a fancy steakhouse?

experience + emotion = memory memory + time = identity coffee is a background, sometimes optional