In Praise Of Ordinary Coffee
…Or why not everything has to be fancy.
I’m a child of the northeast. I like my coffee regular with milk and sugar. Whether it’s Maxwell House on the coffeemaker at a relative’s house, industrial catering coffee from the office kitchen… I love that not-too-strong, not-too-weak cup of America that’s made to get us through the day.
And let’s clarify: I hate bad coffee. Burned coffee or weak coffee makes me cry. Stale beans make me sad inside. But the ordinary, mass market coffee that fills giant 48 ounce tubs at Costco or Sam’s Club makes me very happy indeed.
You see… I also like fancy coffee. Nitro cold brew from the local independent coffee shop is amazing. Single-origin artisianal coffee is wonderful. I love me some french press. But sometimes you just want a cup of coffee without pretension.
What Is Coffee, Anyway?
I can tell you the first time I ever had espresso in my life. It was 1996, and I was at the Starbucks on Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island, New York. Starbucks’ parking lot was one of the local hangouts for local skaters/punk rockers/ravers/goths/hardcore kids/etc., and coffee attracts quasi-rebellious insomniac teenagers. Everyone knows that.
The espresso was great (And Starbucks deserves a round of applause for introducing espresso to a mass audience in America, but that’s a separate essay). More importantly, it was a little jolt of energy fuel that kept us running around like maniacs for a few hours.
But even in Americano or latte form, espresso-based drinks aren’t made for nursing over the course of a day. Even with that Starbucks parking lot, my friends and I enjoyed the cheap, Greek paper cup coffee you’d get from delis and bodegas because they’re made for the day — not just drinking for five minutes.
Coffee Culture, Elitism, And Making Everything Complicated
Here’s the problem, however: America (and the world) loves coffee so much they can’t just leave good enough alone.
In the coffee world, the trend these days is to offer ever-more-specialized products in order to fill a niche your competitors can’t. That means coffee shops serving single-source pour-overs, gourmet grocers with giant walls full of coffee beans from every conceivable climate and country, impossibly clever minimalist coffee beaker thingamajigs, and my personal arch-enemy — coffee shops which only serve espresso to stay, and not for take-out (This is America and not Italy. Take-out coffee is our birthright.).
None of these are bad things. In fact, I might just spend $5 on a pour-over coffee at lunch today because it’s my right as a fancy bastard.
At the same time, there’s a tendency these days to take foods and drinks and make everything as complicated as possible, with ever-more-complicated sourcing, and coffee shop menus that are bewildering to outsiders.
It’s largely due to a human habit to turn everything into a competition sport of niche knowledge: Coffee is the latest in a long line of things, ranging from vinyl records to bicycles to fantasy football to programming languages to have been taken over by this trend.
Why We Need No-Frills Coffee
That’s why I’m arguing something that’s simple and to the point: Mass-market, industrialized, no-frills coffee is an amazing thing.
A take-out cup of coffee from Dunkin Donuts or an endless IHOP coffee refill is more than just a restaurant industry innovation: It’s our American birthright. Generations of this country’s GDP have been built on top of morning mugs of coffee before heading out to work.
Other countries have Nescafe sadly spooned into their cups, the crystals waiting to dissolve: We have coffee with half-and-half straight out of the little paper cups. It’s simple, unpretentious, and makes life so much better.
Noone’s arguing for an end to french presses or Chemex-style devices. But there’s plenty of room for a good, honest, unpretentious cup of coffee in our lives — and we should embrace it.
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