Very interesting article in the Guardian

maxwell smart

Read a very entertaining article on the Guardian website today about coffee.

Some of his points are very well made, especially about the pretentiousness of some coffee 'connoisseurs' and could certainly be applied to this island as well.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/08/the-coffee-revolution-jay-rayner

sarkozy

It's a well-written article and explains quite well the reasons for, as my friend calls it, 'sour hipster coffee'. I often go to Monmouth if I find myself in the Borough Market area, it *is* always busy and very inviting where it's totally fine to have coffee whatever way you want. The article gets across the London coffee scene, I suppose.

I've been obsessed with coffee since my Dad began giving a 12 year-old me the real deal from his home espresso machine. I've gone through a variety of brewing methods and coffee styles over the years and there always seems to be more to learn. The pretension often annoys me, but I also think life is too short to drink bad coffee (I type this as I drink a mug of Nescafe at work). The thing is: there's no right and wrong. I suppose I felt myself siding with the author on one hand. Strong, unctuous, caramelly-bitter espressos are what I love, when I'm drinking espresso. If I'm drinking a regular cup of Joe, I don't want an americano. If I'm in an arabic restaurant, I'll have an arabic coffee. They're all just different ways of making coffee, and trends come and go, but traditions stay and evolve, and each tradition is a world and coffee occupies particular place in that world.

So, with the whole coffee thing, I'm left wondering if it's just the new fixie craze. A few years ago, it seemed everyone wanted to be running single speeds. Now, it's not so much. What's next? We're all obsessed with sharing a rare single-origin high altitude fair trade sourced yerba mate, known for its anti-oxidant properties and known communitarian benefits?

One really interesting thing, though: how much people he talked to spoke of how important the coffee's origin and the farmers of the coffee are. The jury's still out on whether this is part of a bigger social change where agricultural products are more and more seen as a product of human labour, reflecting a deeper understanding generally of how we're all bound up with each other through global and local social relations. Will we begin seeing this with industrial products?

Coffee is one of the quintessential, totemic commodities which go to the heart of our modern world, bringing up all its conflicting complications. And London is a great centre of these complications.