Defending Switzerland’s coffee stockpile | Hacker News Reader

Defending Switzerland’s coffee stockpile

economist.com

22 pointsmayiplease18 comments

This was blowback from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-coffee/swiss-govern....

So they just have a bunch of green coffee beans sitting around and getting old? Are they constantly discarding old stock to make room for new beans?

Green coffee doesn't really go stale—it can be kept in storage for long periods of time without loss of quality.

Once you roast it, it's a different story—it's recommended to consume coffee ideally within two weeks of roasting.

If the world goes to shit and the Swiss are the only ones left with coffee, then I’ll be most pissed off.

The Swiss, quite frankly, don’t deserve coffee. They don’t know how to make it, and they don’t know how to drink it. The Swiss are good at many things, but coffee is not on that list.

I kind of doubt anywhere that close to Italy, large portions of whom speak Italian, has uniformly bad coffee.

In some mountain huts without tap water and only disconnected solar electricity you can't have espresso machines. You'll get filter coffee from melted snow. It's heartwarming, though.

In most mountain huts it’s instant which sucks.

But where is this stigma that the only true coffee is espresso coming from ? I far prefer good filter.

I mean we don't really use espresso machines in Italy, we use moca's. Moca machines can run easily on a camp stove. Try it, you'll get better coffee from a camp stove than most espresso machines, promised!

In fact there's excellent coffee in Ticino.

Italy has near-uniformly bad coffee, unless your idea of good coffee is the cheapest, dark roasted "arabica" found on earth.

Can you even tell the difference between arabica and robusto when the beans are roasted to taste like fire pit ash? That said, Americans are no strangers to overroasting our coffee just as we overhop our beer.

yes, easily. robusta tastes like burnt rubber asides from the charcoal that comes from over roasting the coffee, arabica is more neutral no matter what the roast level is.

Italian coffee is generally not good though.

Coffee is Switzerland biggest export in terms of foodstuff. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/international-coffee-day_most-c...

On average it's true, but we make Nespresso.

I mean, I don't doubt that there are Swiss people which can make a bomb ass coffee.

Citing n'espresso as a reference for this may be a bit counterproductive, though :)

Did you mean to say “for instance” instead of “but”?

You obviously have never been to a good coffee place in Switzerland. Sure Nestlé produces some absolute garbage but go to a real coffee place in Zürich or Lugano.

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