Why drinking coffee in Iran has become so complicated
adelbordbari.github.io
adelbordbari.github.io
Also, I know exactly the place you're talking about and their drinks are great!
Where I used to live in the Middle East, the culture was very tea (more specifically karak) centric for sure. But it wasn’t a hobby you get so deep into that you become very specific for the average person.
You just drive to your regular place. There’s only one choice and that’s karak. You sip it in your car, chat with your buddies, and you drive off.
Definitely do miss the late nights there. No alcohol, just tea and still an extremely social society.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_chai#Consumption_beyo...
This sounds delicious! Do you know a place outside Iran that nails it? (Together with the obsessive bougie tiny-drink cultural cues.)
Sour cherry sharbat is very easy to do at home, too. You just need a bottle of sour cherry syrup (sadaf, golchin, and marco polo are all solid brands in the US). Pour a tablespoon or two into an empty glass, add water or seltzer on top, add ice, mix it all up with a spoon, and you're good to go.
I guess life was better for those behind the iron curtain that only had one brand?
"displayed 24 jams in a busy supermarket for tasting...60% of customers stop[ped and tasted], 3% [made] a purchase."..."Next, 6 jam jars....[40% stopped, less than 60%], but...purchases went up [from 3%] to 30%."
It reeks of the worst sins of early-TED-era social psychology experiments: tons of obvious confounders.
For instance, 24 samples at a table that was 50% busier means I'm thinking I'll come back and wrap up my tryout next week or whenever: it's very busy and I can't afford 15 minutes to sit around trying to maintain tasting notes on something I didn't have intent to buy anyway -- if I did, I wouldn't be sampling!
It also means less 1:1 salesmanship contact with the purveyor of samples, and 4x of much investment needed on their part.
Per the article, Sheena Iyengar did the study on 2000 and then ”This study became a central example in Barry Schwartz's 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice.”
On a related note, this is one of the main reasons we like Costco. Fewer SKUs means less cognitive load and easier shopping.
Want a car? Here are thousands of options. Want a fridge? Good luck in market research. Want a TV? Nope, I will not help. Too many variables. Bottle of water? Here are hundreds of options. Let's guess why one bottle can cost x100 times more than another.
Sometimes I just want simple things ... Like to drink a cup of coffee.
In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels. No trademarks, no info on producers. Very easy to choose.
If paralysed by consumer choice I would lean on Which?[0] magazine which is run by the Consumers' Association charity. Perhaps there is something similar in your geography.
> In my student time. There was a shop where we bought "Beer", "Cognac" or "Vodka", with corresponding simple labels.
This reminds me of the grocery store in the film Repo Man[1] which had a few digs at consumerism. I prefer to know where my alcohol is from & who made it but I pass no judgement.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Man_(film)
This is a poor take on what's actually a rich cultural shift towards variety seeking. What's wrong with that? The author could go to a regular cafe and have the regular coffee they want, but some people want trying new things.
Personally (quantity over quality when it comes to coffee), as long as I can still do that and get a hot, caffeinated, sugar-free (in regions where that's the default) beverage, I don't mind.
That seems to be the customer's problem though, not the business owner. The cafe owner has no obligation to stick to the old way of doing things forever. Companies change all the time and if customers aren't happy about it they should move on to other options.
> food or drink?
> why do I need to specify. I've been out all day in the heat. Bring me a few refreshments.
"deep loneliness", "caramel kiss", "essence of isolation", "burning blooms", "memories of early morning Paris", "rise of the Persian kingdom" "the battle of joys", "a millennium of bliss", "sausage party", "kiss of the dune", and my favorite: "call it whatever you want".
Yes, those are [roughly translated] titles in a cafe menu(!?) The point is to "have" a variety of options, not to be overwhelmed by the abundance of choices. I'm just ranting since I feel like I have no choice, other than to have too many choices. I want the simple, generic boring stuff, "too". Isn't the lack of that very "generic" option against variety itself? I'm a potential consumer too, but I'm deprived of my choice since I'm not planning to pay 3x for an unnecessarily weird name.
People eat up "lifestyle" brand stuff like crazy. I suspect people just want something special in their daily lives. I get that.
I assume it's appealing to sellers too because it inspires some potential level of loyalty and uniqueness when it comes to their products where otherwise it is "just coffee".
Granted I say that while I sip my Kirkland coffee here at my desk, amused that what was once a sort of semi generic store brand, Kirkland now has it's own apparel with its brand on it and Costco fans love it.
I guess we can find something special everywhere.
And then I just quit. I'm not sure if was the price, waiting in line, or the quality going down since so many places popped up or what. But I just have zero interest in buying a coffee. I drink generic stuff I make at home. Or I just go without.
Oddly around the same time I quit drinking sodas.
I drink Folgers and that’s good enough.
For example, I can't personally fathom paying 4k for a gaming PC. 60 vs 40 frames per second doesn't "matter" to me in any meaningful sense.
That being said, I totally get why other people care. If gaming is the thing you really enjoy, I can see why you might want the faster framerate. If you exclusively play super demanding games, I can see wanting decreased loading times and better graphics.
I guess the point I'm making is it's totally fine to drink your Folgers and be fine with that. I do also think that there are "overpriced" coffee places that aren't offering meaningfully better quality and are surviving based on branding. But I think it's okay to spend more for things that you like more. If might be "just a cup of coffee" to you, but reflect and consider what your "cup of coffee" is.
In my opinion, life is more fun when we can enjoy the variety that it has to offer and let others do the same.
Also if I like something (e.g. Whiskey) I try to find the bargain values that are still good (e.g. Evan Williams White Label 100 Proof) rather than spending a lot more on a bottle that's marginally (if at all) better but has a name with more cachet.
Having a preference for a traditional status quo blend is still a preference!
- Beans
- Roast level
The variation from roasting is far greater than the variation from the beans, and all third-wave beans are lightly roasted. This results in a brew that is dominated by acids.
There's also a third axis in brew technique - most old-school espresso is only vaguely the same brew method as what you'd get at a third-wave shop where the newer machines have fairly precise temperature, flow, and pressure controls, as well as more consistent grinds with less fines.
> Third-wave coffee is a term primarily in the United States coffee industry emphasizing higher quality, single-origin farms and light roast to bring out distinctive flavors.
I also strongly suspect your definition of "decently dark" is still below a medium roast. If not, I would be interested if you could cite a "decently dark" roast you have tried from a third-wave coffee shop.
Many of the cups I've had at Dark Matter in Chicago are decidedly on the darker side, and they have Starry Eyes which is specifically sold as their dark roast. I don't think they post exact roast curves, so I'm not sure there's an objective way to denote what qualifies as a "real" dark roast, but I'm guessing most people who like a more classic dark roast would at least find it acceptably close. Roasters in Atlanta like Chrome Yellow, Dancing Goat, or Portrait also tend to be on the darker side, though I'm not sure if they have mainstay coffees.
It's not as if I've never had a cup of Lavazza or Folgers or Cafe du Monde to compare to. I grew up on basic coffeemaker grocery store French Roast all day every day.
> Our premier dark roast is a nod to the old style of roasting which is still favored throughout the world
In this case, they even go out of their way to disqualify it as a third-wave roast.
They are definitely a smaller category, but it is patently false to say that third wave coffee houses don’t do dark roasts. https://beanbox.com/coffee?tags=roast-profile:dark&
Most of the coffees you listed look like actual dark roasts.
"Full City Roast" with "lemon zest" in the flavor notes raises some red flags for me. Indeed, from the reviews: "Yum! I don't like dark roasts, and this is not a dark roast which is why I liked it. Lots of chocolate. Very smooth, not bitterness, a hint of fruit as it cools. I really enjoyed drinking this."
"Imunika Black" might also be an exception: the "blackberry" tasting note makes me think it isn't very dark.
I see more with citrus or other fruity descriptions, and I doubt those are dark roasts either.
Some people say grinder too (I haven't really got into the conical vs. flat)
This is assuming the basics are right i.e. machine temperature and pressure, dialing in, good grinder.
Then if you add milk the provenance and we'll keptness of that is a factor.
A lot of critiques of modern coffee are based in a sort of silent "but I got used to the benefits of imperial colonialism and exploitation. How dare these new people make me consider where my drinks are from and what should be paid for them." I'm certainly not claiming that's a conscious thing - status quo bias is a big thing here, but it's odd how often "paying a living wage" and "caring about sustainable farming" is decried as decadence and depravity that's destroying the old and more honorable ways of living.
the same thing, but with a different price tag.
I'm sure there is some influencer/performative aspect to this as well that the author is reacting to, but the complaint strikes me mostly as a "I was ok with the status quo, and I dislike that other people prefer things other than that". Having preferences and choices is not by default some sort of pretentious thing!
Just like it can be extremely fulfilling to build a PC from parts, compile your own Linux kernel, get an old car working again etc., it can be nice to have somebody else do all of that for you and focus on the details of life that you enjoy most.
It's actually good to offer more options to invoke curiosity, but the old options are still there.
Nobody has to do this in any city I have been to. Even in the most hipstery independent coffee shops, you can still ask for a black/white coffee and they will make you one. And if you simply can't stomach the independent coffee shop there is most likely a Starbucks or Pret next door.
Granted I have not been to Iran, and am loathe to make assumptions about countries I have not experienced, but I simply do not believe that OP cannot find a "basic" coffee in his city.
I agree with this guy. Teheran is probably a nice place if it weren't for the ayatollahs, hijab police, sponsoring terrorists, embargoes and "friendhip" with Russia. All those details are like coffee marketing made into a religion and used as state policy.
What is going on with that? I don’t even dare to speculate. But something more interesting than bougie coffeeshops, certainly.
"They’re not really about coffee anymore. They’re selling a lifestyle."
Then says of the old coffee "Coffee in Iran isn’t new—we were drinking it long before tea took over. Back in the Safavid era, coffeehouses were where people gathered for stories, debates, and a hit of something strong." - this is a lifestyle related to coffee.
And says about the new coffee "Walk in, and the menu reads like a novel: “Ethiopian Yirgacheffe with hints of jasmine and citrus.”" - this is the literal attributes of coffee, origin and flavour profile.
I'm sorry, but coffee is now, more than ever, about the coffee. People who enjoy coffee then make it a part of their lifestyle.
I'd love to hear more about the older Iranian coffee culture, that sounds wonderfully romantic. It's a pattern across the world that we've lost access to third spaces as everything gains a capitalised cost. And as media has intensified and technology poked into every waking moment we're less likely to gather amongst our community in those spaces to just sit and listen anymore. I think we've evolved new ways of doing things, like how we enjoy our newfound international access to coffee varietals but it's good to address what we've lost in doing so.
This article is a bit whiny about the new, and doesn't talk enough about the qualities of the old. There's a good point to be made, but the article makes it poorly.
I can't speak about Iran, but getting into coffee is no different from getting into pie-making, or sourdough, or wine, or cocktail-making.
They write:
> Coffee used to be fuel. Now it’s a lifestyle accessory.
I think this is the quote that reveals everything. People don't want just "fuel" anymore. They want something that actually tastes good.
But for some reason the author thinks it's all about marketing, insecurity, and influencers. Can't the author just let people enjoy what they like?
Why does it bother the author so much? Why can't they even imagine it might just be because the coffee tastes better, and it's a relatively inexpensive and fun hobby if you want to get into it? Why do they have to judge people for it instead?
I like the emphatic style of GPT-4o lately. I can spot it from a mile.
Look at the author's previous blog posts: low effort, not even correctly spelled or written, like https://adelbordbari.github.io/album/2025-1-25-the-horror-an... (as expected from an Iranian ESL) - and then this one is suddenly boom: perfectly spelled, em-dashes all over, and where did all these <br> come from? Who writes a Github Pages Markdown Jekyll post with a bunch of <br>s in it...? An LLM, obviously.
https://adelbordbari.github.io/about/
> I’m studying artificial intelligence at university...I’m busy with my storybook that’s supposed to be published by June 2024 as well.
translation and transliteration is one of the things chatgpt is great at.
> Seems like the same tired take on third wave coffee, without much specific to Iran.
> This article is a bit whiny about the new, and doesn't talk enough about the qualities of the old.
> Funny how even a repressive theocracy can seem so familiar. I guess that's globalization for you.
> One thing the author fails to take note of here is that Iranians have historically been extremely precious about their bougie little drinks.
> This is a poor take on what's actually a rich cultural shift towards variety seeking.
:thinking_face:
Yes, they should have disclosed how much of it is pure LLM vs. prompt.
I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.
I was in Iran in 2008 and half of my family visits all the time. Copying Western consumptions habits was already a thing when I was there, and it makes sense that it's kept up. Probably as a way for young people to signal their alignment with Western culture and/or signal having disposable income in a time when the economy is in a tough spot.
So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible. Which makes sense since it's based on a real tweet from an Iranian resident.
No, I didn't learn anything from the article (except how susceptible HN has become to even 4o-level LLM outputs, of course). I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search. Do you see the difference?
> So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible.
So in other words... it added nothing to even a superficial familiarity with the topic.
But I wouldn't have thought to look into Qajar tea/Safavid coffee if it wasn't for the blog post (by the way, I find 4o to be pretty good at history).
What I can't figure out is why you seem so confident that the OP didn't verify the LLM output and/or would have published anything written by the model, whether it was faulty or not (which again, in this case it wasn't).
You're clearly allergic to basic LLM-style or at least the masquerading of LLM text as human, so I'm curious what you'd consider worse: 1. LLM-generated text reflecting an accurate prompt/input, or 2. genuine human BS wanting to be taken seriously? (e.g. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman if it wasn't in jest)
Personally, I prefer #1 since I can still learn something from it.
Because I routinely catch people, often very intelligent and educated people, confidently posting LLM materials that they have not factchecked and which are wrong (such as, say, about history, where they might make an argument about human evolution based on cave-dwelling where 4o was merely off by a few hundred thousand years), and I still find confabulations in my own use of even frontier models like o1-pro or Gemini-2.5-pro (leaving aside o3's infamous level of crimes, which I think is probably unrepresentative of reasoning models and idiosyncratic to it).
And in this case, the prompt looks like it was very low quality. The author had plenty of chances to put in details from his own real experience as an actual Iranian - any intelligent, observant college undergrad routinely buying coffee ought to have plenty to say - and instead, it's super-vague waffle that... well... an LLM could have written about just about any country, swapping out a few clauses. ("Why drinking coffee in America has become so complicated")
> You're clearly allergic to basic LLM-style
This is not a 'basic' LLM style. It is a very specific, recent chatbot style. (Note that visarga was able to instantly tell it was the recent 4o, because that style is so distinct compared to the previous 4o - never mind Claude-3, Gemini, Llama, Grok etc.)
Further, there should be no single 'LLM-style'; it makes me sad how much LLM writing capability has been collapsed and degraded by RLHF tuning. Even my char-RNN outputs from 2015, never mind GPT-3-base in 2020, showed more occasional sparks of flair than a 2023 ChatGPT did.
> or at least the masquerading of LLM text as human, so I'm curious what you'd consider worse: 1. LLM-generated text reflecting an accurate prompt/input, or 2. genuine human BS wanting to be taken seriously? (e.g. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman if it wasn't in jest)
#1 is worse (if unedited/factchecked/improved etc and just dumped out raw), because there will be much more of it and the intermingling of fact and fiction makes it harder to factcheck, harder to screen out of future training corpuses, and overall more insidious. Human BS serves as costly proof-of-work and because it is costly, once you recognize you are reading BS from someone like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, you can switch modes and ignore the factual content and ask, 'why is he writing this? what purpose does this BS serve? who is the audience here and how are they using it?' and get something quite useful out of it. I have learned a lot from statements by humans where little or none of it was factually true. Whereas a LLM output may mean nothing more than 'some unattended code spent $0.0001 to spam social media with outputs from a canned prompt', if even that.
I was just linked, by an intelligent, educated, skeptical person who regularly uses AI generative tools, to an interesting report on the darknet markets (which I used to be an expert on): https://tornews.org/legendary-darknet-vendor-crimsonlotus-ta... I was not familiar with this site, but I figured it was probably one of many successors to DeepDotWeb, and I've been out of the scene for a long time and wouldn't know about it; but I eventually realized, after several minutes of reading and then checking, that this was an AI slop website. This is because 'Obsidian Bay' doesn't appear to be real, the photo is obviously AI-generated, and the closing commentary by 'Ella Vargas, darknet researcher at the Cyber Crimes Institute' appears to be a fake person at a non-existent organization. Is anything in the article real? Probably not.
Ahhhhh, but you say you don't care about it being real, you say you only care about the prompt - in which case you're fine: some things in it are old events relabeled. (eg. there really was a large darknet market which was famous and had eluded LE and was taken down in a global operation in part due to packet timing attacks! You did learn something true from that accurate prompt/input yielding that slop output! It was just called 'Silk Road 2' and that happened over a decade ago.) So, I guess you have no issue with tornews.org. Maybe you should subscribe. All these articles sound quite exciting and there's a lot of them...
Personally, I think it's a bad site. I could have fallen for it - I simply got lucky that this one was so easy to note the style, factcheck, and debunk. For example, I could have instead read https://tornews.org/massive-dark-web-drug-operation-busted-i... : if you read this, this sounds very plausible and exciting, and it doesn't immediately come off as AI slop because it is so detailed and doesn't sound too much like 4o.
This, it turns out, is because it's based on a real bust: https://www.suffolkcountyda.org/suffolk-county-district-atto... https://www.newsday.com/long-island/fentanyl-bust-suffolk-k7... Heavily rewritten to obscure the sources being plagiarized. How much of it is real? Well, the assertions I spotchecked seemed to be real (ie. copied without too much distortion from the police press conference)... but I have no idea about the rest of it, and this article lends credibility to the other articles.
(Why does this week-old site exist at all and even has a Twitter account? https://x.com/tornews_org It's almost certainly either for the affiliate marketing revenue, in the best-case scenario, or is a phishing scam, in the worst-case scenario. Since it's so young and so reliant on fake content, likely the latter. I didn't check any of the onion links they so helpfully provide, but even if they are all legit right now, that simply means they are not yet scamming. To pay for the AI and domain name and labor here, you only need to phish one DNM user who will deposit a few hundred dollars of cryptocurrency. And this site has already started to pollute Google with its 'facts'.)
I definitely did not say I don't care about it being real. For the submission that we're commenting on there actually was no incorrect factual information, so it seems you're now using outside examples to support your point.
> So, I guess you have no issue with tornews.org. Maybe you should subscribe. All these articles sound quite exciting and there's a lot of them...
You're suggesting I would apply the same level of scrutiny to a personal blog post about coffee trends as to a news site talking about criminal activity?
Well, you're kind of right. I don't blindly believe any information. I research to confirm or learn more about anything that's worth remembering (e.g. the Safavid/Qajar coffee/tea). That's why in terms of learning new things it makes no difference to me whether the post is LLM-generated, LLM-embellished, LLM-edited, or raw human output. I'm not going to use it as a source and it's not going to change my mind about anything unless I can find support for the important claims.
The main problem with the darknet articles you linked to is not the fact that they're LLM slop but that they are masquerading as news outlets while not citing any sources.
That level of journalistic rigor is not something that I expect (although I would appreciate it) from a personal blog post about coffee trends.
And to give something in return, for Athens I can heartily recommend Taf Coffee [1], and also MOTIV [2] just across the small street, and in Vienna I have a soft spot for CoffeePirates [3]
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Taf+Coffee/@37.9834313,23....
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOTIV/@37.9835867,23.73117...
[3] https://www.google.com/maps/place/CoffeePirates/@48.2173765,...
Having a familiar group with something in common is a great conversation starter and way to make new friends. This is similar to how you can visit a new area and stop by a brewery (if you like beer), a sports game (if you like sports), etc.
Same question really - aren't you most likely to find the same type of people at home?
Liking coffee is only one aspect of a person. Once you're talking you can learn more, make connections, and potentially have a friend who you keep talking to even after you return home.
To give a more HN-specific example: If you work at a software company in the US and go to a software company in India/Poland/etc. aren't you going to find the same people at home? Of course not, their job is only one small part of who they are.
Yes, and (back to the original point) despite cultural differences, you will have something in common to connect with one another! (complaining about software)
Coffee shop or brewery or dive bar culture can vary some place to place, but there's usually core elements of the sort of social contract that are core to it and can provide a sense of routine or homely comfort even when you're staying at a hotel in another country. Having an experience that's 80% the same as the one you'd have back home can make it easier for you to recognize and appreciate that 20% difference sometimes and learn about a new culture.
Liking beer doesn't really make people the same 'type'. Going to local bars to strike up conversations is great (one of my go-tos!), but those are not the 'same type of people' IMO.
I interpreted OP as a poorly veiled comment about wanting to avoid locals and local culture, instead preferring to beeline for a Starbucks or Gucci in a new city when 'traveling'. Or perhaps some snobbiness about what people like to do when travelling. Both of which are cringe.
Maybe I misinterpreted OP's preferences, though. My opinion is if you're going to use the resources to travel somewhere new, you should enjoy what is there, not seek copies of what you have at home.
Later edit: I'm over-reaching/exaggerating to make a point, but what I'm doing it's similar in spirit to how back in the European Middle Ages many foreign merchants were seeking accommodation at places very similar to what they had back home, think of the Hanseatic League and of all the Hanseatic Houses spread throughout the merchant cities from the Baltic or the North Sea. This one was for London: The German Hanse in London and the Steelyard [1]
[1] https://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/the-german-hanse-in-lon...
Well Italy doesn't plant coffee so it must come from somewhere else after all.
If you're not curious or don't care where it comes from just say that or pick one randomly.
If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find, why would you go to a fancy shop? If anything, it's more likely to work there than going to a multi-course restaurant and trying to order a hamburger. There are other businesses that serve a "no choices" need.
> If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find
Doesn't have to be cheap, it has to be plain. Just the coffee that, in average, the average disinterested client would like. We had a similar concept - now almost disappeared - with wine. The wine of the house was an average non-fancy wine that you could drink with your dinner without spending time deciphering the wine list.
> If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find, why would you go to a fancy shop?
Because cities are migrating en masse to fancy shops. Selling lifestyle is apparently more profitable & glamorous, so everyone wants to be the fancy shop rather than the humble bar.
People are used to the specific flavor that, for instance, commercial Bunn coffee makers that haven't been properly cleaned for decades tastes like. There's not really any way to emulate that outside of intentionally buying bad equipment.
I'm still honestly confused that people have a hard time with the menu. I literally seek out going to the best and most fancy-ass coffee shops in the world when I travel and most of them will still serve you a normal Americano or Espresso if you order it. Some don't have drip/carafe coffee because that requires specific equipment and I could see that being complex, I guess, but then that's because you went to a especially high end coffee shop. I often have to go out of my way to find a shop that does pour-over. A lot of the world doesn't do drip or pour-over at all until recent times. Ten years ago, I had to go to the British expat bar in Prague to get a drip coffee because every other shop in town was espresso only and looked at you weird if you wanted an americano.
The options even then aren't usually all that complex unless you're into espresso, and then you should be used to ordering a latte/cappuccino/double shot if that's what you want. Your "black coffee" options are almost never more complex than various origins of drip coffee, where if you literally do not care, you can just order the cheapest. I'm perplexed by people who look at a menu of 4 options for drip coffee and seemingly have a mental breakdown due to complexity. The most number of drip/pour over options I've ever seen at a coffee shop was 8 and it was at the central roastery of one of the best coffee roasters in the world.
You can still buy coffee at McDonalds or 7-11 or plenty of other basic places! It's not like that was outlawed!
In Italy, when you ask for an espresso without any other specifications they just give you a default coffee made from pre-chosen beans. It's not so hard to do, is it? Instead they don't do that because it's hard to justify a $10 cup of coffee without selling you a "lifestyle", whatever it means.
Veblan wrote about "conspicuous consumption" over 100 years ago. I see this as the same disease
Walk into literally any place in America that serves coffee, ask for ‘just coffee’ or ‘black coffee’ or ‘drip coffee’ or ‘house blend’ or however you want to say it, and get a hot cup of exactly that: ‘just coffee.’ It’s fun to spout a list of XYZ-achinos but why are people if that’s somehow accurate or insightful? He’s making shit up.
Coffee shops will sell rituals, status, prestige, sophistication or the appearance thereof. Same as every other business. But that's not to say the product can't be superior - it can. It also doesn't say that every product that makes use of those marketing techniques is superior; but even if it isn't, if the customer walks away happy, they must've done something right, right?
Don't we do the same with the technology we're working on? How often is it truly better beyond any critique? People were getting stuff done even before our products were around with less fuss and a different set of problems. We do what we do to end up busy with stuff so we can do what we do all over again, don't we? I digress.
It does get tiresome when everyone is trying to sell you an experience and it becomes disappointing when the selling of experiences becomes so commoditized, the thing being sold loses its credibility as something special on account of being sold as such. Is it a crisis of authenticity?
To each, their own. I used to tinker with espresso based drinks, but I'm mostly over it. I've learned to discern (some) better coffee beans from others, but I mostly don't drink that - I can't justify paying that much for a coffee I brew myself and that I may botch out of being in a hurry. It's also a distraction that takes time I don't have anymore. But it was fun to explore for a while and I now own a very fancy looking espresso machine, grinder and all sorts of acccessories.
Most coffee shops I have been to (not Iran tho) you can order your espresso in 5 sec (after a queue perhaps) but if you want to pick a bean or get cold brew you can do that too.
I'm surprised Iran isn't more into Turkish style coffee though (?)
2) Since people take this seriously for some reason: Fine coffee is neither a hallucination, nor a theater performance, nor a sign of ultimate decadence. Or at least no more so than fine tea and wine. Different producers, roasts and preparation methods give markedly different coffee with a lot of nuance that you can learn to discern and enjoy. Or not -- to each his own.
Literally every time I see or hear anything on the internet about coffee, it's some of the most pretentious and performative crap I've ever encountered. So I'd imagine a very long while ago.
The issue is that there is another world between that and the horribly pretentious and snobbish consumers buying incredibly overpriced cups from trendy places.
But normal people who enjoy quality coffee do exist.
Have you had espresso in Italy? By all measures, the worst coffee I have had anywhere in the world, on the level of instant coffee in 2010 (remember that?).
I personally don’t complain when people emphasize the compelling story of their offerings – it typically coincides with a high-quality brew!
I also don't remember ever having had a bad cup of espresso in Italy. If it ever happens, I'll just walk a few steps down the street and chase it down with a decent or good one.
Just because a specific style has been around for years doesn't mean it's the only valid style that's not "pretentious".
I assume it's more like 2 euros now.
If someone doesn't like Italian mozzarella, then they don't like mozzarella: what they like is some mozzarella-inspired thing.
The same goes for espresso. In Italy, espresso and coffee have been synonymous for over a century.
Yes, both a Moka pot and a full pressure larger machine handled by someone practiced can produce excellent coffee, but you cannot seriously expect espresso in an Italian city to compete with what is happening in Tokyo, Bangkok, Taipei, Vancouver, San Francisco, etc.
During coffee’s third wave the profession of barista emerged, and Italy took little part in this elevation of craft. There are people who have literally built a career out of what others (Italians included) dismiss as fuss.
Yes, Italy devised some of the original techniques, but that was about sixty years ago, with — I would argue — limited development since.
Drink fifty espressos each in Rome, Milan, (or the villages!), Tokyo, Bangkok, Vancouver then tell me where you think it is best.
(PS — Nice try, but no one says Italian mozzarella is bad; it is incredibly delicious by all accounts.)
When I was a kid, espresso was practically unavailable outside Southern Europe. In Italy, every household had, as they still do, a stovetop espresso maker. In Italy, every city corner had, as it still does, a bar serving espresso.
Whatever Italians consider good espresso, we - who grew up on filter coffee, which Italians do not drink - probably ought to defer.
Is there a better espresso somewhere? Perhaps.
Is it conceivable that Italian espresso is terrible? Nope.
The proposition is as absurd as claiming that Japanese sushi is subpar, or that Swedish dammsugare are the world's worst.
I can assure that at least since the 1970's there was hardly any household without a stovetop espresso maker.
The issue in my mind is the dogmatic orthodoxy of people who enjoy French or Italian espresso saying that anything else is borderline immoral, or at best "pretentious". I happen to prefer more modern espresso styles, but there's also joy in a good traditional Italian shot.
1970s, early 1980s in America: nowhere to get espresso except for fancy restaurants or italian neighborhood
Late 1980s in Pacific NW, America: quirky little Starbucks chain pops up. Ambience emulates a SF hippie coffee house, but they serve Italian-style cookies and espresso.
1990s, 2000s: Starbuck becomes gigantic corporation. Coffee culture fad spreads. Average American now knows what 'biscotti' are.
Today: "Italians make bad espresso"
And in a plausible future...
2050s: espresso fad long dead in America. Italians carry on same as ever, since coffee there, for generations, has meant 'espresso'
Both sides can be pretentious. Dogmatic attachment to tradition can be pretentious just like overzealous modernism. I certainly wouldn't order an espresso in Milan and then be upset that I dislike it, but I would find it annoying that it's difficult to find a cup of coffee I do enjoy, just like my British friends find it difficult to find a cup of tea that meets their preference, which I also think is a sub-par way to prepare a drink.
Plus, the espresso fad is kinda already long-dead in America. Sure, there's Starbucks, but no one's really getting a black coffee or espresso shot there. If anything, America's contribution to coffee that has persisted for decades is drip coffee and more recently handbrew pourovers (though Japan and others also contributed a lot there). There's a reason the Americano is essentially just espresso made to taste like drip coffee.
Actually: diners! What a good example...
I would find it equally disrespectful if a Spaniard or an Egyptian posted something like "Americans have the worst diner food in the world."
Nobody needs to like the coffee or the pie in an American diner. But if they don't... whatever they like isn't really diner food.