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Comment by MangoToupe | Hacker News Reader

Is there any place on earth that has good coffee? Italy's coffee is horrible, even if they have quality machines to make it with. 99% of people will use "ille" or whatever that brand is, which is far worse than starbucks worst roast. Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

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>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.

Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.

Perhaps europeans are simply used to burnt coffee

the opposite, the ubiquity of burnt mud in every office coffee warmer seems to have dulled the American palate, that or the over abundance of artificial ingredients in everything, to the extent that they simply cannot discern what good coffee is, because it's either that or coffee that looks like the water from a particularly detail oriented miniature painting session; scant colour, scant aroma.

I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"

Best coffee I have ever had was in Vietnam... but that's robusta beans (which tend to be bitter) and they use a lot of condensed sweetened milk.

https://www.seriouseats.com/vietnamese-coffee-recipe-1177539...

idk man, I would say the opposite but I tended to avoid the Illy shops because I already knew I didn't care for that brand much.

Right here in NJ a shop a block away from me had it as their distinguishing feature and I didn't like it much (still better than sbux though). And then when I go on vacation in Italy and other European countries I see Illy mostly in vending machines, so when I see and Illy shop I'm not tempted, when there are 500 other more interesting looking shops every direction you look. And in all of those, I mostly had a lot of cappucinos, and they were basically all excellent.

I cannot call Italy's coffe bad. But I confess I never drink it perfectly straight. Usually cappucino. The European style, a pretty small and strong espresso that is foamed. Not a honking big american cup.

Anecdotally, Australia and Melbourne does it pretty well. And obviously there is good coffee in every American city, you just need to know where to go.

I mean, Australia the default is decent espresso. Even our petrol stations do decent espresso, it is overroasted for sure, but it's not pot coffee either.

But we have the Italians to thank for that, and Australian cafe culture is why it's so easy to get a good coffee even without trying.

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