Coffee

[woops]

I'm drinking a cocktail in a fancy bar, one of the ingredients was smoke, literally a load of smoke, like a bonfire blowing in your face, four different types of wood apparently, moderately unpleasant and a waste of good kindling

 

[mixed_biscuits]

if you were blindfolded and placed in an Aldi you would have no idea which one you were in, but you would be able to find the prawns by instinct.

You would, Little Lord Fauntleroy

 

[Corpsey]

When's the latest you have coffee?

I sometimes have them around 3pm (around now, in other words), but I worry about sleeping the next day.

However, I happen to have spoken to some people who have coffee until fucking 9 or 10 o clock ffs and sleep fine.

 

[yyaldrin]

i drink one coffee a day, usually around 10 in the morning. i have a melitta aromaboy at home that is so small but perfect to brew one cup of coffee, i throw in any coffee i find on sale in the supermarket. i hardly buy cofee outside as i think it's a total waste of money but if i do i just get an espresso or double espresso because ordering a "coffee" might get you an "americano", which is the most horible tasting muddy kind of shit coffee there is.

 

[shakahislop]

Been in a few higher end coffee shops recently (this one in nolita, la cabra in the east village, ie both downtown Manhattan) which play ambient drone. This kind of lighting and interior design reminds me of Instagram. Everything is bright and clean. It looks digital.

 

[shakahislop]

Ironically my digital camera isn't catching any of what I describe

 

[shakahislop]

has this new thing i've been seeing hit the world outside of nyc yet? i started noticing it in about two thousand and one that sdfd places inventing a whole wave of coffee formulations outside of the espresso-flat white-latte-cappucino-americano hegemony. things like a 'tokyo latte', 'spainish latte', 'lavender latte', 'rose latte'. i don't know what any of them are but they take ages to make, don't get stuck in a queue behind someone that's ordered one. again an example of that very american thing of all kinds of weird shit being experimented with, even when the existing stuff is totally fine to begin with.

 

[Clinamenic]

has this new thing i've been seeing hit the world outside of nyc yet? i started noticing it in about two thousand and one that sdfd places inventing a whole wave of coffee formulations outside of the espresso-flat white-latte-cappucino-americano hegemony. things like a 'tokyo latte', 'spainish latte', 'lavender latte', 'rose latte'. i don't know what any of them are but they take ages to make, don't get stuck in a queue behind someone that's ordered one. again an example of that very american thing of all kinds of weird shit being experimented with, even when the existing stuff is totally fine to begin with.

Do you feel this way about American craft beer too?

 

[shakahislop]

Do you feel this way about American craft beer too?

don't know much about it or how it works

 

[Clinamenic]

don't know much about it or how it works

Its largely the same as what you're describing, at least based on my limited experience outside of the US. The craft beer explosion, with its dozens of proliferating categories and flavor combinations, seems to be a phenomenon largely endemic to the US, maybe with spillover (ba dum tsss) into other western cultures too.

Or are Double Hazy IPAs and Pastry Sours popular in Europe, too?

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

No, no, we don't do beer over here in Europe.

 

[shakahislop]

Its largely the same as what you're describing, at least based on my limited experience outside of the US. The craft beer explosion, with its dozens of proliferating categories and flavor combinations, seems to be a phenomenon largely endemic to the US, maybe with spillover (ba dum tsss) into other western cultures too.

Or are Double Hazy IPAs and Pastry Sours popular in Europe, too?

i'm probably out of date but the story in england at least used to be that almost every pub would have some combination of carling, carlsberg, guinness, stella, kronenburg, fosters and a couple more that i'm forgetting. and then if the pub was trad enough they'd have two three ales would often be pretty local to the area. that was all it was everywhere in 2006 or whatever. you'd go up to the bar in a new town and you'd look at the taps and recognise everything. it was a very legible scenario.

it's totally different now, whenever i go back i get to the bar and there's seven beers i've never heard of and it's different everywhere

uk has had a real ale tradition forever, of connoisseurship, people hiding up their booze problem by pretending they were into tasting them all, a thousand different ales everywhere, the ale in the pub always being the one was that brewed five miles away, all of that. but because ale is essentially horrible it's always been more of a traditional thing than a consumer hellscape thing

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

It's all Madri these days.
Lots of Eurolagers.
Hazy IPAs have broken out too. I had a coffee hazelnut beer out of can on Saturday, to go with my wagyu burger, and the whole evening was a disaster. The place had 99-era dnb vinyl stuck to the walls, but playing the ninth circle of hair metal over the system

 

[shakahislop]

the best beer cultures are the ones where there are a maximum of two options and everyone drinks them. ecuadors like that. light or dark those are the choices. would you like a beer? here have a beer no need to stand in the supermarket aisle and make a consumer selection.

 

[Clinamenic]

i'm probably out of date but the story in england at least used to be that almost every pub would have some combination of carling, carlsberg, guinness, stella, kronenburg, fosters and a couple more that i'm forgetting. and then if the pub was trad enough they'd have two three ales would often be pretty local to the area. that was all it was everywhere in 2006 or whatever. you'd go up to the bar in a new town and you'd look at the taps and recognise everything. it was a very legible scenario.

it's totally different now, whenever i go back i get to the bar and there's seven beers i've never heard of and it's different everywhere

uk has had a real ale tradition forever, of connoisseurship, people hiding up their booze problem by pretending they were into tasting them all, a thousand different ales everywhere, the ale in the pub always being the one was that brewed five miles away, all of that. but because ale is essentially horrible it's always been more of a traditional thing than a consumer hellscape thing

Yeah when I just visited Ireland, it was a bit of a shock for me. There were those mainstay beers you mention and then one or two american ones like Sierra Nevada pale ale or something.

But in the US, plenty of bars and restaurants have 12-20 different beer variants. We also have a bunch of breweries where you can go drink, and there you can get menus with 30, 40 beers on them.

 

[Mr. Tea]

has this new thing i've been seeing hit the world outside of nyc yet? i started noticing it in about two thousand and one that sdfd places inventing a whole wave of coffee formulations outside of the espresso-flat white-latte-cappucino-americano hegemony. things like a 'tokyo latte', 'spainish latte', 'lavender latte', 'rose latte'. i don't know what any of them are but they take ages to make, don't get stuck in a queue behind someone that's ordered one. again an example of that very american thing of all kinds of weird shit being experimented with, even when the existing stuff is totally fine to begin with.

I'd be sorely tempted to ask for a "coffee", and then when they look at me blankly or wave a hand towards a sign listing their huge array of specialist sub-varieties of latte or cappuccino, simply repeat "cof-fee" very slowly and clearly, as if dealing with an imbecile.

 

[IdleRich]

even on the east coast, which is basically about five interconnected cities, there aren't like supermarket chains that everyone knows and can put into hierarchies. there's Starbucks but nothing much like Costa or Cafe Nero, everything is like random individual coffee shops so far as I can see. the actual americans might be able to see better then me about this kind of thing

It's not something I've thought about before, but yeah, now you say it, my mind does see the US as diverse in this respect. That's quite interesting in fact, cos as a rule, what with big chains and mega-corporations staffed by zombies with fake smiles, or just with share price and money overpowering good things and people, the assumption is that the US is absolutely at the forefront - by which I mean the bad end - of leading the way to massive companies taking over the world, destroying nature and exploiting (more like grinding into dust) vulnerable people.

So, credit where credit is due, for some reason, in that respect the States are not this uniform homogeneous place that one might assume. in fact, it's not even a crude assumption, I think that all the evidence - except for a actual evidence of one's own eyes, how things really are - seems to point towards the US being a blandly uniform corporate hell hole... I'm glad that came up cos I realise I had a sort of double-think position in my mind in that I *knew* it had to be that way, while at the same time knowing that it wasn't.

But the question for all you US and US based - ie honorary US - geniuses is, why?

 

[shakahislop]

It's not something I've thought about before, but yeah, now you say it, my mind does see the US as diverse in this respect. That's quite interesting in fact, cos as a rule, what with big chains and mega-corporations staffed by zombies with fake smiles, or just with share price and money overpowering good things and people, the assumption is that the US is absolutely at the forefront - by which I mean the bad end - of leading the way to massive companies taking over the world, destroying nature and exploiting (more like grinding into dust) vulnerable people.

i've wondered about the same thing, the difference between what i'd expected (which was the same as you) and the reality, and i think it's mostly just that we don't realise how far down the homogenisation route the UK has gone. we're a world leader. world beater. like i said somewhere i think that people like it. also the general habit of thought in the UK on most things is 'other bits of western europe do things better than us, but at least we're not as bad as america'. just by default you (well, I) tend to assume that for any fucked up problem america is going to be worse than the UK is. it's true a lot of the time. but not always. another thing that's a bit like that is protection for renters, in NYC anyway you've got quite a lot more rights than you do in england at least. there's other stuff like that. rent control, rent stabilization. legal weed. local residents not being able to close down clubs due to noise complaints.

 

[IdleRich]

i've wondered about the same thing, the difference between what i'd expected (which was the same as you) and the reality, and i think it's mostly just that we don't realise how far down the homogenisation route the UK has gone. we're a world leader. world beater.

I think what's strange is that I would categorise homogenisation with a load of other things which US IS a world leader in... though obviously don't ask me to name any of them.

 

[Clinamenic]

But the question for all you US and US based - ie honorary US - geniuses is, why?

Because we're the land of innovation and prosperity.