Coffee

[Mr. Tea]

Do you not even have a stove Tea?

Sure I do, but I only just moved in and most of my stuff (e.g. pans etc.) only turned up yesterday. I have a kettle that I bought in Switzerland years ago, which I thought would fit a Dutch power socket, but no, the Swiss just have to be different, don't they? Gonna head out in a bit and buy some basic household things that I'm missing.

It's fun, I like that ritual stuff, I like rituals.

I'd love to take part in a proper cha-no-yu one day. There's a brilliant description of one in Shogun.

 

[IdleRich]

I read something about how seriously Illy take coffee once - apparently they have a lab where they do all kinds of experiments and produce chemical charts detailing the effects of different temperatures and pressures on different beans and blends in various machines. Once they asked a famous architect to design a cup for them (I forget whom) but Illy produced seven pages of specifactions within which the cup had to be designed so that a drink from it would still taste as they conceived it. Apparently the architect said that all that was left for him to do was to attach the handle.

 

[Mr. Tea]

mr tea is a physicist so i will leave it to him to explain the process.

Sure, but the operation of moka pots involves non-Abelian gauge fields over a compactified 4-torus, so it might go over people's heads.

 

[luka]

how patronising, i think we're all fairly comfortable with gauge fields, ablian or otherwise.

 

[slowtrain]

Unrelated (kind of) but just so you know the Netherlands is quite possibly the most whacked out and crazy place on the planet.

Everyone there is nuts. No joke.

Never enter a serious relationship with a Dutch girl.

That is the end of my racism for now.


Also, Earl Grey ice cream is inferior to coffee ice cream.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Hmm, the people I've met so far all seem pretty chilled and friendly. I thought the Dutch sent all their mad people to South Africa? Having said that, I've heard...things about how relationships are conducted over here, from a mate who lived in Amsterdam years ago. He said amorous relations tend to occur at one of two extremes: no-strings-attached sex performed with an absence of emotional involvement that seems very stark to most people from an Anglophone culture, or Serious Relationships, where before you know it you're meeting her parents and she's thinking about wedding dates and kids' names. That's probably an exaggeration but I guess it chimes with what you're saying.

how patronising, i think we're all fairly comfortable with gauge fields, ablian or otherwise.

Sorry, yeah, it's pretty basic stuff. My bad.

 

[e/y]

Dutch people, when angry, sound amazing. have no idea how they make the sounds they use in their language.

 

[slowtrain]

Hmm, the people I've met so far all seem pretty chilled and friendly. I thought the Dutch sent all their mad people to South Africa? Having said that, I've heard...things about how relationships are conducted over here, from a mate who lived in Amsterdam years ago. He said amorous relations tend to occur at one of two extremes: no-strings-attached sex performed with an absence of emotional involvement that seems very stark to most people from an Anglophone culture, or Serious Relationships, where before you know it you're meeting her parents and she's thinking about wedding dates and kids' names. That's probably an exaggeration but I guess it chimes with what you're saying.



Sorry, yeah, it's pretty basic stuff. My bad.

My experienes were a sort of fucked bi-polar mixture of those two extremes.

Didn't even have that good taste in coffee, they had one of those hideous nescafe instant coffee machines, tasted like aspartane laced arse.

But is true that generally dutch culture is weird. I mean, hagelmix? Salted licorice? Their crazy crazy weird meals? That bizarre language?

Although that said all of those things are very cool and I like them a lot.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Had an alright coffee in a wee caff today, nothing earth-shattering but it wasn't Nescafe and it was half the price you'd pay in S******k's.

There's unlimited free coffee at work - OK, so it's out of a machine, but as cyber-coffee goes it's not bad at all. I'm a sucker for anything free so I'm going to have to watch myself if I'm to avoid a heart attack at 31...

 

[slowtrain]

I had a piccolo latte today, it was really nice.

Does anyone (aka luka) know why they are called that?

It seems to be a southern hemisphere name.

 

[Numbers]

I read something about how seriously Illy take coffee once - apparently they have a lab where they do all kinds of experiments and produce chemical charts detailing the effects of different temperatures and pressures on different beans and blends in various machines. Once they asked a famous architect to design a cup for them (I forget whom) but Illy produced seven pages of specifactions within which the cup had to be designed so that a drink from it would still taste as they conceived it. Apparently the architect said that all that was left for him to do was to attach the handle.

I wished they used a bit of their research for making their trademarked pods environment-friendly. Now I can't have a coffee anymore without feeling guilty about the waste each cup produces.

Oh and Dutch are not just crazy, they're protestant. That's why they have no gastronomical traditions whatsoever.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Oh and Dutch are not just crazy, they're protestant. That's why they have no gastronomical traditions whatsoever.

I'm in North Brabant, in the south of the country (I think South Brabant is part of Belgium) which is traditionally Catholic (for extra crazy). The food here is funny, there's a basic substrate of your typical Germanic/north-European meat-and-2-veg, a lot like trad English food really - chips are omnipresent, of course - with occasional pretentions at a more culinary, i.e. French/Italian influence, and then the influence of Turkish/Balkan/Arab immigrants on top of that. So various kinds of kebabs, in other words.

There seem to be quite a lot of Indonesian restaurants here, as I guess it used to to be the Dutch East Indies back in the day. Going to explore those a bit once I've had my first paycheque, I reckon.

 

[luka]

piccolo is italian for small. same amount of espresso much less milk. its a good drink. i had a couple today.

 

[baboon2004]

Is there any genuine link between Protestantism and absent culinary traditions? It would make a lot of sense.

My Dutch friend always said she had to come to England to find genuinely nihilistic, crazy people. Where she was in the Netherlands (the east) sounded very tame, dynamiting all my preconceptions. obviously Rotterdam (for eg) is prob a bit different.

Edit: Just got back from Spain - pretty decent standard of coffee all round. There's little more pleasurable than sitting outside in a T-shirt in November in a pleasant mediaeval-ish European city sipping good espresso, watching the world go by.

 

[craner]

Coffee is just like drinking mud, really, unless it's improved by a bit of cream or froth. I don't rate it, whereas tea is...aromatic, relaxing, versatile, subtle.

 

[comelately]

I purchased a couple of coffees from Tapped and Packed in Fitzrovia on Saturday. Fuckin' hell, I swear it took the barista about 10 minutes of stirring, prodding and careful rounded pouring before we got our coffee - worth it though; bloody lovely. No idea what we had, I just let the guy pick and do his thing.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

http://boingboing.net/2011/11/14/howto-attain-radical-hotel-roo.html

"But there's Another Way to do hotel-room coffee: cold-brew. I fucking love cold-brew coffee. Sorry, but strong sentiments demand strong language. Cold-brew coffee is extracted at room temperature or below, and is substantially less acidic than even the best hot coffee. The low-temperature extraction preserves the very volatile aromatic acids, and cold-brew coffee has a lot of chocolatey, caramel notes that are scrummy. Cold-brew tastes very strong, but without any bitterness, and is ferociously caffeinated. A couple glasses of cold-brew turn me into an ALL-CAPS TWEETING HYPERACTIVE SUPERHERO."

 

[slowtrain]

My Dutch friend always said she had to come to England to find genuinely nihilistic, crazy people. Where she was in the Netherlands (the east) sounded very tame, dynamiting all my preconceptions. obviously Rotterdam (for eg) is prob a bit different.

Yes, the Dutch are not crazy in the way that most Western countries (see: English speaking countries, maybe Germany and France too) are, maybe eccentric is a better word, but it isn't really strong enough.

It usually takes about ten minutes to get a coffee here.

 

[viktorvaughn]

I had a vietnamese coffee with condensed milk at the weekend after reading here and it was the biz. More like a pudding in a way cos it's so sweet, great way to finish a meal if you can't be bothered to make a proper pudding.

 

[simon silverdollar]

italians generally use robusta beans which are coarser in flavour but have a significantly higher level of caffine. they have no interest in steaming milk generally as traditionally they dont have milk in coffee. did you check out the link simon? cold filtered coffee and so on. sydney is currently the worlds best coffee city for sure. and did you see the australians were bowled out for 47 runs?

that link is great. why is it do you think Luka, that australians and kiwis take coffee so seriously? what's the history there?

p.s. hope australia get hammered again tomorrow