I admit it: I'm not a coffee enthusiast. Studies have suggested that most people cannot tell the difference between a fancy bottle of wine and its cheapo cousin. To an extent, that is true of me and coffee: the subtle differences between roasts exist for me mainly in theory. This may be a personal thing. My sister once kindly labeled me an "undersmeller" and my mother compounded that by saying that none of my five senses would be my route to fame.
In the case of wine, of course, the problem exists because the difference between a really good bottle of wine and a really bad one is hardly objective; price is one of the few markers the average man has. But I often felt the same way about coffee.
As a result of my naivete, I found coffee shops vaguely intimidating, peopled by individuals who all knew a secret that I didn't. My coffee confusion existed up until my sophomore year of college, when I got a job in a coffee shop. I learned a great deal - for example, the difference between filter coffee and an Americano, and also how to say "whipped cream" in Italian - but this didn't improve my palate.
A few weeks ago, in Washington DC, I went out for coffee with a friend who refused to go to Starbucks.
"They burn their beans," she said. This is a common kvetch - at my college coffee shop, disdain for Starbucks was like a fever, and no one went for long without catching it. The main grounds for our distaste: Starbucks burned their beans.
But alas! Despite this, I still couldn't taste the difference between Starbucks any just about anyone else.
The majority of Indians are, like me, not coffee drinkers. The difference between espresso and coffee might as well be nil, and even South Indians (who drink a sweet, creamy 'filter coffee') usually limit themselves to whatever comes out of the Nescafe foil packet.
Despite this, there's been an explosion of coffee shops across India, most notably the chains Cafe Coffee Day and Barista. These chains make their money off 'value-added' products like cold coffee, which is more of a coffee-flavored milk shake than a real coffee.
Last week, I went into our local Cafe Coffee Day (a flagship store for the brand, right in central Delhi) and asked for a cup of coffee. The waitress, a very skinny and sweet girl who clearly didn't understand a word I was saying, ran for the back of the store to get her supervisor.
After a few moments of careful listening, he divined what I was asking for and told me that I could in fact get a cup of coffee.
What he brought me a few minutes later was in fact an Americano. I didn't protest - I felt it would be hypocritical, since to me the two wouldn't taste particularly different - but it wasn't a cup of coffee.
I mentioned this to an American who immediately concurred. "People in India don't drink filter coffee." I don't know if he meant to sound superior, but he did.
Then last week I went to the Taj Mansingh, which is part of India's famous chain of luxury business hotels. A coffee at the Taj costs about $6. I once went to a Taj with an aunt of mine, a respectable middle-class woman, and when she saw the bill for our cups of tea she visibly blanched, perhaps wondering what the hell they put in there.
The interesting point is this. They brought me a very tiny cup of coffee, about half what one would get in the United States, along with milk. And for the first time in my life, I thought the coffee tasted delicious. I didn't even need sugar to leach out the bitterness.
But I'm suspicious of my own result. Does the Taj legitimately carry better coffee, and unburned beans? (Bitter flavor is a dead ringer for burned beans) Or was I just willing to believe the coffee was better because it was more expensive?
(I think this relates to a grander fact: the "goodness" of any food is relative, which is why everyone's mother is the world's best cook.)
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