Text | Jiang Yinlong
If there is a "chain of contempt" in the coffee world, then American coffee is too easy to be listed at the bottom of this chain. The standard practice of American coffee is to first fill the cup with about eight full hot water, and then pour two cups of well-extracted espresso directly into it - intuitively, American coffee is equal to the espresso with water, and American milk is equal to latte (espresso with milk and milk foam) with water, which is obviously difficult to have too much ceremony.
The "contempt" for American coffee reached its zenith in France. The French call American coffee "jus de chaussette," which is an allusive term. During the Franco-Prussian War, French soldiers could not carry special coffee utensils on the march, so they had to simply and rudely smash the coffee beans with hard objects such as gun butts, and then boil them in an iron pot, and the only filter material they could find was socks. After the war, "sock juice" became a general term for bad coffee, until American coffee inherited this "laurel".
The variety of coffee
Interestingly, espresso is also pejorative in the United States. Similar to the European political terms "champagne socialism" and "caviar left", the American "latte liberalism" is also used to describe the "why not eat meat" type of upper class. These social elites, who have long achieved financial freedom, drink lattes in boutique cafes while chanting liberal slogans, and the smell of coffee masks exquisite egoism.
The irony between American coffee and espresso has long been irrelevant to the taste of the drink itself. Espresso mixed with water is not of course lower than espresso, and espresso with milk and milk bubbles does not necessarily make people "elitist" poisoned. This kind of ridicule represents the collision of two cultures, and the collision of cultures will naturally lead to two unique histories.
Plain ice American
Traditional coffee: an ancient and intricate sense of ritual
Since the 20th century, cafes have been dominated by espresso: the first stop of coffee in Europe was Venice. But since it was "introduced", the source of coffee naturally had to continue to go back east along the route of the Venetian merchants — the birthplace of coffee was neither in Europe nor Asia, but in the Ethiopian plateau of East Africa.
Until the 21st century, ethiopians' cumbersome cooking processes show the longevity of their coffee traditions. It often takes Ethiopians more than an hour to make a cup of home-cooked coffee: drinkers start by washing their own exposed coffee cherries, removing the peel and pulp from them, leaving the beans behind. Then sprinkle spices on the fire to fill the room with aroma, then heat the coffee beans on the fire with an iron plate and stir with an iron hook. After a few minutes, the coffee beans will appear "first burst", to be roasted until golden brown, pour them into a mortar, grind it with a pestle to form a fine powder, and then pour the ground coffee powder into a clay pot, add cardamom, cinnamon and other spices to cook together...
There is no doubt that even the most literary and artistic café in France or Japan cannot compete with the traditional Ethiopian coffee in terms of ceremony, and the Ethiopian coffee cooking method reflects the delicate pursuit of the coffee itself, coffee utensils, drinking occasions and other aspects, almost "coffee road". It is worth noting that traditional Ethiopian coffee does not have this procedure of filtering, and drinkers may drink some suspended coffee powder, but most of the residue will remain at the bottom of the cup. This unfiltered "fundamentalist" coffee has a strong taste, and its wild and rugged nature complements the African flair.
Ethiopian traditional coffee
Soon, the coffee spread across the narrow Red Sea to Yemen in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula. At first, Sufi followers of Islam began drinking coffee in order to stay awake during prayer rituals, but soon this magical drink went from religion to earth. "Kaveh Kanes" (cafes) began to sprang up in the streets, and the wealthy even built cafes at home. By the end of the 15th century, Muslims had brought coffee to the entire Islamic world and had given birth to a relatively mature café culture. People are happy to talk about the past and the present in cafes, and cafes have naturally become a distribution center for social information. A century later, Edward Lloyd founded Lloyd's club based on the café he ran, which relied on the well-informed flow of information in the café.
Of course, rhetoric often goes hand in hand with trouble. In 1511, Kyle Berg, the governor of Mecca in the Ottoman Empire, discovered that a satirical poem was circulating in the cafés and ordered the closure of all cafes in Mecca in a fit of rage. Of course, this ban did not and could not last long, and coffee fans were everywhere in the government and the public, including even the Sultan himself. But the Kyle Berg incident does reflect one aspect of café culture: coffee is exciting, and cafes provide a great place for people to communicate, which will give birth to new ideas, cultures, and even revolutions.
Arabic coffee
In the face of the long history of coffee, the history of coffee filtration is extremely short. Ethiopian coffee, Arabic coffee, Turkish coffee, these traditional coffees are unfiltered, as are Greek coffees that are heavily influenced by Turkish coffee. If coffee had not stepped into Europe, if coffee had brought with it the traditional way of brewing coffee after entering Europe, if Europeans had not started to develop filters by chance or necessity... Without all this, American coffee and espresso would not exist, and the French, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Brazilians would all spend a long time in a room full of aromas like the Ethiopians, tasting a cup of coffee with various spices and a little powder floating.
This did not happen in the end, because coffee, after its introduction to Europe, took a different path.
Turkish coffee
Espresso: Revolution and Elitism
When coffee entered Europe, it brought with it café culture. In 1615, Venetian merchants first brought coffee to Italy, and just a few decades later, the café sailed north from the Apennine Peninsula to London. Because the Ottoman Empire strictly forbade the production of green coffee beans, Europe did not have the ability to produce coffee, from a macro point of view, this seems to lead to two results: first, coffee was originally mainly popular in the aristocracy, Ethiopian small fireman cooking home-cooked coffee can not appear in the life of the general public, coffee lack of civilian color; second, compared to the drinking function of coffee itself, the social function of cafes is more valued by Europeans, which further deepens the attributes of coffee "social drinks".
More importantly, of course, coffee was introduced to Europe at the right time of the Enlightenment. In the kingdoms ruled by monarchs, with the undercurrent of ideas of freedom, democracy and equality, and the need for a suitable social occasion for the emerging bourgeois elite, the café "arrived as promised" and established its important position in the coming centuries.
Early European cafes
During the Ottoman Empire, people satirized the poetry of those in power in cafes, while in Enlightenment Europe, countless poets, believers, students, writers, philosophers, and revolutionaries flocked to cafes to explore the possibilities of a future for mankind. Ideas themselves are endlessly powerful, and the ideas that come together are more like explosives—before the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Parisian cafés were filled with the most fearless "heretics" in all of France, and it was these people who eventually brought the Bourbon dynasty to its knees.
Coffee changed Europe not so much as coffee. When a café opens in one place, it will naturally bring together the most radical and talented people in the area, and people come to the café for the sake of atmosphere and freedom, and coffee has become the icing on the cake. At least at the end of the 17th century, the coffee drunk by Europeans was still unfiltered traditional coffee, which can be deduced from the fortune tellers who walked widely in cafes at that time. After the traditional coffee is drunk, the bottom residue will be left behind, and the coffee cup will be upside down to the plate, and the fortune teller can predict the auspiciousness through the shape of these residues, such as the full moon represents good luck, the half moon represents stability, the new moon represents caution, and the three-day moon represents not very smooth... There is no shortage of romance with a strong classical flavor.
Coffee divination
So, until this time, Europe had not really developed its own coffee culture. In the early 18th century, the French invented a soaked coffee similar to the teabag of later generations, and added milk to form café au lait (literally milk coffee), but compared to the delicate and intricate Ethiopian coffee, this kind of coffee is more like fast-moving consumer goods.
In the 19th century, coffee filters represented by french pressure pots and siphon pots were invented, and European coffee really embarked on the road of independent development. Europeans gradually began to buy roasted coffee beans to grind and brew at home, but the soul of European coffee has always been in cafes. With the advent of espresso machines at the beginning of the 20th century, espresso bars once again became a favorite social place for Europeans, especially Italians. Cafes are to Italians just as izakayas are to Japanese, who are used to standing and chatting with friends while drinking coffee in their hands, and then get up and leave when they're done. Lattes, cappuccinos, Luxretes, Macchiato, Corriot and other espresso-based classic coffees were conceived in this café culture and spread around the world.
European coffee culture, with the café as its soul, has developed a distinctive coffee style in just one hundred years. However, comparing European coffee to traditional Ethiopian coffee, the process of making and drinking it is still too simplified. Espresso is undoubtedly devoid of ritual, but the world is so wonderful — because the more "sloppy" American coffee has come to life on the other side of the Atlantic.
Upright siphon pot
American Coffee: Wild and Civilian Spirit
Far from the birthplace of coffee in the Americas, coffee's connection to the New World began with European colonial expansion. In the early 17th century, the Dutch smuggled a coffee tree from the Ottoman Empire and planted it successfully in Southeast Asia, and gave a coffee tree seedling to France decades later. In 1723, a French officer broke through many difficulties to bring coffee seeds and cultivation techniques to the French colony of Martinique in Central America, and the spark of coffee has been burning in Latin America since then, and until the 21st century, Latin America is still one of the most important coffee producing areas in the world.
Coffee has high requirements for the terrain and climate of the place of origin, and the United States is not suitable for coffee cultivation, but Americans have quickly become fans of coffee. This is not because the United States is close to Latin America and "close to the water to get the moon first", the United States was originally a British colony, deeply affected by the British tea drinking wind, but after the Boston tea dumping incident, inhibiting tea became "politically correct", and tea substitute coffee naturally became more and more popular. During the war in 1812, Britain imposed a tea embargo on the United States, and the French, who were close to the United States, popularized coffee, and the Americans' preference for coffee became more fanatical. At the same time, Brazil has become an important producer of coffee, and Americans can buy coffee at a very low price, so the positioning of coffee at the beginning of the popularity in the United States is a civilian beverage. While it also has a social attribute, coffee in the eyes of Americans is clearly more functional than the café-centric coffee culture in Europe.
Boston Tea Party
As evidenced by this, coffee had become a necessity for American pioneers during the Westward Movement. A surveyor at the time noted that coffee was "an essential on the menu of the Western Prairies." The pioneers could endure any hardship if they had coffee and tobacco; without these two things they would lose the impetus to move forward and be depressed."
As a functional drink, American coffee was tainted with the rugged, direct color of the Americans at the beginning of its introduction. While Europeans were busy studying elaborate filters, American "coffee experts" tried to enhance the sedimentation of coffee grounds by adding strange additions to the brewing of coffee. These additives include eggs, eggshells, cod, eel skins...
Wild Americans have "improved" coffee in their own way, and coffee has gradually become the "national drink" of Americans in the process of this "improvement". During the Civil War, coffee became the most important pay for the U.S. Army, and some Sharpskabine guns even designed stocks that could be used to hang bean grinders — in this environment, Americans did not invent slang such as "sock juice", naturally not a matter of taste, but temperament. In any case, by the 1870s at the latest, the Consumption of Coffee in the United States was already 6 times that of all of Europe, and although it was not as exquisite as Europeans in tasting coffee, Americans should also have more say.
Coffee Coffee trees, botanically, belong to...
After the outbreak of World War II, American soldiers took their beloved coffee to the European and Pacific theaters. Compared with the Civil War, the supply of World War II was more difficult, and American soldiers had to accept lighter coffee and fresher instant coffee; civilians in the latter began to use various methods to make diluted coffee in order to save more coffee for the army. Americans who fought in distant places obviously could not be compared with the Europeans who still maintained a high taste of coffee in the wreckage of the city, and after several years of war, Americans had become accustomed to light coffee, and American coffee was formed under the baptism of this difficult time.
World War II played an important role in the history of coffee spread, and in a sense, the American soldiers' love of coffee provided the basis for the three waves of coffee after the war. The world was affected by the trend of Americans drinking coffee in the war, and at the same time, the ancient European countries with deep historical accumulation could sublimate their contempt for American coffee, but thinking of France, a former colonial power that was defeated by Germany in World War II, and Italy's poor performance in World War II, their sense of superiority in the coffee world seems to be dusted.
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epilogue
If coffee is regarded as an art, then it has been conceived in the Ethiopian period, fermented by the Arab and Ottoman empires, and has its own system, and the coffee art of this period is far from being comparable to the later espresso or American coffee. But Ethiopian traditional coffee has not been able to affect the world, coffee is with the footsteps of European colonists to other corners of the world, from this point of view, the world's coffee culture was zeroed out and revived in the age of great navigation, and espresso and American coffee are representatives of European coffee culture and American coffee culture. The former represents elitism, while the latter is more liberal and populist.
However, although the Age of Discovery expanded the origin and consumption of coffee in the world, coffee was still some distance away from the "world drink" at this time. Coffee as a crop, its origin has included Southeast Asia, Latin America, but as a drink coffee is neither "Oriental" nor "Latin American", it is still "European and American". Europe contributed to the exquisite and violent café culture, and the United States contributed to the world's largest coffee consumption, these two forces have been amplified by the strong national power of Europe and the United States. Coffee truly became the world's drink, which was finally realized in the three "coffee waves" after World War II. The war between American soldiers in the world drove the first wave of coffee, and the commercial operations of American coffee merchants on the home territory drove the second wave of coffee; ." The rough and "lack of cultural accumulation" of the American coffee industry has actually created a second wave of coffee; Coffee has become the world's drink thanks to the United States, which can not but be said to be a typical black humor. After understanding this long history of coffee culture, can american coffee and espresso be simply fixed on the "chain of contempt"?
Coffee does have a high or low score, but it is by no means standard for espresso or American coffee.