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dfdc

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Everything posted by dfdc

  1. It would probably cost you $100 an hour if you wanted a barista to bring an espresso machine to your house, plumb it in, and make you coffee while your toilet is backing up.
  2. Oh, definitely. I drink coffee for both reasons, and sometimes for one or the other. You'll definitely catch me shaking the cobwebs out with some McD's coffee if that's what's available but I'm not carefully brewing $30 a pound coffee at home because I don't have Red Bull in the fridge.
  3. After disclosing that I manage the coffee operation for a Counter Culture account here in DC, I'd like to back my friend Nick up about the value of great coffee, which I've had at Mid-City. Green coffee has historically been ridiculously cheap, as has coffeehouse labor. These factors have affected our conceptions of what a cup of coffee should cost. Great coffee can provide an amazing culinary experience if we open ourselves up to it, having far more aromatic complexity than anything else we ingest. The more we focus on coffee for pleasure rather than for fuel, the more we can appreciate all the hard work that goes into growing, processing, roasting and brewing coffee. Good coffee takes a lot of environmental input and labor to produce. Inexpensive coffee pretty much insures that farmers at the bottom of the pay chain don’t make much money and that the environment isn’t being looked after. I contend that much of the price difference between a great coffee and a great wine doesn’t have to do with the sensory experience they provide or the cost to produce them, but rather is due to wine being grown by people who live in places like Napa or the Rhone Valley, and coffee being grown by people like the tribal members of Papua New Guinea’s Waghi Valley. If you want to get all political, an argument could be made that coffee is cheap in part because we’re willing to perpetuate the economic dynamics of colonial exploitation. Also, as long as we treat coffee like fast food and pay baristas like fast food register people, coffee quality will be low. Fast coffee is not good coffee, and our expectation for fast coffee means that shops making good coffee need to be heavily staffed with good baristas, like those at Mid-City who spent many hours learning about coffee and practicing making drinks before the shop opened. Good baristas are rare. They are skilled craftspeople and should be paid like one. That’s going to affect the price. The purpose of good coffee is not to be used as a paper weight to hold down papers claiming a space in a business being treated like a public library or state park. In order to find value in great coffee it needs to be appreciated for being pleasurable to drink and not for fueling an addiction.
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