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If I can’t take my coffee break …

By Me | June 19, 2007

Believe it or not, I was thinking about Godzilla today.

No, silly! Not the monster. I was thinking about the movie — specifically, the 1998 version of the movie and, even more specifically than that, I was thinking about Phillipe Roache (that French agent played by Jean Reno).

Still more specifically, I was thinking about how Phillipe discovered that finding that elusive reptile was much easier than finding a good cup of coffee in the U.S.

I wasn’t paying too much attention last time I was here but this morning, as I was drinking my carafe of coffee, I finally came to understand why so many Europeans find American coffee undrinkable.

Now, I’m not sure about anywhere else but in Spain, they drink coffee very differently than we generally do in America. Here, we have coffee with milk (or cream) when we fill our cups about eight-tenths of the way and add milk for the last two-tenths or less, just to get the coffee to the proper shade of cafe au lait that we like. In other words, we have a little milk in our coffee.

Here, you have a little coffee in your milk.

You kind of have to have it that way, because the coffee they brew is so rich that too much coffee without sufficiently watering it down with milk would probably melt your teeth.

I used to think, you know, that it had to do with a different way of making coffee, where you brew it normally (i.e., like we do in America), then you boil off all the water and drink the resulting mud.

Today, though, I realized that they don’t do that. The stuff isn’t bitter, it’s just incredibly rich. It really is no wonder that our coffee tastes like watery cardboard to them (even when it says ‘French Roast’ on the label).

The roast is different, too, of course. I don’t think they achieve this flavor simply by adding more to the brew, so I doubt there’s any way to approximate this coffee experience at home using Maxwell House. And that’s too bad. I know I’m supposed to be cutting down my caffeine intake but I’ll confess … I like this stuff.

Topics: Stuff |

One Response to “If I can’t take my coffee break …”

  1. Gina Says:
    June 19th, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    haha. I don’t like cofee at all so BEAT THAT!