Eddie’s food annoyances: being served that tasteless coffee

Adeline (nickname: Eddie) loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Things usually go well, but sometimes they don’t. In the series Eddie’s food annoyances you can read about the latter. This time: the crime of tasteless coffee.

My coffee career began roughly like this. When I was 12, I thought it was cool to drink coffee. My family allowed it, but it had to be black. Coffee with milk wasn’t coffee. So I would already power through my exams with that filthy coffee from the vending machine. Let’s just say it shaped me. I’m the kind of coffee drinker who prefers filter coffee to oat milk, which is exceptional for a millennial like me.

The only deviation I make is during a heatwave, when you might catch me drinking a freddo espresso. Not to be confused with the disgusting frappé that’s made with instant coffee, by the way.

High treason

I also owe some close friendships to that craving for coffee. You could say coffee brings people together. Real coffee snobs recognize one another by their raised noses. I’m even so bad that people who aren’t real coffee drinkers think I’m more of a tea person.

So for years now, I’ve visited someone every month for a little personal maintenance. The person in question thinks I’m not a coffee drinker, but I already start to panic when I see the salmon-pink Senseo (who came up with that color?) proudly standing in the corner. So I always have a little tea there. That amounts to high treason among coffee drinkers, but drinking tasteless coffee is the alternative, and that’s possibly even worse.

Something’s not right

Coffee is – just like the house wine on the menu – a kind of barometer for me when it comes to a restaurant. If your coffee isn’t right, something is wrong. Not just with your coffee, but with everything. The theory goes like this: if you’re too lazy to grind decent beans, you probably toss the food onto a plate without any love as well. Maybe that’s a bit exaggerated, but isn’t there a tiny grain of truth in it?

Pride by proxy

My coffee standards are so high that when I’m abroad, I immediately look for a suitable coffee spot. A Greek hotel owner and friend even complained to me a little that ‘we Dutch people’ make such a fuss about coffee. It was strange, but I felt proud by proxy of every coffee snob who had stayed there before me.

Of course we make a fuss about it—why would you settle for a kind of slightly too strongly brewed tea or a tasteless cup of coffee? Or worse: instant coffee. For f**k’s sake. There are places in Greece where they only have that powdered rubbish for you. After three days, things get serious, because that’s when the inner struggle between principles and caffeine begins.

Boomerang

But the very worst thing only happened to me recently. I bought a new coffee maker, which meant I had to switch coffees. You have to search a little to find the flavor that suits you. And then, as a coffee snob, you end up buying disgusting coffee yourself. What a disgrace.

Also read:

• Eddie’s food annoyances: flavor combinations that make no sense whatsoever
• Eddie’s food annoyances: those people who don’t like anything
• Eddie’s food annoyances: the battle with plastic wrap