We're in Nice now, and I've had two interesting coffee experiences I want to share.
The first is a cappuccino during lunch, which came with added sugar and chocolate. I can more or less understand the idea, because in many ways cappuccinos and lattes are dessert drinks, with a small amount of coffee and a lot of milk. Latte machiattos are even more so in the same vein. But I just don't get adding stuff like that before giving it to the customer, rather than giving them the tools to be depraved with their coffee themselves.
After dinner we were given the dessert menu and to my surprise they had extensive coffee listings, including five named origins: Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, Pure Colombian, Moka Ethiopian, and Java Blue Mountain. It wasn't specified what brewing method would be used (my wife was hoping for French Press, or what she hoped they would call.... "Press"). I ordered Moka Ethiopian out of curiosity, and it came out espresso style.
First, 'Pure Colombian' was an interesting term, and not one I'd associate with coffee first and foremost. Second, Moka Ethiopian is a strange term. Moka coffees generally describe coffees that come from the Arabian peninsula, such as Yemen. Ethiopia is the origin of coffee, and there it grows wild. Maybe it was a blend.
As for taste, I knew what I was in for when they put the cup in front of me. Ethiopian and most other African coffees tend to have a lot of acidity, which give them a tanginess similar to the bite of citric acid. It can make them outstanding, and pretty much unsuited for espresso.
The ending taste of a coffee is dependant on many things, including:
Coffee origin - the factors here are the strain of the plant being used, soil conditions, weather conditions, and processing/storage.
Brewing method - brewing coffee is all about getting the oils out of the beans and into the water while leaving in as much of the bitter compounds as possible, each brewing style attempts to do this in a different way and tend towards different tasting characteristics.
Unfortunately, the espresso brewing style tends to highlight acidity, and if you take a coffee that is highly acidic to begin with it can be overwhelming. This is what I knew would happen when the waiter set down the Moka Ethiopian, and sure enough it had a strong bite like a lemon juice. Drinkable, tasty, but if it were me I would have definitely gone with a vacuum brewing method instead. Not the best use of the beans at all, if not a waste.
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