Hipsters ruined my espresso
A rant
In the months leading to my daughter’s birth, conscious that I didn’t need the additional anxiety, I quit coffee. When I came back to the cup two years later, I did it in a caf in Dalston. This must have been mid-2013 and at the time I wasn’t familiar with the semiotics of dark grey walls and heavily-tattooed and heavily-bearded baristas. I didn’t make much of the ubiquity of Apple products in a given place. Nor did I pay much attention to a quirky wifi password, or Bruce Springsteen blasting ironically from the speakers. When my espresso arrived I was surprised by what food writer Jay Rayner would describe with grace and piercing accuracy a year later: “The colour is right. Its coal black and across the surface is a fine, seashore foam of copper-coloured froth, the all important "crema". The taste, however, is wrong. Very wrong.” I thought that my espresso was perhaps burnt and sent it back. The second cup tasted very wrong too and I attributed the spiteful flavour to me falling out of love with coffee after a long hiatus. It took me a while to figure out that this was a new kind of coffee: light roast, the name of the offending blend, a terrible notion allegedly exported from hip coffee houses in Melbourne to the rest of the world.