I spent a decade of my life working in the coffee industry, mostly for small independently owned roasters. I know very well good coffee from bad coffee, and still, after all these years, love everything from a really well roasted medium-dark Columbia brewed in a french press to a light, fruity, syrupy Ethiopia brewed in a chemex. I have a whole cabinet devoted to coffee, and a nice grinder and electric kettle with variable temperature control.
I'm not here to nerd out about coffee or gear or whatever, though. There's enough of that on youtube. What I want to talk about is cheap coffee. The yellow vacuum sealed bricks of "espresso" that are all somehow imported from some New Jersey warehouse. Cafe Bustelo, Cafe Morro, it doesn't matter what the name is. There's something about that coffee, roasted in some massive facility, with branding that hasn't changed since its first day on the shelves decades ago, brewed in a stove top moka pot, and poured into a small ceramic cup with a decent amount of milk that somehow doesn't even penetrate the strength of the coffee, that just hits the spot.
I think its because it takes me back to a time before coffee was this pretentious, well branded, social media friendly commodity. Before third wave, fourth wave, whatever nth wave we're on now, when you either liked coffee or you didn't. A bag of coffee was something you picked up with all your other groceries, in one place, and it wasn't a status symbol, or a way of showing how informed your palate was. It was just about a morning routine, rolling out of bed, packing it into a moka pot or a Mr. Coffee dripper, saturating it in a french press maybe, and then going back to getting dressed for work, or making the bed on a lazy weekend, while it brewed and filled the whole house with a wonderful aroma that somehow isn't present in the same way in today's specialty coffee.
A lot of the appeal, for me, to drinking cheap coffee, is not the fact that it is much easier on the wallet, if that was the case, I wouldn't have a bag of it in addition to a bag of good coffee. Its that sometimes its nice to not care. I don't mean that in a negative way at all. I just enjoy not trying to always be well curated, or careful with every detail of my life. Sometimes I just want to enjoy a simple cup of coffee, knowing that it is just that. Coffee. Knowing that when my mom talked about using a moka pot in the 80s to brew Cafe Bustelo with her friend from college, it tasted exactly like this. Nostalgia definitely plays into it. I like old things, I like old ways of doing every day habits. I also enjoy when the act of making coffee doesn't get in the way of my life, but is happening at the same time as other things I'm doing.
When I say its nice to not care, I want to talk about how if you're not actively caring about the way you brew your coffee in the morning, you can put that care into any number of other things. In a way its like conserving personal energy for the things you really, truly enjoy, and want to make known that you care about. Something like making coffee was important to me when I was actively working in that industry, because in order to do my job I had to be very knowledgeable about pretty much every part of the production and brewing process. That's not my life anymore though, and I think learning to appreciate simple ways of brewing coffee, whether its cheap or not, is important to this conservation of my personal energy.
I've also found that when I use a moka pot, I can only brew one cup at a time. I savor each sip, and sit there and enjoy my morning. If I finish my cup, and want another, I have to wash the moka pot out, dry it, and go through the whole process again. That little bit of friction forces me to think do I really need more coffee, or is this enough?