Coffee Nerdism
Hi! I’m Mathias, and I’m a coffee nerd.
Let me just go ahead and warn you right up front: Coffee nerdism is a downward spiral! There, I said it. Now that we got that out of the way, let’s get to the photo. What do you see? Beans. Coffee beans. Roasted coffee beans. Locally roasted coffee beans, to be fully specific.
When you get a nice espresso machine, it starts to be all about the bean. You don’t buy pre-ground coffee anymore, that should be obvious. You buy freshly roasted beans. I started looking around our neighborhood, and before I knew it I found three roasters in a one-kilometer radius. That’s awesome. When you look a bit closer you realize that there’s not only much coffee love in Berlin, but also a lot of local roasters, most of them caring about a really good bean, and about a good roast.
The next thing you obviously need is a grinder. Of course you can have the shop grind the beans, but it needs to be as fresh as possible, otherwise it’ll lose a lot of its deliciousness quickly. Luckily we already had one before, but now that I know better, our old espresso maker didn’t do it any justice.
But it doesn’t end there, when you start talking to the real coffee nerds in the shops, they give you all kinds of advice, the most important one being that you should clean the machine and most importantly the brewing head, mercilessly. It must become a ritual to let water go through it before and after the shot. You need a blind filter to clean the insides of the brewing head. And the list goes on.
The downsides of really caring about coffee is that you get very picky about the coffee shops you go to. But then again, if the coffee shop doesn’t care as much about coffee as you do, why bother? Coffee for me is all about enjoyment, it’s not about caffeine getting me high and worked up. I like good coffee, I like a good flat white, I like a neatly pulled ristretto. I stopped drinking my espresso without sugar, for the most part, mainly because without it, you really get to suck in the full aroma of it.
As if I didn’t have enough things to worry about with film photography and Polaroids. But seriously, I think there’s worse things than coffee to be picky about.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pull myself a ristretto.
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