When did coffee stop being coffee?

And why I love my Nespresso machine and nobody can talk me out of it (unless you know something I don't know, in which case I can be talked out of it, maybe)

I love coffee. I have a tattoo of a heart line that starts with a quill (I have recently explained that I am a fine wanker), includes an espresso cup and a paw.

I'm by no means a coffee snob. I’m more of a Gilmore girls get-it-in-me kind of drinker. But I won’t drink an Americano (that’s a Lorelei mugful of pale brown water), after all, I’m Sicilian. I drink black espresso and I add sugar, which is considered a sin by all the new-school cold brew fanatics. But they are not Sicilian, so what do they know about coffee (or pizza), frankly?

We have a saying: Caffè amaro, vita dolce; Caffè dolce, vita amara. Bitter coffee, sweet life; sweet coffee, bitter life. I’m Sicilian (did I mention that?), and a migrant, so it’s obviously the latter.

At home, I graduated to a Nespresso Virtuo machine¹ (with the proprietary pods that can’t be ripped off by cheaper coffee pod makers, eyeroll). I am telling you this to remind you that I'm really not that precious about my coffee. As long as it’s bitter and sweet. But I am also not adventurous. The many times I travelled through SE Asia in the 90s and 00s I happily slurped down 3-in-1 (milk powder, coffee and sweetener in a sachet or tube, added to water). There were no Starbucks in Burma 20 years ago, and I must have coffee before I do anything, like speaking, showering, seeing people, so 3-in-1 became a close friend. As long as I had some boiled water, I was golden (with fake milk and fake sugar).

Anyway, I used to drink a substantial amount of coffee at a terrific café on Brunswick Street in Melbourne called Atomica. When I was a (capital J) Journalist in 90s/00s, I rented an office half a block away, and I had meetings, interviews, chitchats in that blessed café and when they roasted the beans it was like sitting in the world’s biggest fireplace, but instead of coming out reeking of redwood, I smelled like I was dunked in a bath of coffee cologne. Ah, the coffee.

However, at some stage coffee changed (and the people making coffee got serious, took courses, became baristas). Don’t get me wrong, there have always been cafès making the world’s worst espresso because, unlike a latte or crappuccino, there's nothing for an espresso to hide behind. There’s no milk to sweeten and thicken the syrupy eau-de-vis. Even with white sugar (don't get me started about the very renowned Melbourne coffee shop and roaster I went to recently who only had brown sugar, which is a death knell for espresso) a bad coffee will still be bad. In the last 20 years, I have had less than my finger’s worth of good coffees in Melbourne (considered the home of coffee in Australia). Even mum's coffee that she makes at home on her very old Bialetti Moka Express tastes wish-washy these days.²

Last year, I went to a coffee roaster in Palermo, Sicily, where I learned about Arabica and Robusta beans. For decades, Robusta has been considered the poor man’s bean and the Arabica bean has become the Golden Child of the coffee world. Robusta is what they use in instant coffee jars. Serious coffee drinkers were born (took courses, became baristas etc.).

So what happened to coffee? Wasn’t it just fine? I mean, every 1 euro espresso I had in Sicily was “the best coffee I’ve ever had, and why can’t they just make it like this in Melbourne?”

Then I read an article by James Freeman in Saveur: “The 2023 Coffee Trend Nobody Saw Coming: For decades, arabica beans have been the gold standard—and that might be a huge mistake.”

“…until recently, robusta wasn’t taken seriously among coffee professionals. Of the two main types of coffee, robusta and arabica, the former has long been the ugly duckling… Walk into any specialty coffee shop from Brooklyn to London to Bangkok, and you’ll almost certainly be served arabica…”

According to Freeman, under Mussolini, Italy was poor and politically sequestered, and the only coffee we could get was the robusta beans from North Africa. Just like how Italians turned flour and water into pasta and pizza, we found a way to turn robusta into delicious espresso by first slowly roasting the beans.

“They discovered that robusta could be surprisingly delicious when roasted slowly in their rudimentary coal- and wood-powered machines, which steamed out any off flavors and gave robusta’s scant sugars time to develop. Further, the way Italians brewed their coffee was perfect for robusta. The rapid, high-pressure extraction of espresso gave the liquid body, while the drink’s potent coffee-to-water ratio left the rubbery, gassy flavors in the portafilter.”

Soon everyone wanted it. Skip forward a few decades and Starbucks convinced Americans that robusta, used in the cheapest of instant coffee, was the devil, and they would use only 100% arabica beans, which meant they could charge five bucks a pop. As Freeman explains in Saveur, “Most of today’s coffee professionals came up during arabica’s heydey, so it’s no surprise they look for that bean’s fruitiness when evaluating coffee—those tart apple, grape, and berry notes.”

Via the article and my coffee history, I have learned that coffee is much like beer, and arabica beans are the craft beer of the beer world. You see, beer is meant to be bitter and refreshing. It should not have "notes", it should not taste of forest fruits (that’s why we have jam). Craft beer is the devil, yadda yadda. Modern coffee has caramelly notes and is viscous and fruity and... oh please just give me back my lovely bitter coffee and beer that tastes like beer.

And if you have no white sugar in your café, you have no business being in the business of coffee.

1. On a trip to China a few years back, I was staying in fancy hotels, and they all had Nespresso machines which, for a Sicilian in China, was a godsend. You know what I noticed? Every single coffee from that machine was consistent. From one cup to the next, one day, one week to the next. Consistent. Unlike the Bialetti Moka Express, which is affected by the water, the weather, the flame, the extra half teaspoon of ground beans you tamp into the funnel to make it a little stronger, or you don’t tamp it enough, or you tamp it too much, or you leave it on the stove an extra five seconds, or you looked at it sideways…

2. I assume this is due to one of two reasons:
1. She is buying cheap coffee to save money. I don't know why she is always trying to save money. She’s 80, I’m a married only child with no kids and a business.
2. Menopause (mine). Like how my cousin had curly hair like me her whole life, then when she had her first child in her 20s it became straight and never bounced back to curly. Just like that, there have been a handful of times in my life when coffee became abhorrent, and I couldn’t drink a drop for months. I couldn't handle the smell or flavour at all. Come to think of it, I wonder if I was pregnant. Was it the hormones?