Coffee Grumblings

Let's establish a basic fact: Starbucks sucks. In fact, most coffee in the US and Canada is awful. I've found that the majority of coffee on that continent is either watery or burnt and bitter. I can put up with the watery stuff (such as like what finds at Tim Hortons and 7-Eleven) but I just can't understand people actually paying for and enjoying what they get from Starbucks or Caffe Artigiano; their coffee is so bad, bitter, and burnt that one wonders if they cleaned out an ashtray and heated it as a low-cost alternative beverage while charging a whopping premium for it. (Some days, I think that you can sell whatever garbage you want if you just market it properly, and yes, some days I'm grumpy.) I tried dumping out half my mug of Artigiano toxin and replacing it with milk and the beverage was still awful. While living in North America, I coined the phrase, al-qahwatu qit3atun min al-3adhab: coffee is a portion of punishment. Seattle's Best I can actually stomach, though not enjoyably. The only commercial coffee in North America that I actually enjoyed a great deal was Van Houtte. Their coffee is so good that I actually enjoyed their Columbian blend and French roast; with other brands, I normally hate them because they're so bitter. However, the real crown prize goes to Van Houtte's Kenyan blend. The high acidity and subtlety of flavours is to die for. It is no surprise that only 10% of arabica beans meet Van Houtte's standards. There's a saying that when pizza is good, it's really good, and when it's not good, it's still pretty good. This doesn't hold for coffee: there's plenty of repulsive coffee that's not worth drinking.

While I like the plain, unsweetened Bedouin coffee that my in-laws serve, I'm still striving for the perfect cup of sweetened coffee here in Amman. I tried finding Kenyan coffee but it doesn't seem to be readily available. I explained to one coffee seller that I wanted higher acidity. He suggested that I try a nibari blend of two-thirds light roast and one-third dark. (Note: the Arabs do not burn their coffee into oblivion, so what's considered a dark roast in the Arab world is probably medium in other places.) The result was fairly impressive. It was definitely tasty and worth drinking, though it can't match a good cup of Kenyan brew. Now all that remains is for me to find out what Nibar translates to in English: it's an Indian city, but which one? It could be Nurpur, Nagpur, Nandurbar, or a host of other cities that begin with n and end in -pur or -bar.