Coffee Is Like Languages, Different From One Place To Another

Interestingly to me, coffee seems to be very much tied to local cultures and as varied and unique to a place as the language can be. Even in our age of Starbucks, so I guess individualism is not totally dead yet in our global world.

In the United States coffee is a relatively simple affair. Yes we have lattes, cappuccinos, frappuccinos, and so on, but plain coffee still is the mainstay. Bad coffee seems to take on a certain pride too and I can understand why Europeans think our coffee is garbage. But that is because they tend to like more fancy coffee, like lattes and cappuccinos, these are the same people who put ketchup on steak. I could not even find coffee like what they serve in the U.S., in Europe even at Starbucks.

In Botswana they drink instant coffee with milk out of a box. It is not really something you enjoy and frankly I suspect it is there more for the westerners. Since I did not spend time in a Botswana town I guess it is a bit hard for me to judge how the people from Botswana drink their coffee, but at our bush camp they drank it as instant with milk from a box and people really liked it.

They drink plain "American" coffee in South Africa but I am not sure that is the typical way they drink it and whatever coffee they drink, it is loaded with milk. Like half of it is milk. I would order coffee with just a little milk and tell them “it is impossible for you to put too much in it” and even then they always put 2x or 3x more milk then I usually put in.

Peru they like to drink coffee with no milk but lots and lots of sugar. In fact they always look at me strange when I would order coffee with some milk on the side. “You want a café con leche” they would say, no I want coffee with a little milk on the side. They are not the same thing but they could never quite get that in Peru so I gave up and just drank café con leche. Also they give you this coffee syrup thing that you add to hot water. Don’t know how to describe it other than something like a coffee concentrate you have to dilute.

In Croatia and Bosnia they tend to drink Turkish coffee, or Bosnian coffee, which I am told in Bosnia is different but I failed to understand how. This coffee is served in a pot they put over a torch and has coffee grind muck on the bottom. You don’t finish the coffee and are supposed to leave some of it behind doe to the muck. You also drink it out of little cups and they add lots of sugar like in Peru. I bought a Bosnian coffee set and have to figure out how to make it.

In Berlin and Prague you essentially drink a cappuccino, latte or espresso drink. They don’t seem to have simple coffee, a cappuccino, latte or espresso are simple coffee drinks. They have Starbucks here but they don’t have what I call “regular coffee” either. They have Coffee Americano but that is not exactly the same thing ether and more like an espresso drink.

Amsterdam if you go to the coffee shop you get a pot joint. I had to laugh as I heard somebody saying that you tell the Americans not to go to the coffee shop for coffee in the morning as I did on my last day. I did not know the pot houses would still be open at 7 am and just assumed. Of note they do have Starbucks in Amsterdam but it is just “Starbucks” and not “Starbucks Coffee”. Coffee shows up nowhere in the name or logos.