The Coffee is Fine

As I prepare to depart this little country, I would just like to say something about the coffee. It's fine. No, no, really, it is fine.

At the Hotel Mabi, where I have made my home this week, they have a very nice morning coffee setup. Right next to the buffett line they have twin coffee / cafe au lait machines that let you select coffee strength and style. Select Normal / "Cappuccino" and the machine sprays just the right amount of warm milk into your cup (a good ceramic cup, with the machine manufacter's logo on it), followed by a jet of rich black coffee. It tastes fine, it's good coffee, and since it is free (included with breakfast) only the worst sort of curmudgeon would offer anything but unstinting praise.

Of course to get the full European flavor you need to go out the door, down the street to De Markt, Maastricht's big market square, which is ringed with sidewalk cafes. And every one of them is serving lattes and cappuccinos with good, solid, authentic Italian espresso.



There is nothing wrong with these drinks. They are good, basic, delicious espresso drinks, exactly as they have been served in Europe for my whole life and longer. That's what Europe's about, isn't it, keeping what is good, not changing things that don't need changing. Although, for some reason, I need a couple of these to really wake up in the morning.

Now the Dutch are on the cutting edge of Europe, and my hosts made sure that I tried their new chain Coffee Lovers, which brings even greater dedication to their coffee. Their menu of espresso-based specialty drinks will be familiar to anyone from the Bay Area or Seattle, and the coffee, I must say, is delicious. Like Stabucks, Coffee Lovers favors a deeply roasted - some might feel very slightly over-roasted - espresso with a rich flavor that, like Starbucks' perhaps errs just a slight bit on the bitter side. With fresh Dutch milk it is the finest coffee beverage within the national borders and it really is nice. There was an outlet at the university where I had my conference, and there is another at the local bookstore when I have idled away my hours this weekend, and that delicious roasted espresso latte just hits the spot. It is fine, and very good, and certainly no one in their right mind would complain about it.

It's just, you know...

Um look, didn't the Dutch used to own Indonesia? Indonesian coffee is, like, oh my God. Hey, remember Spinelli's? That awesome place down in Cole Valley that closed back in the 90s? Yeah, they're in Singapore now, no kidding.




The reason people lined up in the rain for that coffee was they had a connection to this Indonesian stuff that was beyond category. I mean flavorful, spicy, rich yet kind of light...shit I'm dreaming of it right now. When the plane lands in Singapore, Spinelli's is always my first stop because just writing this I can taste that celestial brew...savoring its balanced complexity and feeling it working its magic through my central nervous system. Spinelli's, yeah. Awesome stuff.

After Spinelli left town we were left with SBUXtm, Tully's, you know, the usual suspects. And Peet's of course, which is really fine coffee. Not for everyone, of course. It's real strong, double-shot even in a small latte, and roasted pretty aggressively, though, I would argue, not erring on the side of bitterness. Peet's optimizes their espresso for the hot specialty drinks, so their iced drinks suffer (Starbucks' espresso surely ices better), but for a morning wakeup, Peet's is really my only choice anymore. Everything else tastes, well, just a little bland. And of course Peet's is named for its founder, Alfred Peet, a Dutchman who in 1966 opened a little roasting operation in Berkeley and simply accepted no compromises.

In his early years he walked the coffee plantations of Indonesia, and in due course he brought to America the finest Costa Rican and African coffees. When asked to recount his life story, he reportedly said, "the coffee tells my story."

That, my friends, is as triumphant a sentence as a man can utter. His story - his worldliness, his uncompromising demand for excellence, his willingness to endure almost anything but mediocrity - my God, I taste it every morning and I swear, I am ready to go to war. How can I give anything less than my absolute God-damned best at home and at the office when a man has dedicated his life and soul to ensuring that every waking day of my life I will have at least one delicious beverage experience? How could I look my children in the eye at the end of the day if I knew in my heart I had not made that same commitment? How? I ask you.

Perhaps I have drifted a little from my subject... I meant to say, and I mean this, the coffee here in the Netherlands is fine. It's just that I had expected...well, never mind. It is fine, and I am glad. This is a nice place, and to criticize it, for not being something else...would just be unfair.

The coffee is fine.