In praise of 'cheap' coffee, the unfussy fuel of the world
Good news at last. Britain, it has been reported, has finally woken up and smelt the cheap coffee. After years of the rash-like spread of primary-coloured coffee chains and artisanal cafés around the country, data from market research firm NPD has shown that fast food restaurants and sandwich shops, such as McDonalds and Upper Crust, have increased sales of the hot drink three times faster than specialist outlets over the last nine years. The war on coffee snobbery has turned, and it is a rich, aromatic and full-bodied victory for common sense.
You will have noticed the rise of the ‘coffee bore’ in the 21st century. Grandly, they tell you they like “good coffee” – by which they generally mean “expensive coffee”. They will test the pH levels of a flat white before consumption; they will happily sit for three hours while their brew drips through a series of conical flasks during rush hour; they actively despise George Clooney as a leader of Philistines. They are all around us, and if you haven’t noticed them, you're probably one. A fool.
The truth – unpalatable as it might be to some – is that cheap, ‘bad’ coffee is the best and only kind you should buy. Around the world, people know it.
The realisation that sashaying into your workplace with a branded, black filter from Greggs is Perfectly Acceptable may have only recently reached the shores of this once tea-drinking nation, but in America, the weak and bitter ‘cup of Joe’ is a national icon. It isn’t a round of soy, cinnamon lattes they’re drinking in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, it’s probably shoddy brown muck.
In Colombia, where they reap the rewards of our coffee culture, people tend to drink what the rest of the world doesn’t want. They take the the rejected crop, saturate it with sugar and turn it into tinto (meaning ‘ink’), and drink that all day, every day. And they can, you know, because cheap coffee tends to have less caffeine in it, meaning you can keep going back for more at any time, without fear of a mid-afternoon coronary spasm.
In our office at Telegraph Towers, we have a canteen for speciality coffees and a glossy automatic thing for slightly less speciality coffees. Then, tucked away in one corner by a fire escape in the newsroom, there is a decrepit old hot drinks vending machine. It looks as if it hasn’t been changed since the Cold War, and audibly groans whenever you ask it to do anything. But assuming you bypass the ‘soup’ option (unimaginable horror) and avoid anything with milk in (an anthrax-like powder), the cup of black coffee it provides is the ideal, cheap fuel to get through the day.
It is a drink my Pret A Manger Oat Cappuccino-drinking colleagues ridicule me for relying on. The most favourable observation they have is that it looks like foamy canal water. The least favourable is that it resembles a cup of steaming dysentery. I cannot deny either, but to me it is just coffee. And it’s perfect.
