this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Coffee
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The Magical Fruit
The Oromo people would customarily plant a coffee tree on the graves of powerful sorcerers. They believed that the first coffee bush sprang up from the tears that the god of heaven shed over the corpse of a dead sorcerer.
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I'm glad you bring that up right away. This is actually the whole reason I reacted. I am really tired of having to hunt down places where I can get reasonably good coffee, and note them so I can return. I often get the wrong drink when ordering "coffee". As a result, I got the equipment to make it myself. However, it still triggers me when I see people referring to "Milk coffee" as "Coffee". It is so not the same drink.
And, part of the reason why I cannot get "coffee" when ordering literally "coffee", is this. As you put it, it is so common to add milk or sugar to coffee. Well, there's nothing wrong with liking milk or sugar (in moderation), but then let's be honest, that person likes milk and/or sugar, not coffee. It's just a variation on "hot chocolate". Which BTW suffers from the exact same issue. Give 99% chocolate to people who say they like chocolate, and check their face: they like sugar and fat, not chocolate. But chocolate isn't the subject at hand, so let's focus on coffee.
"Milk coffee". "Cream coffee". Wait, did I just invent those!? 🤯
Just to name a few.
No, "asshole coffee" already has a name, it is "diarrhea". Besides, it is absolutely not safe to drink, I would not recommend.
I'll just refer to your note there. No, it isn't consistent. There is a similar problem with espresso. I take that you live in a large city, with established customs and where you can reasonably expect "X product" to range from "here" to "there" with variations pertaining to attention to detail, skill, quality of the products, etc. But I do not, and in many places, you simply cannot order a "cortado". The staff will look at you in a state of partial confusion and will dismiss your request with an explicit list of what they have. Which will likely be "tea, coffee, soda, lemonade, sirup and various alcohols". In which case ordering the "coffee" will be akin to playing a sort of (white) russian roulette, if I may, but with coffee as a theme.
Yes, people sometimes ask if you want milk in it. In which case I usually order a different drink, because I know their "coffee" will likely not taste good without it.
That is a bug, not a feature. It is actually the whole reason I reacted. We all share a usage of the word "coffee". But there is probably as many definitions of it as there are people using it, so we clearly do not share the meaning of that term.
This is, BTW, much less of a problem with milk coffee, or cream coffee, since milk or cream has orders of magnitude less variation. It's always cow milk, usually 1.5 or 3% fat, etc. Maybe it's slightly different with the word cream, since apparently some people would use plain "heavy" cream.