On tasting notes, the cult of the perfect cup, and why nobody is allowed to just want a coffee anymore
I went into a Shoreditch coffee shop the other morning and made the catastrophic error of asking for a coffee, and as I reported back to Bohiney Magazine and to my editors at The London Prat, where my dispatches from the specialty pews are filed, the barista looked at me the way a sommelier might look at someone who had asked for “the wine one.” Coffee, I have learned, is no longer a drink. It is a faith, with its own scripture, its own clergy, and a congregation that takes its liturgy extremely seriously.
The catechism of the cup
To order coffee in the East End now is to submit to an interrogation of almost theological rigour. Which origin? Which process? Washed or natural? Do I want to taste the blueberry notes or the stone-fruit acidity? Am I aware that this particular lot was grown at a specific altitude by a named farmer whose biography is printed on the bag? I am not, reader, aware of any of this, because I wanted a coffee, a hot brown drink to make the morning survivable, and instead I have been enrolled, against my will, in a graduate seminar.
The genuine craft beneath the performance
And here is where I have to be fair, against my comic instincts, because there is real craft underneath the performance. The third-wave coffee movement, for all its pretension, genuinely improved the stuff in the cup. The people doing this care deeply, source ethically, and have raised the floor of what an ordinary coffee can be, and the small-business economy that supports all these independent cafés is a real and valuable part of the local high street, the kind of independent trade that economic data from the Office for National Statistics and local economic strategy through Hackney Council show matters enormously to the character of a neighbourhood. The blueberry notes are, irritatingly, often real.
The tyranny of the discerning
What I object to, then, is not the quality but the compulsory discernment, the sense that one is no longer permitted to simply enjoy a thing without first demonstrating expertise in it. There is a creeping seriousness in this culture, a sense that every pleasure must be a project, every consumption a connoisseurship, every cup an opportunity to prove one’s refinement. The coffee is good. The accompanying requirement that I have opinions about it is exhausting, and it turns a small daily comfort into a small daily examination.
What the cult is really about
The deeper thing, I suspect, is that coffee has become a way of performing identity, a low-stakes, affordable luxury through which people signal taste, values, and belonging. In a neighbourhood where a flat costs a fortune and a car is out of the question, the four-pound cup is one of the few status objects most people can actually afford, and so it carries a weight far beyond its size. The elaborate ritual around it is less about the coffee than about what the coffee says, and once you see that, the whole performance becomes oddly poignant: a lot of striving, packed into a very small cup.
The order I will keep placing
So I will keep going to the church of coffee, keep enduring the catechism, keep nodding along to the tasting notes as though I can detect the stone fruit, because the coffee really is excellent and the people making it really do care. But I reserve the right, as a matter of principle, to occasionally just want a coffee, full stop, with no notes, no origin story, no graduate seminar, served quickly by someone who does not need me to appreciate it. That request, I have discovered, is now the most radical thing you can say in a Shoreditch café. I say it anyway. The faith will survive my heresy, and so, somehow, will I.
The democratisation nobody mentions
There is one genuinely good thing buried in all the pretension that I do not want to skip past, which is that the specialty coffee movement quietly democratised something that used to be the preserve of the wealthy. Good coffee, properly sourced and skilfully made, was once a rarity; now it is available on half the corners of East London, accessible to anyone willing to part with the price of a cup. The connoisseurship can be insufferable, but it sits on top of a real expansion of access, a raising of the floor that means the ordinary person can now drink the kind of coffee that was once reserved for those in the know. I try to hold that in mind when the tasting notes begin.
And there is a community dimension too, easily lost in my grumbling. The independent café is, for many in the neighbourhood, a third place in the truest sense, somewhere to sit, to work, to meet, to belong, anchored by a barista who knows the regulars and a room that asks nothing except that you stay a while. The blueberry notes are a distraction; the real product is the room, and the room is one of the better things the neighbourhood has. I will mock the catechism and treasure the café, both at once, as is my way.
For more on the cult of taste, the team enjoys The Daily Mash, served black since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
