For my last article about coffee, you can find it here.
As I’ve moved to Toronto and work in an office on most days, my coffee consumption has skyrocketed. I’ll get coffee at work, on weekends, meeting with friends – I am addicted. I have even made the conscious decision that I will not use the coffee machine at work anymore because when I do, I’m drinking like 2-4 coffees a day which I think is a bit excessive. Nowadays, I go out of my way to go to a new cafe or I deliberately will go to a coffee place that I’ve tried before and know that I’ll like. I also hate to admit this but I’m starting to turn my nose up to drip coffee and will rarely ever drink it if it’s offered to me. The drip just don’t hit. I want something that will punch me in the face with flavour and intensity.
I love espresso though. When I try out a new cafe for the first time, I will get a double espresso and if it’s good I will come back for a cortado. It’s like when I try a new pizza place and get cheese. It’s the control for me. I don’t know what makes a good espresso but I do know what flavours I look for. I look for something with a medium body, with a good balance of sour and bitter. I don’t like it too fruity, rather I like something more nutty or chocolate. I know that there are many more technical aspects to espresso that I don’t know. Talking about extraction, how the grounds are dealt with, where they beans are from, acidity – all sorts of stuff but I’m learning one step at a time.
When I was in undergrad, coffee was not something that I drank very often which makes it quite weird to why I love it so much. I used to think that coffee snobs were strange but I am one now. Just something about how balanced and how unique a nice espresso tastes, it’s just not like any other flavour in the world. It’s gotten to the point where friends have been recommending places to me where they order lattes and drip – but for me, a purist, I haven’t been able to enjoy many of these places due to their espresso not tasting very good. Nothing wrong with lattes but I just can’t taste the coffee, which takes away from the experience of a good espresso.
But I guess that now I have a hobby of visiting different cafes and trying new coffee. It’s crazy that the longer I live in this city, the more basic I become. Writing this article is making me cringe but as you get older you start to realize that you’re pretty lame anyways as an adult and that maybe this is all a part of growing up. By the way, my favourite place in Toronto is Fahrenheit. If you’ve got a place that you like, let me know in the comments.
