NogaNote:

Coffee

"I jumped in, explaining that the sort of coffee he’d asked for is indicative of coffee that’s been over-roasted, and though the beans look like what he thinks good coffee should look like, all black and oily, in fact, they’ve had all the subtleties incinerated out of them. Too dark a roast obliterates the soft chocolate tones of a Guatemala Medina, the intense blueberry hit of an Ethiopian Harrar…."

I feel somewhat vindicated in my choice of coffee taste which has always inclined towards “medium-roast”. Real manly men, like Johnny Bravo, seem to attach a certain significance to their liking a coffee that is dark-roast. As though a preference for drinking a coffee dark, bitter, sugarless and milkless is somehow indicative of a certain tough virility as well as continental connaisseurship... Well, I never had any pretensions for European elegance. It's all a myth, anyway. I have always liked my coffee medium roast and I have a preference for the way the Italians roast their coffee beans. But I always welcome new flavours, as long as they are not "dark roast". I am a coffee multiculturalist moderate: curious and respectful.