Coffee sour

Complaining here recently about the deterring bitterness of the coffee in so many Edinburgh restaurants and cafes, I found myself trying to pin down its cause.  It wasn’t that it was too strong.  I expect an espresso to be strong. Nor was it a matter of weakness. If you ask for a latte, you should know by now that you will be served something that is more milk than coffee. It’s the modern British  espresso, or double espresso, that seems to be the root of the trouble, principally because of its sheer nastiness. Big bright modern  espresso machines, I suspected, are possibly hard to operate, no matter how expert the barista, and small domestic ones are clearly no safer. It’s all a question of quality control. 

But the people in charge of the machines, it now seems, are not to be blamed any more than are the machines themselves. According to Jay Rayner, restaurant critic of the Observer, the problem lies in the actual coffee. It’s a thought, of course, that had occurred to me, too.  I still remember the time an Edinburgh headwaiter dragged a sack of coffee beans to my table to prove how fresh and flavoursome he considered the house coffee to be.   

True enough, perhaps. But in an article last Sunday, Rayner pointed an accusing finger at a different aspect of coffee beans.  He started by saying how he had been sitting in a restaurant at King’sCross, looking glumly at his espresso. What was wrong  with it? The colour was right. The crema, as they call  the copper-coloured froth on the coffee’s surface, was right. But the taste, which he describd as fiercely, lip-puckeringly acidic, was utterly wrong, It was more reminiscent of lemon juice than coffee. He repeated the experience again and again across London. . “I order coffee. I am served a cup of something sharp and unpleasant.”

It all began, he says, two years ago. Fast forwarding to today, he says that he is sitting in different premises which are bang on trend. With him is Salvatore Malatesta, a name I would associate with an opera buffa baritone but who is in fact a coffee guru from Melbourne. They sip their sour espresso, which Rayner’s companion declares to be “serious” coffee, going on to explain that it’s all  to do with shorter roasting times providing access to all the “fruitier, fresher flavours.”  Rayner stares at him. “You mean,” he asks, “it’s actually meant to taste like this?”  The answer seems to be that yes it’s deliberate. Sour espresso, it appears, is a symptom of a British - and presumably Australian - coffee business which is booming.

So now we know. Meanwhile I’ll stick to the Edinburgh cafes that continue to serve the sort of coffee I can rely upon amd not the sort, as a friend told me yesterday, had just ruined an excellent meal.  To the short  list I included in a previous blog, I’ll now add Marie Delices on the slopes of Comiston Road.   Its cappuccino comes in what is perhaps too large a cup, but it’s a beautifully decorated Breton cup and what it contains tastes exactly how it should.

12 June 2014