Ultimate travel coffee setup or cry for help? You decide.
Posted by TheShot on 30 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
It wasn’t long ago that the word obsession conjured up much more negative connotations in society. Today obsession is practically treated like a virtue — something to aspire to — and it can apply to something as neurotically trivial as the cup of coffee you drink when you are traveling.
Case and point with an article posted today on Boing Boing: My quest for the ultimate travel coffee setup – Boing Boing. And you can overlook Boing Boing’s nerd factor; it’s not like they’re the only ones covering obsessive travel coffee setups. (This also published today: How to Have Good Coffee While Traveling | Serious Eats.)
So when does obsession go from a cute hobby to seek out the “perfect” coffee to a Sisyphean road to Lithium treatment? One unhealthy sign is when you’re carrying a suitcase dedicated to your home coffee.
Good coffee can even be found in the middle of nowhere
A big reason why we’ve been quiet around here of late is that we recently spent a few weeks traveling in the remote Portuguese archipelago of the Azores. In particular, we spent the bulk of our time on the sleepy island of São Jorge — where, on an island about twice the size of San Francisco, there are less than 10,000 residents, more than twice as many cows, and Internet access barely exists beyond its tiny airport.
Friends planning to visit us while we were there asked, “Should we bring coffee?” Even in the middle of nowhere, this is still Portugal. And the typical coffee was better than anything you can typically get in the U.S. (Expect a coffee-related article on the Azores in the near future.)
This recent example illustrates what’s lost when people insist on taking their lives with them everywhere. What happened to the joy of discovery in travel? Why go to places like the Azores to ensure that you have your daily supply of Chipotle burritos and Intelligentsia coffee? Why demand the same exact dining experiences you can get back home in your suburban backyard? Call it the “When in Rome, why seek out an Olive Garden?” rule.
Yes, a lot of coffee in the American backwoods, and the rest of the world, is terrible. But with a little research with this thing called the Internet, you can actually learn something new in the process. I may have stumbled on some of the most foul and unrecognizable coffee in the world when I was traveling outside of Prague’s Vyšehrad back in 1995 — it was like large-grit sawdust suspended in boiling water. But the fact is I can still remember that experience. Fondly even (albeit comically). That’s more than I can say for the hundreds of Intelligentsia shots I’ve had over the years.
But set aside any xenophobia diagnoses for a moment. Obsession over coffee travel setups also raises the question of whether these people actually like coffee to begin with. For example, we could argue that the author of the Boing Boing article doesn’t really like coffee. Because when the only coffee you can tolerate is a very specific kind made a very specific way, reduced to an obsessed miniature slice of the wide spectrum of experiences that coffee has to offer, it’s only that tiny bit that you actually enjoy. And that’s not coffee — that’s some other craving you’re feeding.
6 Comments »
I read that article yesterday on Boing Boing and I did not draw the same conclusion as you. You are making something out of nothing (GASP! On a BLOG?!). It’s not black and white. Dude clearly says “So when when traveling to places that DON’T TEND TO have great coffee at the ready, I’ve learned that bringing your own brewing setup is mandatory.” You’re talking about bringing a coffee kit and Chipotle on your fancy-pants Euro vaca to the Azores, which indeed would be asinine. But if you spent weeks in, say, Oklahoma City, the story would be very different (even for the Chipotle). I suspect coffee-geek dude is talking mostly of making coffee in domestic hotel rooms vs. using their crap K-cups. I’m sure if he were driving down the coast of Croatia to Montenegro the case might be slightly different.
For some of us, “travel” isn’t weeks in an exotic foreign place. For some people, “vacation” is a 4-day weekend to a different city. We don’t always have time to travel the back alleys of unfamiliar, mundane cities to find coffee and we’d rather have what we know vs. the typical crap found at 99 percent of hotels. I’m actually not one of these people who travel with coffee, but I can respect where they are coming from.
BTW, I’m an actual journalist. How do I get a job poo-pooing people from my high horse that is my Macbook from a remote villa in the Azores I’ve been at for weeks?
First of all, I had to laugh at your “fancy-pants Euro vaca” reference to the Azores. That’s a bit like suggesting they should put a Club Med in Greenland. (As a journalist, you may want to research that topic…the austere, isolated island living for maritime frontiersmen there is clearly not what you think it is.)
But I hear where you’re coming from re: travel coffee isn’t always about some exotic destination where the national coffee culture at least has something to offer. I’ve long traveled to some — shall we say — challenging domestic places too. Odd trips of the past that included a search for a decent cup of coffee in towns like Hartford, CT or Rockford, IL.
But this is the era of the Internet, where the answers to many questions are at the tips of our fingers. To suggest that the challenges of finding decent coffee in Podunk, OK are in any way different, harder, or more exceptional than the challenges of finding a good restaurant, a decent bed to sleep on, etc. is rather preposterous.
We’d think it ludicrous to bring El Farolito burritos and a box-spring as airplane carry-on luggage. So why is carrying along a press pot and grinder setup any different? Coffee is important, but does it really deserve its own suitcase relative to other basic traveling needs?
[...] http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2010/09/travel-coffee-setup-obsessions/ [...]
Tom Owen of Sweet Maria’s is someone who unquestionably loves coffee and who travels to remote locations of the world all the time. His travel set-up: A Hario hand-grinder set atop an Aeropress.
Tom Owen is one of the greatest figures in quality specialty coffee today. CoffeeRatings.com largely owes its entire rating system to his influence.
But given how much he travels to buy lots of greens for reselling, I’m surprised his travel setup doesn’t also include a FreshRoast SR300.
I also want to say that, as a coffee professional, I love what you say in the last paragraph. Certain self-described “coffee snobs” remind me of photographers who spend more time buying and comparing expensive lenses and tripods than they do taking photos.