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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   3870 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Except what OP is describing isn't $thing either. What OP is describing is a 1990s invention that was only possible because of mass-market industrialization and technological advancement. If you go back to the way the Turks were drinking coffee around the time it was introduced in Europe, beans were roasted in a pan over an open fire, ground using a mortar and pestle, boiled in sugar water and drunk unfiltered. The roast was unlikely to be consistent let alone follow the precise roasting curves of today, and I don't know of any try-hard coffee snobs who would approve of the brewing method. Even the seemingly simple pourover wasn't invented until the 20th century, well into the era of industrial coffee production. There isn't some question of authenticity involved here, because historically "authentic" coffee probably tastes like crap.

turkishGreek coffee is... well I like it. Goes great with a cigarette and a pastry.

It's also fun to read fortunes in the leftover grounds.

I went to a coffee roasting event with an Ethiopian woman, and it was fun, smelled great, and tasted fine for black coffee. She told a story about highly caffeinated goats where coffee used to grow wild in her homeland.

Humans have been developing food technology for about ten thousand years, from domestication and selective breeding to improved processing techniques. Would I find you in Middle Kingdom Egypt saying that if you don't like the bitter and poisonous watermelons of our forefathers then you don't like watermelons at all? Would you deride the sweet watermelon as "a Menhtuhotep II era invention only possible thanks to a selective breeding program"?

No, I'm saying that if the only watermelon you like is some special cultivar that's only available in specialty stores, costs 20 dollars and has to be prepared in a very particular way, it's safe to say you don't really like watermelon.

You're missing the point. The watermelon we have today is the special cultivar. Presumably at some point you'd say that people who only like this cultivar don't like watermelon, and now you wouldn't.

Seems like an unfair comparison. The whole bean coffee I generally buy from my local midrange supermarket (city in the southern US) costs $12 a pound (compared to roughly $8 a pound for a 2.5 lb tub of the cheapest Folger's grounds) and is vastly better in a normal drip process. The grocery is doing enough volume that roast dates are consistently in the past month (vs typically 1-2 years for Folger's).

I think you may be generalizing from top-end third wave cafes to say that everything better than bottom-tier is snobbery. Coffee is coffee, and bad coffee is preferable to no coffee, but there can still be a reason to want more than the minimum viable experience here.

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