Coffee

The worst cup of coffee I have ever had—US or UK—was on the 3^rd of September 2011. I know the date because it was so bad I took a picture.

It tasted just like it looks, but colder. It was weak, tepid, and terrible. And it was served in a Styrofoam cup because the café’s dishwasher was broken, so they couldn’t wash the china mugs. It was served to me at the Amberly Chalky Pits Museum’s Limeburners Café, something I would usually not reveal—in order to avoid embarrassing the establishment for a momentary lapse—but I will make an exception in this case for reasons you will discover at the end of this article.

My second-worst cup of coffee was served to me in a Wimpy’s Diner in Nottingham sometime in November of 2007. I don’t worry about keeping them anonymous; people just expect that of them.

Long time readers of this blog will recall my years’ long quest for a decent cup of coffee outside of America. The quest—not merely long but fruitless to boot—took me through a succession of coffee makers, a smattering of single-cup and coffee bag dalliances (you’d think this should work, but it doesn’t), and the eventual surrender to instant coffee.

This wasn’t all bad, as instant coffee technology had improved dramatically by then, and it wasn’t long before my wife’s friend’s daughter-in-law introduced me to Bialetti, and I never looked back.

From then on, for many years, I considered my coffee quest at an end. I could make myself a Real By God cup of coffee—espresso, hot water and cream (they might not have Half-and-Half over here, but they do have Cremora)—or a Can’t be Arsed cup of instant, any time I wanted. And in the cafés, the coffee—unlike when I first arrived—now tasted very good indeed.

Then a friend of my wife gave me a birthday gift of coffee-related items, one of which was a container of Azera, a new Nescafé offering that boasted “ground coffee beans” (AKA grit) as an ingredient. I was not eager to try this dubious fad but, as it was a gift, I felt obligated, and that was fortunate because it was great, ground coffee beans and all. So, my wife tried it, and now it is the only instant coffee in the flat.

And so, it seemed, the UK was finally catching up with American coffee. Then we went to Italy, where I drank their coffee and found it extremely palatable, prompting my wife to observe that it wasn’t the UK’s coffee that had changed, but me: I now like European coffee, and so does the UK.

This makes it easier to get along in the UK and on the Continent, but I do wonder how my upcoming trip to the US is going to pan out, coffee-wise. I will keep you updated.

Whether or not I find the US coffee a bit bland or too sweet (I’m sure their Half-and-Half has sugar in it; everything else does) I’m fairly certain they will not manage to unseat The Worse Cup of Coffee I Have Ever Had. And here’s why:

A few weeks ago, we paid another visit to The Amberly Chalky Pits Museum and ended up having lunch at the Limeburners Café. I was not expecting the coffee to be bad, however, despite them, once again, telling me that I had to drink it from a Styrofoam cup because their dishwasher was broken, because 14 years had passed and their coffee could not have done anything but improve.

But. alas, I was wrong. The coffee looked and tasted exactly like the one I had been served in 2011, pushing Wimpy’s coffee into third place while the Limeburners Café took both Gold and Silver.

Seriously, how are they still in business?