In this article we interview the famous coffee expert Pierre La Longue Langue. He flies in the face of common opinion by suggesting that espresso based drinks taste bad.

CH: How did you become a coffee taster?

PLLL: Coffee tasting has been in my family for three generations, beginning with my grandfather, Jean-Luc La Longue Langue. He decided, after WW1, to expand from wine tasting into coffee tasting. So I tasted coffee with my mother’s milk, if you’ll pardon the expression.

CH: Coffee chains like Starbucks are becoming very widespread these days. Do you think that they serve good coffee?

PLLL: Mediocre. There just isn’t that much high quality coffee in the world.

CH: Is high quality coffee really worth the expense?

PLLL: That’s a matter of taste. Some coffees, like Jamaican Blue Mountain, for example, sell for more than they are really worth because of reputation. However, excellent coffee is quite a different substance than ordinary coffee, not only in the flavour but in the effect it has on the human body. So in a way, it is comparable to a fine, aged wine.

CH: What is your opinion about cappuccino and other espresso drinks?

PLLL: Businesses push espresso based drinks because they can charge more for a fancy sounding drink made with an expensive machine than simple brewed coffee. Anybody with a sense of taste can tell that adding hot milk or water to coffee which is already brewed makes it taste bad. No one who truly understands coffee will drink an espresso drink.

CH: Why are such drinks so popular then?

PLLL: People are so suggestible that they accept what the media tells them even if it contradicts their own senses. Also they believe that something which comes from such a big, expensive, shiny machine, made by trained specialists, barristas, and costing so much, must be good. Belief trumps experience. If they do notice that it doesn’t taste good, they think it must be something wrong with them – everyone else likes it, after all.

CH: How did espresso drinks become popular?

PLLL: This takes a bit of history. First, Italians are very good at what Americans call “hype.” After the war there were many factories which had been making war munitions and were now idle. Someone hit on the idea of converting some of these factories to making espresso machines. Then they convinced people, with effective marketing, that proper coffee could only be made with these expensive machines. And everyone imitated Italians as the leaders in fashion. So they made espresso drinks fashionable. You were chic, sipping your lovely foamy cappuccino at the fashionable cafe.

CH: Why do they dark roast espresso coffee?

PLLL: Actually dark roasting good coffee is like taking a valuable diamond and having it cut by an amateur. All dark roasted coffee tastes the same, like burned coffee.

When Italians started to drink coffee, they had bad tasting coffee. But they enjoyed the “kick” coffee gave them. So they dark roasted it to bring out the caffeine and also to hide the bad flavour, and then made it very strong and sweet so they could quickly gulp it down like a dose of medicine. That was the beginning of espresso.

For high quality coffee, even so-called medium roasts tend to be too dark. Light to medium is best, just enough to take the greenness out. Then you can taste the bouquet of the coffee.

CH: What is the best way to brew coffee?

PLLL: Well, the coffee industry might blacklist me for saying this, but between you and me, the best apparatus to make good coffee is a cup and a spoon. The best way to get the full flavor of coffee is simply to pour almost boiling water directly over very finely ground coffee. The grounds sink to the bottom and then you drink it. There’s a reason why professional coffee tasters do it this way. We would not use a paper filter, then the coffee tastes of paper. And we certainly would not run it through an espresso machine.

CH: But then it requires no apparatus except a grinder and something to heat water, so how can you charge four or five dollars a cup for it?

PLLL: Exactly! And in Ethiopia, where coffee originated, they make it that way. The Czechs also traditionally did it that way; they called it “Turecko” – Turkish, although real Turkish coffee is a more complex process.

If you enjoy milk coffee, you can brew it the same way: pour the hot milk directly onto the coffee grounds.

CH: What about the French Press?

PLLL: You can also brew good coffee with a French Press. Pour the hot water over the grounds and wait a few minutes, then press down the filter.

The next best way is a single cup paper (Melitta) filter, though you get some paper flavor from that. However, there are also washable filters made of fine mesh. But this alters the flavour – you don’t get the full bouquet.

Restaurants and coffee shops often keep the brewed coffee in a thermos; then the taste deteriorates. Coffee should always be drunk right after brewing.

CH: I’ve been in Cafes where they poured coffee from a pot which had been left on a hotplate. Tasted awful!

PLLL: (Laughs) That’s the worst thing you can do to coffee! I would never touch coffee left on a hotplate or reheated.

CH: What about coffee roasting?

PLLL: Well, that’s another secret of the industry – you can actually roast coffee yourself. An Ethiopian would probably say that coffee doesn’t taste good unless you roast it just before brewing it. There every family roasts their coffee every day – they wouldn’t think of buying roasted coffee.

CH: It’s a ritual, isn’t it?

PLLL: Yes, like the Japanese tea ceremony. They heat the water in ceramic jugs on a charcoal burner, on which they also burn Frankincense while roasting the green beans which they then grind with a mortar and pestle. Though the grandmother of my friend used an electric grinder – she apologized that she had painful arthritis in the fingers and couldn’t use the mortar. After adding the coffee to the jug, she poured it into tiny cups – you have to do three rounds of drinking.

Of course, in our money and machine worshipping society, we have our own ritual: we are tickled by having our drinks drizzled out of a complicated and expensive machine!

CH: Thank you for your time, Mr. La Longue Langue.

PLLL: Mon plaisir!