>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.
You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.
Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.
the opposite, the ubiquity of burnt mud in every office coffee warmer seems to have dulled the American palate, that or the over abundance of artificial ingredients in everything, to the extent that they simply cannot discern what good coffee is, because it's either that or coffee that looks like the water from a particularly detail oriented miniature painting session; scant colour, scant aroma.
I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"
You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.
Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.