Strong coffee

On my board, the string that got me to come over to LTH happened to contain a mention of "weak Northern Coffee", and claimed that the Chicago-brewed stuff couldn't hold a candle to New Orleans coffee. Of course this is a total generalization, but is there ANY truth to this? The times I've visited, I've had friends to stay with who brew it to my "exacting standards" (I usually go through a pound in 5-7 days, and that's just my morning fix). When I lived in the Midwest, I didn't drink coffee, so I haven't yet qualified the veracity of the "weak coffee" statement.

I would figure you'd need really strong coffee to cleave through the haze borne of nigh-artic conditions!!

EDIT: Crapola. I meant to post this in the "Eating Out in Chicagoland" forum. C'est la vie.....

I know it's an NO tradition, but please keep the chicory out of my coffee!

I wouldn't travel to Chicago and look for or even expect to find a facsimile of NO-style coffee. When I finally muster up the resources to travel around, I revel in all the myriad differences that are to be found in any particular city. If the coffee's weak...then vive la difference! Y'all wouldn't come down here and expect to find a decent pizza or hot dog right?

But hattyn, thanks for putting that coffee hunt out. I may be in desperate need of that turbocharged brew in the morning, after an evening of quaffing Goose Island with my NO expats up there.

You know, I've always found Chicago to be a *good* coffee town. No, it's not Seattle, where the stuff is taken as seriously as they say (wish it were as so with seafood, an area that suprised me as good but not as good as it should be, but that's a different story) nor is it South Florida or South Louisiana where Cuban and French styles held forth long before the Italophiles of the Northwest came along in the 70's. But solid. Apparently, the geniuses at Starbucks decided that Chicago had the capacity, taste, and weather for better-than-7-11 coffee when they decided to use our town as the platform for world domination (Chicago being the "second market" for the co., way before expansion to even CA -- original stores are Hyde Park and Randolph/Wacker).

So, I wouldn't think that Chicago should be singled out for bad coffee.

PS, it might not be obvious, given where you live, but there is some kind of double-reverse post-colonial exchange thing going on with Vietnamese cafes. I've never had the pleasure of visiting Vietnam, but every time I've had coffee at a Vietnamese place (the black is very similar to Cuban coffee in its prep and sugar content), they use Cafe Du Monde, right from the goldenrod can. Consistent in IL, CA, FL, etc. If nothing else, you ban go to Ba Le here and get your strong NO coffee fix anytime.

We were also the first location for Peet's outside California!

One thing that I find, is that the cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde or (better) Morning Call, is the only only thing that comes close to tasting like coffee with milk in Europe. I have no idea what exactly produces that flavor, as Euro coffee comes typically from the espresso machine and New Orleans coffee from the drip pot. Perhaps it is the tempature that the milk and coffee are at when combined or the proportion of milk to coffee. There is something so delicious, so yummy, so damn different about a cafe au lait in Paris than at Starbucks, and like I say, only the stuff in New Orleans comes close.

Anyways, like I said in the Caffe Italia thread, for espresso, there are a few places around town that produce very high quality cups.

A couple more thoughts:

While New Orleans has a few local fetishes about coffee, that may be, well just New Orleans, which pretty much as its own way of doing things period. Those old fashioned bags of French Market Coffee or tins of Luzianne coffee may look cool, but I do not think they are necessarily better coffees, I mean not better than say Intelligensia. Also, yes Cafe du Monde and Morning Call are great, and the coffee at restaurants like Tujagues is special, but I do not think the (obviously in my day) the local Starbuckish places like PJs were superb coffee producers. My memory on this is rather dim, but the closest thing to an Italian caffe in New Orleans was Angelo Brocato's. I remember the espresso there as just being OK.

I don't know how Chicago coffee compares to New Orleans coffee, but I will say that we do better on the coffee front than much of the rest of the "northern" part of the country, if you like your coffee full-bodied, anyway. Before we had kids, my husband and I used to take long driving trips west, meandering through North Dakota and Montana on our way to Jasper Park in Alberta, Canada. It got so we could almost tell where we were by how the coffee was, as it got weaker and weaker the further west we went (now, of course, if one keeps going to the coast -- say to Vancouver -- then you can get a strong cup of coffee once again.) We often speculated that perhaps the coffee was so watery in places like the Cowboy Cafe in Medura, North Dakota because the cowboys in actual attendance liked to drink coffee all day, like water. We assumed, anyway, that they liked it that way, and so it is one of those regional differences that make travel interesting. I do know that not everyone likes it strong -- my aunt's family from Kansas City, for instance, used to add water to the coffee made by my mom (a native New Yorker) when they'd visit us.

ToniG, I'm sure the major reason for the weak coffee you found in your travels is culture and tradition, but, at the risk of being a science weenie, you have altitude to consider when you travel through the great plains and into the mountains. Every 500 feet of elevation drops the boiling point of water by about .9 degrees (average elevation in Montana is 3,400 ft, North Dakota is 1,900). The extraction of flavor from coffee is pretty sensitive to water temperature (not to mention the minerals in the water). Try having a cup of brewed coffee in Alma, CO (10,000 ft), where the water boils at 194 degrees. Leavening's a challenge, too, but I'll leave that to a "bread thread." Just one more reason to prefer espresso....

Choey wrote:The extraction of flavor from coffee is pretty sensitive to water temperature (not to mention the minerals in the water). Try having a cup of brewed coffee in Alma, CO (10,000 ft), where the water boils at 194 degrees. Leavening's a challenge, too, but I'll leave that to a "bread thread." Just one more reason to prefer espresso....

So, does that mean coffee brewed in Bogota, Colombia (elevation ~8500 feet) would perhaps be similar?

Maybe we're missing the true experience by brewing at sea level

gleam, I certainly have no first hand experience with coffee in Columbia (with the exception of theColumbian beans that are in my grinder presently and make fine coffee), but I used to live in Denver. If you've broken the altitude code, I'll help you bottle and sell in there. Of course, I could just be brew-challenged and am blaming it on a feeble grasp of food chemistry. It wouldn't be the first time I flunked a physical science.

I hope this doesn't mean that I have to add coffee to the list of things I can't discuss in polite company....

Oh, I don't doubt that you miss a lot because of the lower temperature. Perhaps someone needs to come up with a way to pressurize the air around the coffee maker so water boils at a normal temperature.

It's just interesting to me that coffee, which is so often associated with mountains (blue mountain in jamaica; pretty much all of colombia, including the famous juan valdez logo; kona mountain) is ideally brewed well below where it's often grown.

-ed

Does not the pressure from the espresso machine compensate? A pressure cooker works on this principle no?

Yeah, my reason for preferring espresso in the mountains was for pressure. It's also why one might wish to drive a car with a turbo at altitude....