From time to my wife or my mom mention the idea that I must spend so much money drinking coffee at cafes, that I should just drink coffee at home and save a few dollars every month. In actuality, going to cafes during the summer can run a bit more, because I tend to have a small meal at a cafe, but all things considered, a cafe meal is far cheaper than most other places that I could go out for breakfast or lunch.
It is true that I could probably drink coffee at home in the morning and not go out at all. Maybe that doesn't sound so bad. We have a nice apartment with a cafe table in the living window that overlooks the open backyards that cover our block from three stories up. We have every coffee contraption imaginable - Turkish, stove top espresso, French press, an old electric coffee maker, as well as ye trusty paper filter cone. To complement all of these amazing machines of caffeine extraction, we have two different coffee grinders and at least four pounds of coffee from various beaneries that are all quite amazing. I do drink a cup of coffee from time to time at home.
But drinking coffee by itself is not why I end up going to on average about 10 different cafes over the 30 days per month. I have my favorites, some when I am in the mood for a specific drink made by a skilled barista, other cafes when I want to work on my iPad or write, and still others when I know I will bump into friends or just to watch people at a specific location. Certain cafes are part of my morning walking routes, where a 20 - 30 minute cafe experience is the reward for a 25 - 40 minute walk. Over the years, like most people I have had that one standard cafe that satisfied all of my cafe going needs. But since I decided that life is too short to go to the same cafe everyday, I have branched out to three regular cafes, accompanied by my never ending search for new cafes within a 40 minute walking radius from my apartment.
I have been surprised to learn, after I started exploring cafes around the city that it is possible to always find a better espresso somewhere else, or a cafe space that I have only imagined in the fantasy of what a perfect cafe should be for my different needs. I have started to follow specific roasters that distribute to cafes in the city, and watch carefully to see whether the barista seems to know what they are doing. Ultimately, no acrobatic air show of precision espresso slinging that follows the 20 point specifications that some cafes guarantee will make my espresso any better if the beans are not at least a medium roast. Likewise, the best beans next to God can be obliterated by a ill-trained barista or poorly maintained equipment, especially when some frothy foamy layer of milk is lathered on top.
The beans themselves do not need to be handpicked by the 20th generation of a famous coffee grower in Ethiopia or Indonesia for the beans to be incredible. I don't need them to be organic or even free trade for the coffee to be amazing (although, I would prefer both politically, and a number of cafes in San Francisco serve only Free Trade). I have found that some roasters, most notably Starbucks, follow the for profit motive in their coffee fields, where direct sunlight and yield rates necessary to produce the most caffeine in the shortest growing cycle typically produce terrible coffee, forcing Starbucks to completely obliterate their beans by roasting them to a crisp. If a well roasted bean may have a woodsy or cocoa aftertaste, a burnt bean has a dirty carbon bitterness, that only can be saved by adding caramel, sugar or 8 ounces of frothy foamy milk, so that the taste of the coffee does not stand out. Not that Starbucks does not have its specialty blends as well, and even sells medium roasts, but they almost never sell their brewed coffee or their espresso with their specialty beans in the brew or in the grinder.
The other extreme is the shade grown on a hillside, slow roasted gourmet coffee bean that is organic and free trade that goes for $4 or more per cup of a fancy porcelain or blown glass cheese cloth filter drip coffee. As I have said before, all of this is not necessary. A daily cup of coffee, whether it be poured by a coffee Druid that performs some magical ritual over my 12 oz morning elixir or shat (read filtered) through the digestive system of Sivit cats is too expensive for a daily cafe experience to make sense. For that special coffee pleasure my own coffee laboratory is requisitioned from time to time, since the per cup cost of such expensive coffee is extreme.
But the cafe offers an environment that is definitely not about the coffee in the cup, as long as the coffee is very good to incredible. I end up at cafes because they offer a living room away from my apartment, with different furniture, different people, different windows to watch the sunrise and the City's weather patterns, different music and different baristas and friends at different cafes. Overall, my cafe habit allows me to walk about the city with several different destinations, and for the cost of about $3.50 including a tip, I can enjoy a macchiato in over 20 cafes just a fifteen minute walk from my house. Imagine having access to 20 different living spaces for about $100 a month.
Of course the ritual of drinking a cup of coffee and writing is priceless.
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