Have you ever stopped and thought how a seemingly everyday consumable like coffee shows a lot about who you are and where you are from?
Coffee has a long and important tradition, also in Central Europe. Turks introduced it during their centuries long dominance, it was introduced via a back door into popular and highbrow culture. In Central European cities like Wien and Budapest, coffee houses played an important role in meeting, creation and (in Budapest, 1848) in revolutionary processes.
Coffee became an inseparable part of daily life, daily work, of protocol and shared feelings.
In Hungary, as in Italy, coffee is often prepared in a percolator. I have not encountered this method anywhere else, unless we count the “espresso machine” system (the ones the latter day baristas use and abuse).
As of Transylvania, the “ibrik” serves us Turkish coffee: the kind that we have to sweeten while brewing, as it is served with the grinds in a tiny cup.
Since the fall of the Wall and the change of the system, filter coffee has made headways into the more labor-intensive but much tastier domain of the percolator and the ibrik. I remember introducing Hungarians to what they called “American” or “German” coffee in the beginning of the 90s and watching them pull faces and calling the liquid I served out of the freshly brewed filter coffee pot “weak tea”.
Central Europeans used to drink maximum 2 cups of coffee per day: in the morning to wake up, after lunch with a cigarette to digest. In Belgium, I grew up in a working culture that served coffee in massive quantities all day long. Liters and liters of the intoxicant were ingested in the course of a working day.
Real coffee had to brewed at home, preferably by some one taking their time and lovingly handling the percolator. Coffee was meant to sooth the spirit, to help in awakening, to break the ice in conversations.
Hotel coffee was the exact and horrible opposite: nescafé left to burn and cook for hours, leaving it tasting like asphalt.
The culture of coffee still thrives in Central Europe, next to the “Seattle” wave of coffee shops, the real kávéház, cukrázda, cofetarie, kavarna or Konditorei still has its place in local communities, folklore and in tourist’s hearts.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg){kind=link}