black coffee or white coffee?

Most people prefer white coffee to black coffee.  The majority have coffee served with milk and sugar, chocolate or syrup, and maybe seasoning it with cinnamon, or other spices.  Latte, cappuccino and macchiato are the most commonly seen on menu.  Don’t forget the most popular flat white! 

I don’t mind drinking coffee with milk.  Milk to coffee is like cosmetics to women.  The former indeed makes the latter, if you do it right, charming.  Yet I tend to call white coffee “flavored milk”.  How can you call a beverage composed of 80% milk, “coffee”?  I have latte for breakfast, which couples with toast well.  If I need something serious to quench my thirst of “coffee”, I go for straight black.  

Black coffee herself can be fruity (coffee beans are seeds of coffee fruits.  After a long process of fermentation, how can the seeds not be fruity?), nutty (roasted beans are similar to roasted nuts.  How can it’s not nutty?), sweet and buttery (after nice roasting, majority of its chemical factors turn into sugar and fat.  it must be sweet and buttery.)  Just to name a few of the aromas and tastes.  If a lady is born pretty, she probably wouldn’t bother to cover up her beauty by using cosmetics. 

The truth is - If you dare to venture black, you may often find yourself struggle with a cup of bitter and charred beverage.  Cupping a nice black coffee is challenging. (If a barista knows what s/he is doing, I usually find her/him either extremely excited or depressed when I order short black)  Maybe that’s why people started to drink coffee with milk.  Milk neutralizes the unpleasant bitterness of coffee, while coffee inspires the sweetness of milk.  The marriage of milk and coffee must be one of the greatest inventions in the coffee drinking history.  The only problem (and critical problem) is that milk covers up the personalities of coffee! 

Maybe it’s just me.  I rather my girlfriend (if I had one...shame!) is born beautiful rather than made pretty.  I love coffee as who she is and how she looks like, without milk or makeup, though I still have the flavored milk, latte, for my breakfast.  

seven rules of Sydney amora safari

Love is a pain especially when it comes to life and death.  Craving for love has mercilessly sent me to hell for so many times that I promised myself a do-not-return.  

I moved to Sydney two years ago.  The first life-saving mission after landing in the city was to search for my love, the most desirable dark beverage on the globe - COFFEE!  To survive in the new environment, I planed to locate drinkable coffee in a short period of time.  (clock was clicking!!) I needed a strategy, a few simple rules to determine if a shop is worth risking my taste buds before walking in.  Here were my rules:

1. Don’t bother if there is no que (quite obvious right?), but don’t go in when there is a long que. (the mass produced is usually not as delicate as the hand crafted)
2. Never trust coffee in good restaurants or 5 star hotels.   They are too busy with serving foods or housekeeping to cup a good coffee.  I skip “food” courts for the same reason.  
3. A good location doesn’t assure you a nice cup.  (why would I bother to make good coffee if I owned a shop in a lobby of office building?  traffic would be busy regardless!)
4. Be brand conscious but not brand blind.  Good brand doesn’t necessary make a good coffee, while crappy brands guaranty you a terrible drink.  (no commercial.  figure out your favorite by yourself.)
5. Robust and clean machines.  I can’t image a good cup coming from a messy grinder or a tiny domestic coffee machine.
6. a passionate but not a “cool” barista.  The former knows what s/he is doing, while the latter knows how s/he is performing.  (for the similar reason, I don’t walk in a coffee shop where a charming girl is making coffee!  Mum said never trust pretty girls, and my heart-breaking experiences told me that she was right...)

last but not least, never trust any words on internet... uhhh.... so you shouldn’t trust mine either!