Focus on Coffee

If someone asked me about cultural groups or subcultures 5 years ago I would share my opinion about goths or hipsters or whatever. Now I am constantly living in big cities and I position myself as capital city resident, so I have my opinion slightly changed. There are still those traditional subcultures, but society in general tends to separate by social habits. We are surrounded by different people so we choose alternative ways of establish communication with each of them. Someone prefers having lunch together, someone likes to share a bowl of nachos drinking beer in a pub, others like cozy evening talks, where bottle of wine is the most suitable beverage. But the most interesting group for me is the union of coffee lovers.

I consider myself as a person who can differentiate good and bad coffee, who appreciates atmosphere in a café and gives attention to coffee machine and ways of brewing. I spent one year working as an even-manager in a coffee place – this is where my interest originates from. Drink free coffee every day and – not surprising – you will get used to accompany every activity with a cup of cappuccino. I spend my daily life in Moscow and this is the best place I’ve been so far to be coffee addicted. There are few reasons for that:

• Multiple options of coffeehouses – megapolis starves for liters of coffee
• Good informational support via social networks – all info available in a one click
• Increasing amount of specialty coffee spots with reasonable price (!) – basically the most important point for students

Visiting different spots, you start noticing the difference between them, create your own short-list and go for study, rest, socialization or concentration to the coffeehouse – no doubts. And as soon you get used to this lifestyle you expect this from any other place on the earth, especially, while travelling or moving to another city. It is hard to re-adjust to new lifestyle, so cup of well-brewed coffee would cure your stress. That hasn’t happened with me in Munich (yet) (unfortunately) (god why).

I perceive Munich as a shelter from my daily routine in Moscow. Such a “piece&quiet” city, which is still big enough to have space to wander around and not get bored. However the choice of specialty coffee frustrated me at first. Recommendations of locals didn’t really satisfy me, my own findings either didn’t. I discovered few good options finally – I tackle this problem very seriously – through precise researches and monitoring numerous web sites. I was rewarded by really good cappuccino and productive day of work. And I was so excited about it – next week I have been there three times (though it cost me a pretty penny).

I decided to do a research about coffee culture in Munich and I found out some peculiar points. Talking about coffee brewing on professional level, I should said that on all recent world latte art/cupping/brewing championships Russian participants performed a little better that German – although none of them haven’t reached final rounds. I moved to the subject itself and found a well-filmed video from DW where they state that café scene in Munich had rapidly developed. Video was enjoyable and useful – I concluded that in Bavarian capital we can already find some proper specialty, but here are not that many of them yet.

Probably when I come back to Munich in several years, I will get lost in variety of places with qualitative coffee. I will be sitting in a spacious café, glancing on the perfect latte art in my cup, and hopefully, I will be able to afford more coffee investigations. I still have 3 more months – who knows, may I will find my special coffeehouse the other day.