Why are hotels so incapable of getting even a simple cup of regular black coffee right, asks Conor Pope
IT DOESN’T matter where in the world you find yourself or how many stars the hotel you’re staying in has, you can be pretty sure that the coffee served as part of your buffet breakfast or laid out neatly on the plastic tray in your room will be vile.
Even in Italy, where they take enormous – some might say excessive – pride in their coffee, after exporting their coffee knowledge, machines and names all over the world, hotels still make a pig’s ear of it, almost as if they’ve only recently discovered these magic beans and are still working out what to do with them.
One thing that should never, ever be done with them is stewing. While apples, rhubarb, cheap cuts of meat and – at a pinch – prunes benefit from a good long stew, coffee does not. This fact appears to have escaped the notice of most of the world’s hotel kitchens where boiling all the caffeine goodness out of our essential morning pick-me-up is still considered acceptable.
It’s not acceptable, not by a long shot. We conducted a straw poll on Twitter this week to see what people thought of hotel coffee and the response was instant and almost universally negative.
“I can’t ever remember having a good cup of coffee in an Irish hotel,” said one respondent. “Always absolutely bloody awful,” said another, while a third wondered how it was possible that in an age of coffee houses selling ridiculously complex skinny decaf lattes, half caffs and macchiatos on every street corner, hotels remained incapable of getting even a simple cup of black coffee right.
It is an important part of the hotel experience but is almost always treated as an afterthought with coffee brewed early, dumped into flasks or left on boiler plates.
Jane Ruffino, an American journalist living in Ireland and a self-confessed caffeine junky, has been so badly let down over many years that she’s taken to smuggling a one-cup cafetière and good quality ground coffee into her hotel rooms so she’ll always have a fix: “I really need coffee to wake up. I’m not a nice person if I don’t have it so I bring the good stuff with me just in case.”
She doesn’t bother, incidentally, when she’s in Austria, the home of 19th-century cafe society, where, she says, the hotels consistently serve good coffee.
She also claims that coffee standards have gotten better in the US in recent years, although the improvements are not as a result of any eureka moment on the part of hotels – they have simply given up trying and outsourced their coffee business to Starbucks.
While the stuff served in hotel dining rooms and lobbies is terrible, it is like heavenly nectar when compared with the crime against coffee that is to be found lurking in plastic sachets in hotel bedrooms alongside its revolting accomplices, UHT and powdered “cream”.
Ireland’s most successful crime writer, the widely acclaimed and widely travelled John Connolly, knows a thing or two about such beverages having spent much of the last 10 years drinking the stuff while on promotional tours.
Connolly describes hotel-room coffee as “universally awful” because “hotels don’t want you hanging around in your room drinking coffee when you could be ordering overpriced pots in the lobby, or paying extortionate rates, plus a surcharge, plus a tip, for room service”.
His sympathy for complainers is limited, however, because we live in a “brave new world where it’s hard to avoid coffee houses a stone’s throw” from any hotel. “And anyway, who sits around in their hotel room making coffee from sachets? Women of the night and spies, that’s who. If you don’t fall into either category, then you’ve no business hiding out in your room, fiddling with kettles and milk cartons.”
On the wider issue of bad hotel coffee, he is equally unsympathetic. “What do you expect of coffee that’s brewed in a kitchen many floors below your room, then sits around waiting for a room service waiter to bring it to you? It’s going to be lukewarm, it’s going to taste a bit funny, and the only consolation is going to be the ‘free’ biscuit.”
The kind of person who orders coffee of this nature has “too much money”, so the hotel “is morally obliged to deprive you of some of it”.