Column: Facing the fact that I’ve become a coffee snob - but I’m not alone

It was only a matter of time before coffee made its way into my weekly column. In fact, I have no doubt that some people who know me well are surprised that it took so long.

It has made the occasional guest appearance, the odd mention in passing, but this week it gets to be the star.

Why now? Well, a few days ago an otherwise trivial occurrence led me to face up to the fact that I have most definitely become a coffee snob.

I was taking a photo in my kitchen of a little family celebration, a photo which was destined for Facebook. Just as I was about to press the button on my phone, I spotted a jar of instant coffee in the background. Without thinking, I moved it so that it wouldn’t appear in the photo, much to the amusement of the teenagers in the house. 

I should point out at this stage, that the coffee in question does not belong to me. Yes, I bought it, but not for my own consumption. One of my children has a preference for instant, and so there is generally a jar in the house. 

My own coffee comes in bean form, with an emergency bag of nice ground coffee usually in a cupboard. 

I love the smell of coffee being ground, and for the sake of an extra 30 seconds in the morning, the taste of freshly ground coffee is worth the small bit of extra effort.

I’ll say it myself before anyone else does - it’s far from grinding my own coffee beans that I was reared. 

So how did I get from the days of Nescafé or Maxwell House instant being the posh stuff, to following the aromas in specialty coffee suppliers in a quest for the perfect brew?

And of course, I am by no means unique. In a single generation we have become a nation of discerning coffee drinkers, with barista skills among the most useful things that any young person looking for summer work can put on a job application. 

My own journey, while having some aspects that are down to my personal life adventures and choices, isn’t terribly different from the rest of my generation. And in an era when every generation needs a title, eg baby boomers, millennials, Gen Z, etc, I shall christen my contemporaries the Coffee Generation.

For me, from an early age, coffee was considered a treat. As in most homes, the teapot was used at every meal, and was brought out when there were visitors, life traumas, celebrations. 

My parents sometimes drank coffee at home but generally speaking coffee was something that we only really had when we were out. And that only happened as a big treat. 

My earliest memory of drinking coffee will no doubt be a familiar one to many people in Donegal Town, or those who enjoyed a trip to the café in Magee’s shop when they were visiting. 

The café was presided over by Mrs Mulhern, and you could get a cup of coffee served with a big dollop of fresh cream. It felt very grown up to add a sachet of sugar, and there was quite an art to stirring in the sugar without stirring in all the cream.

In my teenage years I began to suffer from migraines and for a while, I couldn’t drink coffee at all. But thankfully that passed, and it was when I moved to France at the age of 18 that I really developed a taste for coffee.

The French take their coffee very seriously, and it is quite a ritual. They seldom add milk unless having a cappuccino, and most of them take sugar. That may have changed since my time there in the early nineties, but back then, they thought I was a bit weird for drinking coffee without sugar. 

For a lot of my time there I worked long hours with split shifts in hotels, and so the kick of regular espresso shots were simply part of life. 

It wasn’t until I moved back home after four years that I realised just how much of a coffee habit I had developed, and how fussy I had become. 

It wasn’t easy to get nice coffee at that time, and it wasn’t cheap either. Even in the mid-nineties, the more expensive instants such as Gold Blend and Carte Noire were about as good as it got. I wasn’t complaining. I particularly liked the Carte Noire, and when I had to go off coffee for a while, its decaf version was a reasonably good alternative. 

I think it was when Lidl opened in Donegal Town that I was able to treat myself to an electric cafetiere and regular ground coffee.

And then - I think it must have been, somewhere in the middle of the Celtic Tiger years - we suddenly became a nation of serious coffee drinkers. Bean to cup coffee was everywhere - every café had state of the art pressurised equipment, every petrol station in the country had a coffee machine, as did supermarkets, newsagents; it was unavoidable. Our standards had changed and there was no going back. 

I couldn’t pass a coffee machine in a service station without picking up an Americano for myself. Meeting friends involved sipping at cappuccinos, lattes, or mochas. The quality of coffee became almost more important than that of food in determining the merits of one eatery over another. 

And I absolutely love it. I love that you can get really delicious coffee so easily. I love the smell and sound of coffee brewing, the anticipation of the great taste that is to come, and of the kick it gives my tired brain when I am struggling to find the right words to tell a particular story. 

Most of all, I love that first sip of a fresh cup of coffee, brewed to the perfect strength.

Up until a three days ago I would have said that didn’t make me a coffee snob But my actions in moving the jar of instant out of the photo have told their own undeniable story. 

Guilty as charged, I’d hold my hands up, but one of them is holding on tight to my morning brew!