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As one of the editors of a guide to the world’s best coffee shops, I visited hundreds of places across Europe. Those we rated among the best all had one thing in common (other than great coffee, obviously): the baristas enveloped their love of coffee in a human touch. The bad places were bad in different ways, but one trait shared by the most infuriating establishments was that they looked down their noses at their less coffee-nerdy customers. For instance, coffee experts have a thing about how you shouldn’t add milk to certain types of coffee. There’s nothing wrong in educating the customer about why they might decide to try their filter coffee without milk, but if the general public decides that, after being given all the information, they still want to go ahead and have milk, what does it matter? It’s certainly not a prompt to act like a coffee lord and treat them like a mud-water-drinking peasant.
This kind of snobbery isn’t found only in the world of speciality coffee, of course. Wine ‘experts’ have lots of previous. (Yes, I do want an ice cube in my pinot grigio and no, I don’t care if you deem it to be wrong.) Meanwhile, the craft beer revolution has created a new generation of beer bores (“Sour IPA with a steak and ale pie? I mean, really…”).
I can just about turn a blind eye to such irritating elitism in the arcane worlds of fine wine, hipster coffee and fancy-pants beer, but it’s inexcusable in cookery teaching. And yet, I’ve come across it. Fresh out of university, I was cooking green beans in a cookery workshop and had forgotten to blanch and cool them first to help them retain that lovely green colour. And OK, I’d overcooked them too. The texture was reasonable but they’d gone a bit khaki. Still, I was willing to serve them. One of the tutors, however, was not.