Boy howdy do I miss drip coffee. Coffee purveyors in Madrid will serve you an Americano, which is espresso and hot water. And it’s not without a sense of self awareness and irony that the Americano is my go-to at Starbucks in the States. It’s just clear now that you never know what you have until you don’t.
It’s not that I don’t like espresso (I love it). It’s that not waking up every morning to a carafe full of brewed coffee takes some adjusting. Instead, we’re forced to make coffee one cup at a time with a contraption known as a moka pot. Basically, it’s a manual espresso machine that sits on the stove to heat a reserve of water that becomes steam that is forced through coffee grounds that gets collected as drinkable coffee in a second story of the device. It works like this:
Because it’s designed to make a single serving of espresso, you can either have a small cup of coffee, a very weak regular-sized cup of coffee, or you can use two filter thingies and make a passable regular-sized cup of coffee. It gets the job done, but it’s just not the same.
From what I can tell, though, coffee-making here has to be done with a machine that uses steam. Buying coffee in the supermercado can be confusing because you’ll see shelves and shelves of pods and such, but nothing that looks like what I and my fellow Americans would call coffee. Where each of these types of pods go only becomes apparent when you peruse the coffee machine section at the El Corte Inglés, an eight-story department store that deserves its own blog post. One can only guess how all these appliances work, but I have a better idea of what the pods in the grocery store are for by matching their brand names to the machines.
Madrileños do love their coffee. Visit any bar, restaurant, chocolatería, or government office building, and you will be able to order your favorite coffee beverage – just as long as it’s an espresso with or without steamed milk or water. This is a good thing, as you will never have to search long to find coffee. It will always be a shaking hand away.
Fortunately and unfortunately, Meghan and I have both fallen in love with the café con leche. It’s become our afternoon pick-me-up in the middle of a long day of “researching” paintings at the Prado for our other website. A shot of espresso enveloped in steamed milk hits that sweet spot of enough caffeine, fat, carbs, and protein to get you through another few rooms in the Prado.
As it happens, though, there are serious – capital-s serious – coffee places to be found in Madrid. It’s not enough to just to order un café, you will be asked which variety of coffee bean you prefer and how you would like it brewed. They’ll gladly espresso-ize it for you, but you can – ¡dios mio! – order a pour-over (which is essentially a drip, but accomplished by pouring hot water over a grounds that filters into a cup). In the States, if there wasn’t a long line behind me, I’d order a pour-over, because it really is just a little better than coffee out of your standard industrial (or home) coffee maker.
I think you would have to put a lot in the deal to make me give up nitros and draft coffee, but I can’t say I’m wholly upset by the coffee situation in Madrid. If a French press traveled better, I might consider picking up one of those, but for now I can live with espresso-based coffee beverages.