The hotel room I was visiting in Germany this week offered coffee, like most of the hotel rooms I stay in. Typically there’s a tiny version of a kitchen coffeemaker or one of the pod-type machines, generating weak brown liquid with caffeine that’s just passable to get me through my morning to a real cup of coffee.
Here, though, I was given a kettle, a small French press, a paper bag of coffee beans, and a manual grinder.
This was amazing. The design of each element was pleasing. It was fun to use the electric kettle, to turn the crank of the grinder, to pour the water over the grounds, to steep the coffee, to press the plunger. It wasn’t convenient and it wasn’t quick, but the coffee was delicious and the process was satisfying.
What do we get when we trade the delicious, the satisfying, for the merely adequate but quick?
Is it worth it?
