The possibility space

You need a few stories before I get to the main story, so we’re going to hop around a bit. This story is about coffee, but really it’s about opinions.

The last time I was in Paris, it was 2012. Paris did not contain good coffee in 2012. It doesn’t contain much good coffee in 2023, but it contains some good coffee, which is the point of this story. But in 2012, I was in Paris, trying to find coffee, and ending up at a bunch of different cafés that handed me burned espresso with a little sugar packet on the side, and a demitasse spoon.

This is, in a profound objective sense, a bad experience. Coffee is a tropical fruit. You are turning that tropical fruit into a distilled, high-octane version of itself. Done right, espresso should not need sugar, because it will have all of the intrinsic sweetness that it already needs. One is being handed sugar because one is also being handed bad espresso, and they are being asked to compensate for the badness of this espresso by stirring in some sugar. One is charged a euro for the privilege.