Coffee time

I can go for weeks without alcohol, years without sugar, but my morning coffee is essential to my well-being. For years, it has been delivered from an espresso machine using ground Lavazza Qualita d'Oro. However, since December 2022 and a trip to Szczecin, where I received a packet of locally roasted artisan coffee beans, I have changed my coffee routine. Those beans meant I needed to buy myself a grinder, which I use in conjunction with a Bialetti pot. This is fine in everyday use, although it is limited by its size; its basket holds around 18g of ground coffee. Yes, I'll add hot water to the mug to make an Americano, but it's not strong enough. There are mornings when a double-double espresso coffee is needed, especially weekend mornings.

Mulling over how nice it would be to have a larger Bialetti, I somehow never got round to it, despite there being an excellent kitchen-equipment shop round the corner from my office (Voltimex, ulica Świętokrzyska 30). And then one day while doing my weekly shop at Lidl in Warka, I chanced upon a cheap (49zł/£10) Bialetti knock-off, under Lidl's Ernesto own brand. This was advertised as a nine-cup pot (my own Bialetti being a three-cup pot). Nonsense! A single portion is 18g, not 6g! Anyway, with this, I can grind a full 36 grams of coffee bean and fill the basket and water container and make a strong coffee that fits perfectly into a small mug.

Not for everyday consumption, though. During the working week, the small Bialetti is fine; it makes about a third of a small mug of intensely strong coffee, the product of 115 krenches of the handle on my manual coffee grinder. To get through the entire contents of the grinder is in excess of 230 krenches – a lot of work. The big coffee pot is for weekends. I grind the beans and boil the kettle. Boiled water goes into the water container at the bottom of the pot (cuts the amount of gas used to get the steam to express through the grinds, and cuts the time too). I also warm my coffee mug with boiled water to keep the coffee hot for longer.

One gram of arabica bean ground and expressed into coffee yields six milligrams of caffeine, so 36 grams gives 216 milligrams of caffeine; the recommended daily limit for adults is 400 milligrams, so spoko.

Comparing the Bialetti and Lidl's Ernesto-brand pot, it's easy to see the difference. The Lidl pot is manufactured with inferior tolerance, leading to leaks; the spout doesn't pour straight, leading to coffee puddles on the worktop. The material is thinner, evidently specified down to a price-point by a factory in the Far East. Italian quality wins out; however, at 160zł a genuine Bialetti nine-cup pot is more than three times dearer.

Lidl also does good deals on coffee. I recently bought two kilos of Lidl's own-brand Bellarom Gold Crema arabica beans for 72.26zł (buy two, get one half price). This works out at £7.75 a kilo. 

Now, here's an interesting thing. One kilo of beans fills over two-and-half one-kilo containers with coffee grounds. This is excellent fertiliser, so it returns to the soil. The image demonstrates just how hygroscopic ground coffee is (on account of its large surface-area-to-volume ratio). When stored this way, it soon starts growing a greenish mould, which I read is beneficial to most plants, inhibiting fungal growth (although it is toxic to mushroom, onion and pine-tree cultivation).

I mentioned Szczecin, and once again on my visit last week I was rewarded with two (this time!) bags of artisan-roasted coffee beans, from the aptly named Qualia Coffee.

Left: right now, I am enjoying Stoczniowa Robota ('shipyard work') by Qualia Coffee Roasters (qualiacaffe.com). Like all good coffees, it has a roast-date on the packaging as well as a best-by date (Feb 2025). It grinds with a satisfying crunchiness lacking in Lidl's beans. And it is clearly superior in terms of aroma, colour, flavour and mouth-feel. 

When I've worked my way through Stoczniowa Robota, I shall move on to the next pack, a coffee entitled Pokusa Krokusa ('the temptation of Crocus'); will be interesting to sample two artisan coffees back to back.

Once again, many thanks to my hosts at Agencja Rozwoju Metropolii Szczecińskiej for the kind gift.

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