That’s my daily elixir of life and work. Coffee. I can’t live without. Ever since North End started roasting beans here in Dhaka, the whole coffee scene changed. Now if you look carefully, it’s whole beans from North End stored inside a blasphemous Nescafe jar! And right beside it the ubiquitous french-press.
Thank god, beans are slowly taking over the notorious Nescafe! Interestingly enough, when people think tea, they think of real tea-leaves here, they don’t think about some suspicious soluble substance like instant coffee! They know you need to brew it to get tea and throw away the leaves. But when you say ‘coffee’ in general terms in Bangladesh, people understand ‘instant coffee,’ they think coffee by default is supposed to be a soluble powder. All credit goes to Nestle and their marketing for this mess of course! People started to know coffee without knowing they are getting shit in the name of an elixir. So at office without compromising, even if it is expensive, I buy my own beans, grind them, and press them or brew them in a drip-machine. Yap, we’ve got a grinder too, just to make sure we get the freshest coffee from grinding it right before pouring water.
After experimenting with several different beans (single-origin and blends) from all over the world, I now have comfortably settled in North End’s regular Espresso blend, it’s the safest choice, readily available, never fails. Often-time I mix around 10% French Roast in it, to enhance the burnt smokey flavor. I can’t take French Roast on its own, it’s too roasty and loses the complex taste.
If you are wondering what is iPhone 8 Plus is doing in the title of this post, look at the photo again. You must have noticed that blurred stem of the press? That’s iPhone 8 Plus’s faulty ‘portrait mode’ that artificially creates a low depth-of-field effect. During the first few days of the phone I didn’t realize it’s artificial blurring; silly me, of course it is 🙄 But who cares, oftentimes, this phone takes remarkably good photos! Although the low-light performance of iPhone 8 Plus is nowhere near the mighty Pixel-2.
