How to make a better coffee? According to a very short piece in Scientific American, a new study in Physics of Fluids has brought high-speed footage and transparent silica gel to the table, revealing how water really flows through your morning ritual.
According to some Physicists, stronger coffee doesn’t necessarily mean more beans. It’s all about how we pour. To maximize extraction, we want the water to spend more time mingling with the grounds and to stir things up—literally. The trick is to pour slowly, and from higher up. This creates a longer contact time and promotes mixing. Use a thin stream from a gooseneck kettle, and you might just brew a more potent cup with fewer grounds.
But let’s be honest: the best coffee isn’t just about the coffee. It’s the flaky croissant on the side, the sunlight on the worn wooden counter, the familiar face behind the machine. It’s the tiny rituals and fleeting melancholies. Because sometimes, the perfect cup is about the whole café-shaped moment it comes wrapped in.
It’s Books and Beans .com, but I’ve neglected to write about beans for a while. Fitting it is then, that I’m at Riva 25 in Komiza. That’s on the island of Vis, about 2 and a half hours by big fat ferry from Split, Croatia’s second-largest city.
Riva, Komiza, Vis Otok, Croatia
Riva has been my summer time café for a wee bit more than the last few years. The coffee is authentic and hot and served efficiently and with a smile by Mia or Lina who are pleasantly efficient getting the coffee to their caffeine addicted customers. There’s a sneaky little cookie with the coffee, in case you’re pretending not to want sugar. The staff probably weren’t born yet when I had my first Riva coffee, but they speak excellent English if your Croatian is still at beginner level.
If you’re both early and lucky, Riva also serves up freshly made krofnas. That’s a jam filled, sugar-dusted German-style doughnut, aka a Berliner. If you can start your day with a hearty black coffee and a fresh krofna you’ll have a good day – guaranteed.
Riva also serves those other caffeine dilettantes like the cappuccino and the affogato and the macchiato. And now that heatwaves are de rigeur, Riva also serves up some fine crispy cold beers, local and immigrant of course. But if you’re serious about beating the heatwaves, you’ll ask nicely (don’t forget to say ‘molim’ because good manners go a long way, whoever you are, wherever you are) for an iced coffee with ice cream, speaking of which, has anyone told you how good Croatian ice cream is? Riva has about a thousand different flavours to choose from so you’d be mad not to try at least a hundred of them while you’re hanging out in Komiza. A hundred might seem a lot, but they can squeeze 3 scoops onto one cone easy, so a hundred divided by three is… um…
Anyway, many of the books reviewed in this blog were read at Café Riva. Indeed, Riva and I read the entire Master & Commander series and then the Tintin series together. And it was Riva and I who decided to kill off Esref who was my first novel’s hero. One of my sneaky measures of how good a book is is whether it holds my attention while reading it at Riva – I can be easily distracted by the glorious scenery, the postcard boats and the quite interesting gaggle of people who stop by, for example James Bond, who used to take his morning coffee at Riva – no really, Florian told me, so it must be true.
From time to time we read that a medical expert has said we must drink less or even no coffee and then we read something else that says it’s OK. So, which is it? Bad Boy Coffee or Good Boy?
Here’s a link to an opinion piece in The Guardian which may help (or not).
Through the winter and spring, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and drinking coffee, here…
Books and beans 