The coffee is over-roasted, as always, but at least here there are other human beings.
Your days of purchasing pre-ground coffee are over.
Essex is not the only campus in the grip of coffee culture: a student bar at Aberystwyth University closed this year due to falling alcohol sales, suggesting coffee is taking over as the campus drink of choice, while Cardiff Met now hosts a thriving Starbucks.
"In the UK, you guys used to have long office lunches, put down on expenses, but those days are over and coffee is the new treat," she adds.
Just be aware of one rule: The length of steep time controls extraction - too short and the coffee will be under-extracted and sour; too long and the coffee will be over-extracted and bitter.
— my coffee, then it's over".
If, at the end of an irate tirade about how my Kenyan coffee beans were over-roasted by the artisanal torréfacteur, I append the phrase "first world problem" with some wry rearrangement of my face muscles, I signal that I know this is just one of the minor frustrations of a very fortunate life.
Of course, the whole point of pour-over coffee is that it's simple: you can do it at home, while on vacation, while hiking or indeed at a coffee shop with a bare minimum of apparatus.
(I was hoping for an ice brew, in which hot coffee is brewed directly over ice. Done well, it tastes like summer. But another barista said he had only been "toying" with making ice brew in an Aeropress; he wasn't comfortable serving it to me).
