Earlier, no one would have thought of walking down the street with a cup of coffee, because drinking coffee meant resting
Presumably, Frau Bentz was simply tired of coffee grounds sticking in her teeth. After all, in those days coffee was brewed cowboy-style, just with water. The prototype for the filter was the blotting paper from her son's school notebook and a punctured tin can. Incidentally, today Melitta Unternehmensgruppe Bentz KG is an international concern with 3,300 employees and headed by Melitta's great-grandson.
The drink passed through a paper filter became much tastier in any case. So good that a whole culture formed around it. Such quintessentially German institutions as ladies' coffee gatherings or casual conversation over a cup of coffee. Because not only huge pieces of cake were served with coffee, but also the latest gossip.
There are many like me around. People who believe that nothing is more soothing than the prospect of a cup of coffee. It could even be seen as a space where Germans want to escape from their fears. After all, for them coffee is an emergency exit, a place to run away, and thus a staple food.
For decades, coffee for Germans meant a kind of pause, hatha yoga for everyone, a means of fostering a sense of collectivism at work and in the family, and its own unit of time. Drinking a cup of coffee meant at least half an hour of rest; thereby it contributed a more valuable contribution to work-life-romance than any corporate party. No one would have had the crazy idea of going out into the street with their cup and its hot contents, until…
Until in the 1990s the first trend for 'coffee-to-go' came from the USA to Germany, and coffee in capsules from Switzerland. Since then, it has become possible to choose up to 20 coffee options, and when ordering one had to make more decisions than when getting a mortgage. Most people, apparently, are so absorbed in this activity that they do not notice that they pay many times more for 1 kg of coffee in capsules than for 1 kg of regular coffee. But that is nothing compared to the price the environment pays.
Packaging waste is measured in thousands of tons. Just for the paper coffee cups used in Germany, about 2.5 million trees have to be cut down every year. Every hour, 320,000 such cups end up in trash cans. And one almost feels a desire that there were great-aunts all over the country giving half a kilo of 'good whole-bean coffee', rather than friends offering a chic gift set with 20 different flavor options of coffee in capsules.
But there is also light at the end of the German coffee tunnel. And there you can see someone brewing their coffee in an absolutely traditional way. 'Pour Over', the return of manually prepared filter coffee – that is what can be seen on the menus of trendy cafes across the area between Berlin, Hamburg and Munich.
This leads us through a porcelain cup to the origins of our coffee culture. To where coffee again, finally, means a small pause for rest, where it is made simply. And, despite its stimulating effect, it is so relaxing that no one is scared off by a piece of delicious cream cake with its 1200 calories from some Aunt Erika, which goes so wonderfully with coffee – as does the latest gossip from the neighborhood.