The French want to rediscover the good taste of coffee

At 74 years old, Jean-Claude Ball has not forgotten his grandmother’s mill. Those were the days when coffee could be bought in beans at the grocery store. Or at the baker, in newspaper cones. The drink infused all day on the stove.

During haymaking, each member of the family took their own bottle of coffee, sometimes cut with chicory to save money. Or spiced with schnapps. “It was refreshing,” laughs Jean-Claude. At the age of 12, he gave his mother an electric mill on Mother’s Day. Relegating the manual instrument to a cupboard forever.

This does not prevent this resident of Haut-Rhin from owning 400 of them. Because Jean-Claude is a mylokaphéphile: he is one of the 120 members of the International Association of Coffee Grinder Collectors. Daniel Gelin, an octogenarian in the Loire, also joined. Purchaser of 800 grinders, he keeps memories linked to the object: “When we came home from school, we had to grind coffee to help the parents.” And when their backs were turned, he had fun trying with sand and earth.

These two collectors do not attribute their passion to the coffee fragrances of their childhood. But who knows what their keen nostalgia unconsciously owes to the power of the mill to reveal the best flavors?

Because the instrument is still the gateway to the great café. To the point that it is becoming trendy again among the French who have fallen in love with it – and there are many of them. This is evidenced by the proliferation of artisanal roasters in major French cities. Or franchised coffee shops, whose number of establishments increased by 20% between 2019 and 2023, according to the research firm Food Service Vision.

Volatile aromas

If the grinder is so crucial, it is because 50% of the aromas of the coffee disappear in the open air twenty-four hours after it has been ground, indicates a study by the roaster MaxiCoffee. However, aromas – perceived especially by the nose – are essential in the apprehension of taste, even more than flavors – detected by the tongue.

Viva Lenoir, deputy general director of Editions Jean-Lenoir – a company which offers book-boxes of aromas – demonstrates this to me at the Paris Coffee Show, a coffee fair which is held every year in September at the Parc floral de Paris. She makes me chew a coriander seed with a stuffy nose. I don’t perceive any taste. Then she orders me not to block my nostrils anymore.

Suddenly, the flavors explode in the mouth. “You have just experienced retronasal olfaction,” she explains. The volatile compounds rise towards the olfactory mucosa via the back of the throat: 80% of the tasting is conveyed by smell.

Viva Lenoir knows her subject. His father, Jean Lenoir, was a tasting legend. In 1981, he created The nose of wine, a book accompanied by vials containing the aromas of wine to allow oenologists to work on their olfactory memory. He also launched, in 1997, The nose of coffee, at the request of the Colombian Coffee Federation.

The best tasters in the world swear by this book. But almost no French know him. For what ? “Because, when it comes to taste, the Frenchman thinks he already knows everything,” laughs Viva Lenoir. He has long believed that good coffee can only be black and bitter. However, bitterness, rarely pleasant, often signals a danger to human health.”

Take care of the grains

It was not always this way. France was even a pioneer in coffee culture. In the 18th century, she took coffee seeds from Yemen to plant them on the island of Reunion and in the French Caribbean. Passionate about this plant, French botanists discovered and named most of the species known today.

In the 19th century, there were many manuals on the art of making good coffee. Balzac, crazy about this drink, bought his beans from the best roasters and all of Paris praised the writer’s preparations.

Everything changed after 1945. Coffee then entered the category of standardized, industrialized products sold in supermarkets. Nescafé’s soluble formula, launched in 1938, enjoyed growing success after the war. Manufacturers are flooding the market with ready-made grinds.

The French developed a taste for this cheap and easy-to-prepare coffee in electric filter coffee makers, which became popular in the 1970s. “It was progress. All you had to do was press a button,” recalls Grégoire Le Bec, 71, a mylokaphéphile from Côtes-d’Armor. In the 1980s, Jean-Claude Ball changed his Italian coffee maker for a Krups electric model. Daniel Gelin immediately adopted ground coffee, which saved him precious time in his daily life as a young father.

All this was therefore to the detriment of taste. Manufacturers often concealed a coffee’s defects by overroasting the bean. “This type of roasting removes the defects linked to rotting or bad agricultural practices: taste of trash, chemicals… Then only one defect remains, this burnt taste to which we have been accustomed,” explains Pierre de Chantérac, young barista (cafe sommelier, editor’s note) exceptional and world champion in Turkish coffee preparation.

This overroasting removes the flavors that make a coffee unique. And yet… Just read the list of thirty-six aromas of Coffee nose to capture all its hidden potential: nuts, apple, vanilla, pea, malt, lemon… A new edition, released in April in English, even contains twenty-four additional aromas, in order to follow the list established by international coffee institutions.

The popular specialty coffee

The paradox was that it was two manufacturers, Starbucks and Nespresso, who enabled the rediscovery of coffee terroirs in the 1990s. Their coffee, more expensive but tastier, launched the “specialty coffee” trend. It represents 6% of French consumption in 2024, according to the Café Collective. A figure close to 0% in 2000.

But habits have a life of their own. Jean-Claude Ball only drinks one type of coffee, a Senseo pod. “It’s quick and it suits me. I don’t want to bother doing anything differently at my age.” His reaction does not surprise Pierre de Chantérac: “We taste by drawing from a sensory library which is that of the weight of our past life.”

But he has already seen people in their 90s love the specialty coffee they were discovering for the first time. “Everyone can taste it,” says Pierre. No one is born with a super palate. Some of the best tasters I met, who had their palates analyzed, had fewer taste buds than average! The key is to love eating and drinking. To be curious. We are never better tasters than when we are enjoying ourselves.”

Daniel Gelin is one of these new adventurers of taste. For ten years, he has started grinding again. “I saw coffee beans in supermarkets. I said to myself, hey, I could use one of my grinders. It combines the pleasure of obtaining better coffee with that of grinding its beans with a Peugeot model from 1880 with a conical hardened steel nut. “It’s indestructible,” admires Daniel. His capsule machine, given to him by his children, now sleeps in a cupboard.

Arabica or robusta?

If there are 140 species of coffee trees, two of them represent 99.9% of the coffee grown and marketed: arabica and canephora. The latter is better known under the nickname robusta, because it is more resistant and more productive than arabica. On the other hand, Arabica produces a drink richer in floral or fruity aromas, often devoid of bitter or astringent flavors.

Certain varieties are particularly popular, such as pointed bourbon, pacamara, SL28 from Kenya, those from Ethiopia and gesha, the undisputed Rolls of coffees. They are more likely to be found at an artisan roaster than in supermarkets, where the packets are often filled with robusta, cheaper than arabica and containing more caffeine, the substance that creates addiction.

Very bitter, robusta proves economical for manufacturers. One of the unspeakable reasons for the absence of indication of the species of coffee on the packaging.