There is an ongoing discussion about Leiden lacking a refined coffee. Well, I have a place in mind, coffee of which I enjoy a lot: Simon Lévelt, located near the Koornbrug in the center. They don’t make coffee in fact, as you would find in a regular coffeehouse. They sell a variety of coffee beans, plus many kinds of tea and yes, fancy kitchen ware. Before coming to Leiden, it wasn’t my habit to go and buy different types of beans especially grinded for French press. Now I have it. Oh I forgot to mention, they also sell colorful French presses! This opinion piece sounds more of an advertisement now, I admit it. I will still tell the story of how I got familiar with this shop.
Everything started with my mom visiting me last year. You know how moms are; they try to decorate your newly inhabited environment with their own sense of taste. My mom is not different at all. When I was in class, struggling to grasp the essence of what Althusser meant with ideological state apparatuses, she was going in and out of every kind of shop she could find in this small town of Leiden. I joined her after class. She already knew the place better than me! We passed in front of Simon Lévelt and decided to go in and take a closer look at the nice porcelain teapots and coffee cups but we didn’t buy anything then.
A year passed, I totally forgot about the shop since I had huge piles of articles and books in front of me to read and write papers about. Then a friend of mine’s birthday was in September and I wanted to give her a mug as a gift because I knew she was very fond of drinking coffee. We had spent enormous amounts of time in a cozy café – het Koffiehuisje near Rapenburg. So I remembered this shop and found the biggest mug ever in my life! My friend was very happy when she found out about what was inside the package.
Two more months passed. It was December. I was having a bagel with other friends in Bagels and Beans and the subject of conversation came to be French press coffee flavors. My friend said she loved this kind of coffee. I had a eureka moment! I stood up and began to put my coat on. I lied I had an urgent thing to do and headed to Simon Lévelt to buy a French press and a pack of assorted coffee for my dear friend as a Christmas gift. See, shopping can be an urgency in a girl’s life. I picked the Ethiopian beans since I knew it was the origin of coffee (reference: 2006 documentary called “Black Gold” on fair-trade coffee). I went back to Bagels and presented my gift to her. She didn’t believe my surprise at first but took the gift and told me she would open it on December 24th. So she couldn’t learn what was inside then but when she did, she was so happy and enjoyed her first cup very much. My other friends also made use of the coffee beans available in the shop. I still didn’t. Remember me stating above that I did not have the habit of drinking flavored coffee? This is the evidence for it. My friends knew the place better than me even though I was the one introducing it to them.
It was the end of January now. I was so bored of taking my portable mug to the main library and drinking Nestlé Gold all the time. So I figured out stopping by this shop and getting myself a French press, a hundred grams of Mocha Limu beans and a metal container to store coffee. Later that day I went home, washed the new equipment, boiled water, put three spoons of Mocha Limu into the French press and put hot water on top of it. The act of pouring hot water always makes me calm. I put the upper part which functioned for pressing and waited for four minutes. Then I poured again the best smelling coffee in my life to one of my lovely mugs, purple this time. I waited again for a couple of minutes since I cannot drink hot water right away after boiling. I tasted it. It was good. It was very good though. Self-made coffee is the precious experience here. The last but not the least comment on this particular coffee company is being acknowledged about the coffee you have is biological and served to customers with fair-trading standards.