This question is often raised by our visitors. – “Because of childhood.” That’s if very short.
I started drinking coffee when I was quite young. Maybe my mother can tell more precisely, but it seemed that I was around 10 years old. During deep Soviet time (дремучий совок), we had such an old geyser coffee maker, called “Elvo” and by the way, made in Lviv.
It was a terrible coffee maker that didn’t leave the coffee in the imaginary “bottom” tank like the original geyser coffee maker should have, but instead pushed the already brewed coffee powder back up to the ground section and brewed it again. And it could be continued endless until you unplug it. Probably because of such way the brewed coffee affected sleep for several days.
I also tried to brew coffee as long as possible to make the taste stronger. Ground coffee was appearing from somewhere. No idea how, but somehow (it was one of scarce goods during Soviet time).
At that time, I also got the book of Mykola Pucherov “All About Coffee”, which it’s still with me and which I have read several times. I even had a conversation with the widow of this brilliant man, but that’s another story. The main thing is that this book, which was published in 1988 in Kyiv, contains a text that is still relevant today.
After such a head-scratching start, I went through all the steps of a coffee lover: instant coffee – Lviv “Halka” and Indian instant coffee of the company “JFK Coffee”, granulated coffee “Nescafe Gold”, ground coffee “Jacobs Monarch”, coffee beans “Blasercafé”. How can we not mention chicory coffee, when there was a total scarce of all goods.
I still remember our weekend morning coffee that my mom made after the breakfast. For me in those days it was brewed black coffee with a condensed milk. It was incredibly delicious. And such a delicacy was also available in the cafeteria on the ground floor of the building where I lived that time.
In short, to enjoy a coffee that costs approx. 1000 euros per kilogram while chatting with my baristas in my own coffee shop, I had to consistently and thoroughly go through all the stages of coffee evolution. And by the way, this significantly affected our market offer, and, as a result, the level we reached.
It was another episode. My wife and I started saving money for an automatic coffee machine from the company “Gaggia”, which was sold by “Dim Kavyi” (House of coffee). At that time, it seemed to me that this was the pinnacle of coffee making. It was pretty cute in today’s view. Instead of different gifts for different holidays, we forced our guests to donate into a box marked as “for the coffee machine”. By the way, it was almost collected. But we moved in Vienna before a full amount was reached.
So, I think that’s what I’m doing now. The main reason that Fenster exists in Vienna was a kind of warm and friendly relationship with coffee in my family when I was a child and then a teenager. Probably, many such stories are with such background