So have you tried Cuban cigars?

I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version.

The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce.

It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.

I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.

I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water.

The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.

For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc.

[0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut butter cups too. There's nothing special about the Trader Joe's ones other than they are mass produced and use better chocolate that Reese's.

EDIT: Flavor change may be due to cost-saving measures like replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...

All stuff that's made in factories and needs to have shelf life, so I can only imagine it's any number of cost saving substitutions and preservatives and who knows what all for other reasons like preserving texture etc.

This happens to me too; I thought it was universal. I actually like it, though, for some reason (I guess the association with chocolate).

I have no idea why they use it, but I can think of one really good reason why they shouldn't, your product probably shouldn't have "hints of vomit" in its flavour profile.

Nespresso is barely any better.

Same for a majority of local roasters.

And people expect this type of taste:(

I get all mine from Pact, by no means particularly artisan or expensive, and yeah a light roast is not my favourite. But whole beans freshly roasted and ground makes an entirely different drink to freeze-dried instant Nescafe or whatever, or supermarket beans ok the shelf for months, flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla or something to hide the stale.

Given that, Switzerland is a bit special for this matter I believe, but I know that most people will be happy with Nespresso.

I rarely see anyone drinking instant coffee. On that subject, I rather drink some "expensive" instant coffee (yes I have seen single origin instant coffee) than Nespresso or Nescafé.

My point is drinking good coffee is a luxe.

You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.

Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.

I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"

https://www.seriouseats.com/vietnamese-coffee-recipe-1177539...

Right here in NJ a shop a block away from me had it as their distinguishing feature and I didn't like it much (still better than sbux though). And then when I go on vacation in Italy and other European countries I see Illy mostly in vending machines, so when I see and Illy shop I'm not tempted, when there are 500 other more interesting looking shops every direction you look. And in all of those, I mostly had a lot of cappucinos, and they were basically all excellent.

I cannot call Italy's coffe bad. But I confess I never drink it perfectly straight. Usually cappucino. The European style, a pretty small and strong espresso that is foamed. Not a honking big american cup.

But we have the Italians to thank for that, and Australian cafe culture is why it's so easy to get a good coffee even without trying.

But they're all artisanal products that few access. The baseline Starbucks, Hershey's, Budweiser, TGI Fridays, etc. are all... so bad.

However, some people in the US like Hershey's, are not sensitive to the smell, and want the chocolate they grew up with (they might also like the acidic/tangy taste.)

But certain varieties of Hershey chocolate (Symphony, Special Dark) do not bother me as much.

Then later in life, when I traveled to US as an independent adult (after EU coffee culture upbringing), for work, and embraced the local coffee culture... I had a big disassociation between what my mind thought about how coffee in US should be and what it actually was.

I realized that majority of positive feedback about coffee drinks was based on all those other things people put into coffee...syrups, chocolate, marshmallows, cinnamon, milk, etc. Etc.

While the most basic espresso was... Vile:(

That chocolate - can you name a product, or give us a link? I think I know what you mean, but one can never be sure.

I think it's a bit different from developing taste, what you describe. It's more about finding out who you are. I would say once you know your baseline for what makes chocolate/coffee/etc enjoyable, then taste is about experiencing the nuances within that spectrum. Some people also have a greater tolerance for things that aren't really tasty due to coming up in a culture where things generally taste plain or bad (netherlands and UK come to mind).

The dried beans were simply cooked with water. Later with milk. Chocolate as we know it only became a thing centuries later. (Dried milk was only invented in 1802, and you can’t make milk chocolate without that for example)

Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference.

There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.

I feel it's the same or similar than wine, chocolate etc

I, for one, don't like the bite of low quality alcohol. Whisky taken neat starts to be drinkable to me somewhere around $150-$200 a bottle. With ice or water, you can go cheaper than that because you're cutting the harshness of the impurities.

There used to be a theory that passing cheap rail alcohol through an activated charcoal filter several times would improve the taste. In my experience with rail vodka, it removes the worst part of the bite from impurities. But it obviously doesn't make it taste like high quality alcohol. I've only tried this with vodka. It may remove some desirable favors from other alcohols.

The hardest thing to brew at home is actually a pale ale or a light lager. You can't hide any mistakes in those because they are 'sex in a canoe' beers.

Well, I reckon whether one considers that statement true or not depends on who one is (as I'll explain).

Coffee, tea, chocolate and cola all contain mixtures of methylxanthines of which caffeine is but one, others include theophylline, theobromine† and paraxanthine to mention a few.

What's relevant here is not only that all are psychoactive to varying degrees but also they are bitter substances that contribute significantly to the taste. For example, dark chocolate is considerably more bitter than milk chocolate because it contains significantly higher level of xanthines than the latter.

I've yet to taste any decaffeinated coffee that in my opinion is worth drinking and it's not for the want of the stimulating effects of the caffeine but rather its taste. Without those xanthines the product just doesn't taste like coffee to me.

From observation, most consumers of decaffeinated coffee consume it with cream or as a latte and often with sugar, these additives tend to mask the bitterness of caffeine so it seems its absence doesn't bother them. For my part I add nothing to coffee—not even sugar—for reason that for me the bitterness of the xanthines is an integral part of the taste.

I drink coffee because of its taste, not for its stimulating properties. Unfortunately, unlike many others, caffeine has almost no noticeable stimulating effect on me—I can drink the strongest coffee at bedtime and still easily fall asleep.

† Despite its name theobromine does not contain bromine.

Even though there's a popular strain of edgy internet bro logic that "no one actually likes X, they only drink/eat/wear/consume it because Y."