Coffee in Scandinavia

[Mia in Germany]

Hey, that's cool! Thanks I've been thinking about it because I make cheese myself often. I'll tell you how it turns out with goat's milk.

[stormylee]

Two good reasons to have coffee today: it's the national day of Norway...



... and yet another study finds coffee is good for you!
http://www.talkaboutcoffee.com/coffee-drinkers-less-likely-to-die.html

So let's raise a cup to Norway and long life!

[stormylee]

Start your week with a cup of egg coffee! From wisegeek.com: "Egg coffee is coffee which has been brewed with a raw egg, shell and all. The coffee has a distinct flavor and scent which some people quite enjoy, and as an added bonus, eggshells help to leach the acids from coffee, making egg coffee less hard on the stomach. This unique beverage is found in some Scandinavian nations, along with the American Midwest, and it appears in some parts of Eastern Europe as well." I'll readily admit I first heard about egg coffee only this morning.

Swedish Egg Coffee

A blogger's experience (complete with pictures!):

http://puttingweirdthingsincoffee.com/2010/01/28/putting-an-egg-in-coffee-eggspresso/

[Mia in Germany]

Good morning

My grandma used to make this egg coffee I'm still making it sometimes, it's really good.
She made another one, too, which is just creaming the egg without shell into the coffee so you get kinda egg cappuccino.

Also I made this Viking Blood Cocktail now. Very surprising indeed. I'm a bit confused because one of the other reviewers seems to have sweet aquavit - mine is anything but sweet Also I never use store bought lemon beverages, so I made my own which wasn't very sweet, and all together it was a really pleasant drink.

[stormylee]

I've was vaguely aware of using egg shells in coffee grounds (to reduce acidity, maybe?), but the rest of the egg was news to me. I guess there's nothing for it but to try egg coffee myself!

How did you find the taste of the Viking Blood cocktail - did one of the flavours dominate or did it turn out more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts?

[Mia in Germany]

More than the sum of its parts, I'd say. I could recognise the caraway flavour of the aquavit, but it was not dominant. That was what worried me - caraway and coffee, a really weird combination. But somehow the lemon beverage seems to balance that. For me it had something of lemon-caraway-flavoured coffee.

[stormylee]

This weekend's coffee-y cocktail: Durango Royale! Aquavit and coffee liqueur with lemon again - this time with cider and a touch of cinnamon! Hmm!

[SQRT(3)]

Well, I do not know is it our scandinavian genes that makes us consume that much coffee. Anyway, I cannot get my day started if I do not get coffee. And like you said, decaf is not real coffee. It is coffee kind of liquid named as coffee. It would be desaster to have only decaf in the morning

I wonder is it natural development to have bigger size coffee cups over time. When going back to 30's 40's and 50's coffee cup was sized to 1 dl max. Nowadays you have easily 0,5 liter coffee mugs. The mug is standard anyway and you can have 3 times more coffee with one go compared to old times. Then again during old times coffee was perhaps more expensive and today it is commodity.
Comparing to soda bottles, 3 decades ago there were only 3,33 dl bottles and 1 litre bottles. Today the smallest size here in Finland is 0,5 litre and the biggest are now 2 litre bottles. The package size/portion size has grown bigger there too.

[stormylee]

Oh yes, coffee cups used to be so dainty!



Well, not quite as dainty as that, but still!

As a coffee drinker, I've evolved from small cups to huge mugs and back to smal cups again - wonder what's up with that?

[Mia in Germany]

Acquired sense of elegance?
If I'm in the mood for something refined, I use small pretty cups. Or when I make Turkish mokka, of course. In the morning, I just need that huge mug to keep me company.

[stormylee]

Oh Mia, I like your elegance theory! I'll stick with that!

Guests tend to make us bring out the smaller cups too, don't they? I guess small cups just feel more formal and festive, with the little saucers and all. Our guests get their coffee in these little numbers, volume: 150 ml to the brim...



... while we always drink coffee from chunky mugs when there are no guests around! (Ok, so my mug is only 200 ml - SO's is 400 ml - but no saucers, at least! )

[Mia in Germany]

They *do* look elegant
I have bought a giant mug saying "always best coffee" that's reserved for my best friend when he stops by. He's a coffee addict, too, and he always collapses when he gets that mug (400 ml).