Best Cup of Coffee

I had so much good coffee this year (if you're in the EU, allow me to recommend Coffeevine - both for their exceptionally curated monthly subscription box and for their deep catalog of cafe reviews), but this one doesn't even require a second thought. It was the first cup I had at Lot Coffee Boutique in Delft. There are a couple reasons that it's weird for me to tell you this: unlike books or movies, it's not all that easy for someone outside the Netherlands to have the experience I had at Lot. Also - and this is very, very weird for me - I don't actually remember the origin of the coffee itself. It was from 3fe in Dublin...and I think it may have been a Kenya AA. How is a cup of coffee whose origin I can't even recall the best cup of coffee this year, and why am I telling you about it in the first place?

A curious thing happened at Lot. This would have been back in late July, when pandemic precautions were just starting to subside here. I was in the habit of spending my Mondays taking my 3 children on a day trip somewhere in their newly adopted home country as a means of showing them how great this country is. For every day trip, I had a coffee place picked out for us to visit. For Delft, Lot wasn't it. It hadn't even been on my radar, but we walked by and it captured my attention. We walked in, and before I knew it the shop's owner & head barista Lotte, had greeted the kids and snuck stroopwaffels into their hands while I was busy checking out the beans she had on offer. There was a sense of lightness and joy in that shop. I go to plenty of coffee spots that are passionate about the craft of coffee and hold themselves to the highest standard of service excellence. Lot was a place where I felt unburdened, and I watched others have the same experience too. I have since taken to people watching every time I return to that shop, and I see people approach the counter and from the first interaction with Lotte they release tension throughout their bodies and begin to smile in anticipation of the coffee they're about to drink.