It is hard to get good coffee at a low price.

I don't have to be a professional to drink freshly ground coffee beans, but a cup of coffee with sandwiches every morning has been my habit for years. When I used to live in Taiwan, the freshly made sandwiches at Meimei breakfast and a cup of freshly brewed coffee from the convenience store were my most common and casual breakfast. Only after moving to Beijing for breakfast, which is so simple and readily available in Taiwan, did I find that it is not so easy to enjoy life as a matter of course.

In Beijing, when I go to work every day, I bring the egg salad sandwich I made the night before to the office. After putting things down, I go to Starbucks coffee on the ground floor of the office building and buy a cup of coffee for breakfast. Like many people, I must have a cup of coffee for breakfast in order to start the day full of energy. But after such a high-end breakfast for a while, I began to feel that something was wrong.

How to drink Starbucks coffee in mainland China is not as good as that in Taiwan, and I can't tell where it is different. I guess the most likely thing is that the milk from the mainland is not as fragrant as that from Taiwan. In addition, it costs about 30 yuan per cup, which is a little more expensive than in Taiwan. Although it is not much different from Taiwan, the general price in the mainland is more than one grade lower than that in Taiwan, so by comparison, a cup of coffee at this price is very expensive in this consumer market. A purchasing lady from Jilin, who earns 3500 yuan a month, only eats 10 yuan lunches every day. A cup of coffee equals three lunches, so I no longer patronize this coffee shop every day.

Although there are many 7-Eleven convenience stores in Beijing, they do not sell freshly brewed coffee like Taiwan's Uni-President supermarket chain. Of course, there are other Starbucks-like coffee chains in Beijing, such as Costa Coffee from the UK, Pacific Coffee Company American Coffee from Hong Kong, and S PR Coffee run by Taiwan companies. After I tried it around, I came to the conclusion that the price was about the same as that of Starbucks, and the aroma was not significantly better than Starbucks.

In order to get the right cup of coffee, I searched and searched everywhere. The coffee sold in the supermarket is all very sweet canned coffee, or bad instant coffee. Coffee shops opened by mainlanders themselves taste no better than Starbucks, and the price is higher than Starbucks. I conducted a small survey on coffee drinking behavior among my Taiwanese friends. Some people drink Starbucks, some simply quit coffee, while the more fastidious Taiwanese buy their own imported coffee beans, grind their own beans and make their own coffee at home, but for me, this is too time-consuming and troublesome.

In Taiwan, I never thought it would be so difficult to have a cup of coffee. In the end, I had to give in to the freshly brewed coffee sold at the bakery in the community, which was neither bad nor expensive, as long as 15 yuan, but their second-hand coffee machine occasionally broke down. It was only after all this trouble that I deeply realized that the fragrant and affordable coffee available everywhere in Taiwan is worth cherishing.

China Coffee Trading Network: www.gafei.com