A dark, rich cup of coffee creme, please!

Traditional German coffee is actually very similar to the dreadful American "large, weak cups" you mention. We call it "Filterkaffee", it's usually prepared with Jacobs, Tchibo or Melitta brands. It's what your grandma would serve Ooooh but. My grandma served the upscale blends from Tschibo right from the shop (this was Bremen in the seventies) and made it strong enough to keep a bunch of other grandmas alive and squeaking throughout Sundays of severe cream cake attacks; the stuff made my heart skip but it was really good. The filter (as stated above, not my choice) is not the problem per se, and not (necessarily) the brand name either. But there are, and here we come closer to the downs of German coffee lore, quite some differences between German grandmas. Look at the Saxonian http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bl%C3%BCmchenkaffee, which is so weak that you can see the flower decoration at the bottom inside the cup, or its weaker brother Schwerterkaffee, where you can see through the cup and discern the crossed-swords sign of the Meissen porcelain factory, stamped on the bottom.

Personally, I like the Italian brands. I don't agree with this advice. You have to see roasted coffee as food, more particularly: like bread. While green beans can last half a year if stored correctly, roasted coffee will go stale in one or two weeks. Even beans in vacuum cans will suffer from prolonged storage. If possible, buy your coffee from a local roaster. I wouldn't try roasting my own beans, unless you've got A LOT of time on your hands. Sorry, but this is nonsense. I roast my beans in the http://www.behmor.com/, and it takes me exactly 20 minutes for a full pound of freshly roasted coffee per week. It's cheap, it's trivially easy, and 20 minutes is not a LOT of times. I drink espresso, which uses a lot of coffee per cup. If you drink drip coffee, a pound would probably last you two weeks. Incidentally, coffee goes stale after at most two weeks. There's a wonderful website called http://sweetmarias.com/, where you can buy bags and bags of fresh green coffee varieties at competitive prices (they also do roasted, by the way). Two easy ways to drastically improve your coffee would be: 1. Buy freshly roasted coffee from a roaster in your neighbourhood (or via the internet). 2. Buy whole beans. Get a grinder to grind your beans freshly. Once you've smelled fresh coffee grounds, you'll never go back to preground. If you want to geek out: 3. Homeroast. 4. Get shiny espresso gear.

Europe is a rather diverse place. Regular 'indigenous' coffee in scandinavia is different from regular coffee in Germany or France. And of course Italian style coffee is different. So if you tell us a bit more we can give you better advice. So: in what European country did you get this coffee and under what name is it on the menu?

In the absence of an actual crazy-expensive espresso machine, the Italian-born members of both sides of my family will turn to a http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000CF3Q6/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/. While the coffee is brewing in that, they’ll heat up milk in a saucepan. Combine the two and cook for a bit, and you get what they call a caffèlatte. That and some small baked good makes breakfast.

Get thee to http://coffeegeek.com, they'll opine you to death as to what kind of coffee you drank and how to reproduce it. In the process, they'll try to convince you that you need a 4000 $ espresso machine made by LaMarzocco and a 2000 $ coffee grinder by Mahlkoenig. Then, a Behmor coffee roaster (or a second hand Probat). But anyway. I'm guessing that a lot of coffees you drank must have been some kind of http://senseo.com (single serve pod system) coffees.

Somewhat out of the blue, I found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_crema which seems to fit what I was drinking to a tee. Looks like the machines use a coarser grind than standard espresso and pull a very long shot.

They come in vacuum packs. It almost looks like a giant blister-pack. That way they don't go stale. And it's what you call "overpriced" for a reason: it's superior to any coffee you can buy in NA. Sorry, that's totally untrue. There's no reason why columbian beans roasted in an Italian roaster in America are any different than columbian beans roasted in an Italian roaster in Europe. Granted, there are all kinds of roasts, and every single one of them is done in the US, somewhere. Add to that the fact that no one has any idea how long beans have sat around in the warehouse before being vacuum packed, and the fact that there is no way to know what sort of temperature fluctuations in transit occurred, and anyone who care about the taste of coffee is not going to waste their time on mass produced coffee imported from overseas. (Ditto anything in a pod, even if it is produced in America.)

Look, if you are new to making good coffee, don't get intimidated by all these suggestions, excellent though they may be. First off, go get yourself some freshly ground beans - try your local cafe - and pack your stovetop espresso maker with them. If you have a water filter, use filtered water in the espresso maker. Otherwise, just fresh cold tap water is fine. Don't overfill - you want this to be strong. Heat a little half and half in a small pan. Don't let it boil. When the espresso is ready, pour it into a coffee cup and add cream to taste: voila, kaffe creme, aka cafe creme, aka cafe crema.

....freshly ground beans in a dark roast, I forgot to say.