We here at Sprudge are very pro-coffee. We say buy yourself that expensive coffee as a treat if you feel so inclined. Get weird with it. The more gadgets the better if that’s your thing. Enjoying the process is a big part of it. All this is to say, you could reasonably assume that Sprudge is all for going ham on making a fancy little coffee on an airplane. But you would be wrong. Don’t be That Guy.
“That Guy” in question, per Daily Mail, is TikTok user Ozan Cetinkaya, who posted a 45-second clip of him “making espresso at 35,000 feet.” In the video, he can be seen with a vacuum-sealed bag with 18g of “Geisha” (red flag number one), which he then hand grinds, loads into a handless portafilter-type situation, tamps—TAMPS! With a tamper, on an airplane—and the pulls a shot in the app-enabled Cera+ portable espresso maker.
You can watch him track the shot progress on the app in his phone, which means that he had to bring another piece of equipment on the flight just to film himself watching it all happen.
@ozanncetinkaya #espresso ♬ Will I See You Again? – Thee Sacred Souls
Of the over 2,000 comments on the video—with over 1.7 million times thus far—most are not particularly kind, many of which include some combination of the words “performative”, “insufferable”, and “final boss.” I choose not to be so harsh, despite my eyes rolling so far back into my head I could see my own thoughts.
I’m going to assume that unbridled excitement for specialty coffee is what brought our friend Ozan to this point and that’s a wonderful thing. (I will conveniently forget that he filmed all of it and the subsequent implications as to the real reason for this in-flight brew sesh may be.) Nonetheless I cannot let this one slide because it’s too much, he’s doing too much.
Here’s a general rule to help you navigate when is appropriate to let your coffee freak flag fly. Coffee shops, take note because some of y’all need to hear this too. Don’t make your love of coffee someone else’s problem. And in closed quarters in the economy section of an aircraft, which is where he appears to be, it’s everybody’s problem. Now, if you’ve got no neighbors because the flight is empty or because you’re fancy up in first class, then maybe. But even still it’s a stretch. I personally wouldn’t do it, but I also quite love the bad airplane coffee experience.
Which brings me to my next point, the true enlightened coffee enthusiast is the one who has learned to appreciate bad airplane coffee. If your love of coffee means that you have to brew a Gesha when you fly, then you’re loving coffee all wrong. And also, if using a handheld espresso maker really the best way to appreciate the work it took to produce that Gesha? Is it? Really?
So everyone just cool it. Drink your bad coffee because it’s warm and caffeinated and is a great place to dunk a Biscoff. Or, if you must, exclusively fly Alaska Airlines. They serve Stumptown in-flight and it is perfectly fine.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
