Coffee

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. Michael Pollan wrote a book about caffeine. It, of course, featured coffee. I read it. It’s an interesting read and I highly recommend it if you want to know something about caffeine or coffee or tea or anything with caffeine in it. When I Googled coffee versus tea usage in the world I was surprised to find that tea is, according to google, more widely used then coffee. When I started to get a little deeper into this tea and coffee thing I started out by Googling “tea usage in the world” and the next thing I know I’ve got this PDF by the Tea Association of the USA on my tablet. It said that in 2021 Americans consumed almost 85 billion servings of tea or more than 3.9 billion gallons. About 84% of all tea consumed was black tea, 15% was green tea and the small remaining amount of was oolong white and dark tea. That’s really probably more than I needed to know and goes to show you that the tea people are more aggressive at getting information into the hands of consumers than the coffee people. I’m more of a coffee people but I do like tea. Apparently, so do a lot of other people.

This Googling of coffee started because I made myself a cup of coffee this morning in a way that I had never made it before. Now I’ve made lots of coffee in my day. I wasn’t a huge coffee drinker and I’m still not a huge coffee drinker but I’m a consistent coffee drinker. I like coffee in the morning and I like it strong.

Coffee and I go way back. As a child I was fascinated by the coffee pot. My grandparents drank a lot of coffee and since I spent the first 10 years of my life living with them, I watched a lot of coffee being perked in a glass coffee maker that set on top of the stove. It actually would go perk-perk-perk. It was cool to watch.

I never really drank the stuff until I was a working man. Never needed to. Never wanted to. As a working man, I needed a little help in my mornings to get going. There was nothing like a coffee and cigarette to give me a buzz in the morning to help me get out the door. Later, as a mature working man,  or rather as a somewhat mature working man, although still quite young, I added a newspaper to the mix. It was a habit I sustained for decades. Fortunately, I lost the cigarettes early in that period and, unfortunately, missed them dearly. It is, however, probably one of the reasons why I’m still able to write this in my mid-70s.

My relationship with coffee has gone through many stages and many variations in those stages. As a younger man the relationship was pretty bland. I bought a can or a bag of coffee and perked it. Later, when I matured, I started having instances that changed my relationship with coffee. I’ll detail three of those instances below.

The first was once-upon-a-time when my wife and I were taking a week-long Caribbean cruise. We had missed a connection on a flight to Miami to board the boat due to increment weather. It wasn’t our fault. I called the travel agent and she said that they woud put us up in the hotel at the airport and fly us out to the first port the next day and they would put us up at a hotel until the boat arrived. Sounded okay to me. While at the airport in Miami I went down to this little coffee bar in the middle of the airport and got in line with all these Hispanics to get some coffee. Once I got to the front of the line I got a little adventurous. I ordered a double espresso. I then took it and put way too much sugar in it and the next thing I know I’m buzzing out of my mind. This was good coffee. So good in fact that, for the rest of my life, I felt the best place in the world to get a cup of coffee was the coffee bar at the Miami Airport. This one double espresso changed my life. Double espressos became my favorite coffee drink for years. While I was a working stiff chasing the almighty dollar I used to stop at the local bistro on my way to work and the whole thing got to be so consistent that Cheryl, the lady who worked behind the counter and had a horrible attitude, would often have my double espresso and ham and cheese croissant waiting on me when I walked in the door.

The next instance of how coffee changed my life was when I was on vacation in Italy. My wife and I were staying at a hotel somewhere in Italy while we were just kind of wandering around the country and I woke up one morning, it must have been a Saturday because the street in front of the hotel where they put us in the room at the front of the street where the hotel was located because we were stupid Americans, was alive with a market that just sort of sprang up overnight. I thought that wandering around a street market in Italy might be interesting so I went downstairs wandered through the market,  during my browsing I found this coffee pot, a metal coffee pot that I had seen used throughout Europe by Europeans making coffee and I bought one for $5. This is back in the day when I had to pay for it in lira. At that time it could have been some ridiculous number like a hundred thousand lira. I remember going to money machines and putting in more zeros than you can ever imagine to get paper money. I brought the little metal thing home and it was another instance where coffee changed my life.

The third instance came when I visited a friend who I had run around with in high school. We were great friends. We used to run around all the time. Sometimes we would even go out on double dates together with our girlfriends. He may actually have lost his virginity in the back of my car. Not with me, of course. We were roommates at various times while we were in college and he eventually went off to do some kind of mysterious work for the government and I would go see him periodically and hang out with him at his home for a few days. One morning I got up and went into the kitchen and he was grinding coffee beans with a coffee bean grinder. He was also heating water on the stove and he had this weird glass thing sitting on the counter where he would put in the ground coffee beans and eventually add the boiling water. He called it a french press. When I went home I ordered one along with a bean grinder and, again, my life was changed.

I’m an American. Americans have changed their relationship with coffee. They now get it out of a drive-up window to consume while they’re driving their cars way-more than they did when I was a child. Actually, no one ever did that when I was a child. I can also tell you that I have spent a little time in France wandering around in a car, sometimes with my wife, sometimes with my wife and some of my children, and sometimes alone. I can tell you that the French don’t drink coffee that they obtained in a drive-thru while in their car. At least not during the period when I was driving around France. It would have been sacrilegious. Now I’m saying this not having been to France in years and years. Most of my traveling in the last decade has been in Asia. France was one of the first places I went to when I started going overseas decades ago. I can tell you that I still remember the french word for to-go and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the only place I ever found that I could use that word when referring to a cup of coffee while in France was at a McDonald’s and as soon as I said it I could see the person behind the counter grimace. That’s probably changed but it would almost break my heart if it has. I used to say that it was easier to find a three-legged prostitute than it was to find styrofoam in France.

Today, I have numerous ways to make coffee. This morning, however, was a change. While I was boiling the water for the French press I put the coffee in the water and boiled it. I can’t remember ever having done that before. Now some coffee connoisseurs might almost faint if they read this. Not only that, but the beans weren’t ground fresh. I ground the beans at the store. I’m almost embarrassed to say that. Further, I blended some coffees. It wasn’t just Sumatra Dark, I added some vanilla coffee to make a blend.

I know. I’ve sinned and now that I’ve confessed I feel so much better. But the coffee was great. I’m even going to do it again. But, not this morning, I’m already starting to get a little buzz.