I take my coffee black. No sugar, no sweetener, no milk, frothed or heated or otherwise. Like so many coffee is a utilitarian drink for me, banishing those morning dregs of an incomplete night’s sleep or keeping me up those couple of hours longer. I do not, I confess, understand the love for the ranges of café specialties we’ve seen spring into being over the past few decades, and that makes me think that my relationship with the drink is, if not unique, then at least in a minority in my culture. Coffee, it seems, is just an energy-boosting ingredient in a concoction that’s more about dynamic flavours than it is about staying awake.
It’s funny, I feel, that we treat coffee in this part of the world as a sleep alternative. For all the recycled jokes about not talking to me until I’ve had my coffee, I don’t find that it wakes you up so much as prevents sleep. “Aren’t those the same thing, Joey?”, you might ask, but I must tell you they are not. Do you feel a difference between waking up after a good night’s sleep and that sleeplessness you experience when you’re in bed, staring at an ever-advancing clock, waiting for sleep to come? You’re awake and unable to sleep in both scenarios, after all. I think you’ll agree that there is a difference there, between an inner energy that makes you feel awake, and a concern or feeling that prevents you from not being awake. Coffee is, I think, similar in that regard. I don’t feel any less tired in the morning after a cup of coffee (and I’m liberal with the grounds and drink from a rather large mug), but I can’t deny it stops me from closing my eyes for more than a few seconds. Where good sleep gives you the energy to open your eyes, coffee is like propping your eyelids open.
Coffee is a cultural phenomenon that the world’s had the pleasure to slurp at for centuries. The proliferation of the beverage, as opposed to the chewed bean, appears to have come out of Ethiopia, up into the Arabian peninsula, and from there into Europe and on to the Americas. All along the way the impression I get of its use is similar to my own; an energy-boosting substance, so where has the explosion of spin-offs come from? As far as I can tell, the path of coffee development has forked in two. To one side, there is the road of the roast, the obsessive care given to the bean’s origin, variety, roast time and all the rest of it. When you think of trendy cafés, their tabletops invariably distressed wood and zinc, their lights devoid of lampshades and their baristas meticulously coiffed and absurdly barbate, this is the kind of coffee you’ll find. It strikes me as a terribly exclusive world, one rich in backstory and lore, and I get the impression you’re expected to know what you’re drinking with a level of awareness and particularity matching that of the baristas themselves. It’s a baffling world to me because I’m not a coffee insider, and I’m just satisfied that what I’m drinking will stave off the creeping onset of sleep. The other fork in the road is much more commercial, and you can understand why, looking at it, why the other fork exists in the way that it does. It follows what I understand Kodak did in its early days: they’d release a new product, then just a short time later introduce a new alternative product meeting a different need, subverting the usual pattern of product launch, wait until no-one’s buying it anymore, then release a new one. Every conceivable combination of coffee flavour additives now exists, launched at machine-gun speed by all the major café chains, and I have to wonder how great a part the coffee bean itself plays in, for example, the Starbucks Peppermint Double Chocolate Chip Blended Crème. That’s a lot of words and a lot of ingredients that don’t mention what I would’ve assumed was the primary ingredient. As a result, I do sometimes feel my choice of coffee outside home is either a religiously and ritualistically prepared serving of sour tar for which I must prostrate myself before the local high priest of brewing, or a sugary ooze of liquid fudge with an asthmatic breath of coffee aroma to it, served in a cup with a name similar, but not exactly like, my real name. It’s a poor choice, considering at home the three most important adjectives in my coffee are quick, plenty, and alone.
But maybe I’m being too hard on coffee and its multitude of aficionados around the globe. You can’t fault a café chain for diversifying their offerings any more than you can fault a committed barista for agonising over the preparation of what they sincerely hope is a perfect coffee. And maybe it’s my fault, running that line between pedestrian taste and unnecessary pernicketiness and complaining about anything that strays over either side. But after all, this is just my opinion, as my opinion is that if you need to soften your pick-me-up with spoons of sugar and serving after serving of milk and shot of caramel goo and a grating of cinnamon and a sprinkle of cocoa powder, then maybe you don’t actually like coffee, deep down. And if you’re flipping through colour swatches making sure that Kopi Luwak bean is roasted just the right side of perfect, then maybe you could do with remembering that, after a cigarette, they all taste the same anyway and maybe your attention to detail would be better spent elsewhere. But what do I know? I drink instant.
Coffee – 6.5 out of 10. It’s hard to judge coffee itself too harshly, but the prep and presentation is all fair game. Maybe try tea?
Joey Reviews Everything 