I’m sure there are kids out there that like coffee. Abby has become a morning tea drinker, making herself tea before 4th grade quite regularly. She uses a lot of milk in her tea. But she doesn’t drink coffee at all. And as a kid, neither did I. I wonder at what point we cross the threshold from not liking coffee to liking it.
I guess I can’t even say I “like” it. When it comes down to it, and I really think about it, it’s a rare cup of coffee that I like to drink. If I think back, I can actually pinpoint the beginning of my coffee-drinking days, and it does come from the first time I enjoyed a coffee drink.
Brian had taken Berta and I to see Pulp Fiction at the Beehive in Pittsburgh (which I believe is now closed), an old police station turned movie theater/coffee house with a sort of exterior castle motif, and for reasons I can’t fathom currently, I had ordered some kind of iced mochaccino concoction to drink. Well, I liked it. And since then, we tried to re-create the drink at home. We bought an espresso machine, and went through many bottles of liquid chocolate before perfecting the drink. But that was the start of it, and since then, I’ve been drinking coffee with reasonable regularity.
We now have a k-cup machine at home. It’s one of those ones you refill with water, but a little pre-measured cup of coffee (or tea, in Abby’s case) into the slot, and push the button to produce whatever you put in it. We’ve been getting the k-cups in a bulk subscription from Amazon, which brings the price of the coffee down to about 23 cents per cup. I drink only one cup per day, with only the occasional “OMG, today is a two cup day”, so I suppose at today’s level of inflation, I’m not really making some African kid’s village go hungry at the cost of my coffee.
Hazelnut Coffee-Mate used to be the thing. It cools the coffee and flavors it. Truly, I’m not a fan of just the plain coffee. It would have to be really good coffee to drink it black, and I haven’t had a lot of really good coffee. In case you were wondering, Starbucks, which tastes like burnt shoe sole, is not really good coffee - it just costs a lot. We’ve been ordering Tully’s Morning Blend for the coffee maker, which I really like. And if I remember correctly, there are Tully’s shops in Seattle, where you can get coffee just like Starbucks. Gotta try that sometime.
In any case, the Coffee-Mate… We get the sugar free kind. Why not the fat free? Because the fat free kind has a ton of sugar in it that makes it actually worse than the fat free kind! It’s kind of crazy. But we’ve been tapering off of the Cremora, and now I’ve got a new regimen.
The cup of coffee that I’m drinking currently has one packet of Truvia (a more natural non-sugar sweetener) and a bit of sugar-free hazelnut Monin. There is no cream. I was using half-and-half for a while with this, but it turns out I don’t like the flavor it adds. Maybe it’s the milk part, but it just doesn’t taste good to me. The only trouble with this blend of a drink is that the coffee comes out of the machine too hot. So I’m looking forward to the arrival of the Coffee Joulies that I helped kickstart, which use an internal polymer mixture to absorb excess heat from the coffee and then release the heat back into the coffee as it it starts to cool.
Maybe I’ll find some other drink to satisfy my morning startup routine, like Kava or something more exotic and with less wacko side-effects, but this coffee thing is working for now
