I don’t know how it happened. I hated the stuff. It confused me with it’s deceptively delightful smell in the early morning hours but yet it had such a putrid taste. I can’t remember a time when my father didn’t partake of it every morning and he even influenced my older brother to indulge. I hated the taste and I don’t know why…yes I do…because it tasted like hot bitter asphalt (Now please allow me some poetic license here. I have never tasted asphalt, but I am assuming you can follow my creative word picture here and you “catch my drift”.)
How did it come about? Someone said, “Let’s take these beans, grind them, and pour hot water over them and see what it tastes like.” Why not do this with, oh I don’t know, refried beans, or kidney beans, or what about green beans? The reason…because that would taste like crap, but for some reason the bitterness of these beans, whether they are dark or bold, medium or Columbian, house blend or decaf…
Coffee beans have sucked the whole world into believing they are “good.”
And after 34 years of denial, I am a new member of this cult.
My name is Shawn…and I am a coffee drinker.
What you don’t realize is what a huge step this is for me. I was born in Seattle, WA and I hated coffee all my life. After college, I moved back to Seattle…and still hated coffee. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to live in Seattle and despise coffee. It’s part of the lifestyle out there. And forget Starbucks, the real coffee drinkers in Seattle drink SBC (or so I was told while I lived there). And that’s a whole different debate…who has the better freaking $4 cup of joe. Anyway, I hated coffee and all the it’s narcissistic accoutrements. I even hated the No. 1 suggestion when someone found out that I hated coffee…the whimpy all-time chic coffee…THE MOCHA! Please. If I were to drink something that tasted that bad, I definitely would not choose to drink, basically, a dressed up version of hot chocolate. Ordering a mocha is the equivalent to walking into an Irish Bar in Ireland and ordering an O’Doul’s. Wannabe.
So there it is. I hated coffee. (Notice the past tense). I don’t know how it happened. I am sure my taste buds didn’t evolve…maybe they just died. But it did happen. And I think it is due to bigger things than just enjoying a hot cup of bitter asphalt on a cold winter morning. I think my new found morning and after dinner,/during desert friend has more to do with becoming an adult than anything else.
The funny thing is that it started with a dressed-up cup of hot chocolate. I was in Las Vegas with almost no sleep (for obvious reasons) and I needed a jump start to my morning and I just had a feeling that hot chocolate wasn’t going to do it. So I added a splash of coffee to the hot chocolate…and the rest is history. Like any whimp trying to get on “The Coffee Train”, I started with Mocha’s and even bought a coffee maker. I actually calculated the number of scoops the coffee can recommended per serving. I was a coffee virgin. I actually read the instructions to the coffee maker…which I know seems silly, but for a coffee virgin the whole “insert filter into coffee maker, dispense coffee into said filter, add water to coffee maker, turn on coffee maker moron” seemed quite foreign. The Wife even bought me a package of Starbuck’s coffee for my birthday…she obviously doesn’t know about SBC.
And now I can be like everyone else and waste $4 on a cup of what I used to hate. In fact, I found out that I can order exactly the whimpy coffee I like. It’s called a Misto (MEE-sto). That’s regular coffee with a shot of 2%(steamed) and a shot of chocolate. I add a dash of sugar and I’m just like all the other cool kids now…I have an excuse to go into Starbucks.
What changed? Why do I now drink coffee every morning? I don’t know how it happened.
I guess my older brother was just more mature than me all those years ago…or he figured out that as an adolescent a caffeine high is a good as it gets….legally for a 12 year old anyway.
I have learned that as life gets quicker and time seems to slip through my fingers everyday…for a few minutes, in the morning, life slows down, while I fix my perfect cup of coffee.
…then the caffeine and sugar kicks in.
So this is what being an adult is all about.
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