How I got my start in caffeine

After you reach a certain age, you can't remember the first time you drank coffee. It's been a part of my life so long, I don't remember the first sip. But I know that first taste occurred at a young age.

Coffee is a big part of family life (even dysfunctional ones). Like most adults, my parents drank coffee every morning. But the coffee moments that have the most significance are the after-dinner coffees with my grandparents. Like clockwork, when we finished eating, we had coffee. No, they weren't serving me coffee. They served me coffee-flavored milk. And it was good.

It was enough to give me the taste for coffee. And as I got older, my coffee-flavored milk became milky coffee.

Because I knew I liked coffee, and because my parents drank it every morning, I decided in high school that I would also drink it every morning. Now, what I considered coffee then, is actually something I consider quite blasphemous now. Brace yourself. My parents drank instant coffee. And used powdered creamer. Yep. Horrible, right? Yet, I always strove to create the perfect cup. In the evening, I would set up the cup so that all I had to do was pour in the hot water. I would put in a teaspoon of coffee (or whatever serving it was), a teaspoon of creamer and sugar and I'd stir it all together so it was blended. Then when I poured the hot water in all the flavors would blend.

It sounds disgusting now. Fake coffee and cream. Yuck. And sugar in my coffee. Yuck. However, that's how it started. I drank that concoction a long time. I'm not exactly sure when the transition to real coffee happened. I wasn't averse to drinking brewed coffee, but I just didn't know anything about it. Things changed when I got a job at a cafe. There was an espresso machine there. And brewed coffee. Around the same time, I developed a taste for espresso drinks, similar to the coffee-flavored milk I used to drink as a kid. For a while, I was drinking breves daily. That's intense. Espresso and steamed cream. The size of a latte. Yum. Decedent. And drinking those can lead to weight gain so I don't recommend making a habit of it.

The first cafe I worked at wasn't so focused on the coffee part. But then I went to work in a French-inspired bakery/cafe. There we served Cafe La Semeuse. It's good ... and expensive. But that was the place I discovered really good coffee. And really good espresso. And there was no turning back. I bought the best coffee-making machinery I could afford (and there are many options from basic to fancy). I bought a coffee grinder so that I would never brew pre-ground coffee again. And I embarked on a life-long journey to find good beans.

Now I've already confessed in previous posts that I drink ground coffee. So you can imagine that my journey has taken a few turns, mostly due to the necessity of rising early for my job. There's nothing that turns an overnight guest away more than the sound of the coffee grinder at 4:30 AM. Something told me I had to grind the coffee in advance and that just led to buying it already ground for me.

So that's my story. I think coffee is an acquired taste, and my journey has some bad chapters in it, but who's doesn't?

Happy brewing.