The Draw of the Brew

I would bet that most little kids who ever take a drink of Mommy’s or Daddy’s coffee can’t stand the taste of it, and never attempt it again until they’re teenagers or college students cramming for tests or to finish a semester-long project they gave themselves a week to do.

Not me. I don’t remember the day, or what age I was, when I first tried coffee, but I had the distinct advantage of a father who liked to put some coffee in his cup of milk and sugar. Mom was the “barista” of the house. She and Dad grew up in the waning heyday of coffee brewing, with stove-top percolator and “manual” drip methods being the most prevalent. Until Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – a face and name which I’m sure appealed to people of my parents’ generation – popped up hawking for Mr. Coffee automatic drip coffee makers (hell, I thought he WAS Mr. Coffee for most of my young life!), Mom made coffee the old-fashioned way: put the water on the boil in a tea-kettle, put a filter in the basket, put the basket in the top of the pot, dump the appropriate number of scoops of ground coffee into the filter and basket, pour the boiled water into the basket, filling it once, letting it drain completely through the grounds, and then filling it again for a full pot. Every single morning the house would fill with the warming aroma of coffee. Yep, whatever age I was, I was hooked early. And strict as they were in general, my parents quite regularly allowed me to indulge my nascent caffeine jones: on weekends when the pot sat cooling on the counter and Mom and Dad had both had their fixes, I would ask – usually Mom, as Dad worked on Saturdays – if I could have some. Had my mother been at all concerned with my potential future habits, she would have made sure not to put in any sugar, yet letting me believe she had; or better yet, insisted that I drink it like she did – black, which was just absolutely FOUL! – and I would probably have stayed away from the obnoxious brew. But no, she laced it with a half-pound of sugar and a full udder’s worth of milk, and I eased into the taste of coffee.

On the rare occasion that we went out for breakfast, I fascinated myself first with the tiny cream pots, and later with the individual half & half mini-tubs that were found on the tables, plus the sugar packets, and Mom and Dad would supervise as I prepared my own fix. I’m sure that, afterward, continuing on to wherever we were going, or on the way back home, I was as a rubber ball in the back seat of the car!

I spent the larger part of my childhood and adolescence as the only person in my group of friends who drank coffee. Occasionally a friend would ask why I liked coffee, and the honest answer was that I liked the taste. Hell! With all that sugar, who wouldn’t?! There was just something about that milk-chocolate-brown liquid, the smell, the warmth, the mouth-filling, slightly “dark” taste that I could never leave alone if the opportunity arose.

During my teen years, Dad, the unwitting enabler of my addiction, added another wrinkle to my affection for coffee. If I may make a few assumptions about my pre-cognizant life, it would seem apparent that Dad rarely, if ever, made his own coffee, even right up to Mom’s death in 1993. However, once Mom had to go to work in the early 1970s – after she told the Catholic church to shove it, and went on the pill so the babies would stop arriving – Dad found himself more often re-heating the coffee when he woke up that Mom had made before she went to work earlier. Thus began his almost ritual, absent-minded, daily boiling of the coffee that occurred while he attended to his other morning ritual which, if you didn’t get in there before he did, would make you want to avoid the bathroom until around noon! I became accustomed to the distinctly stronger – nay, foul – flavor of boiled coffee, which steeled me to the many rather nasty concoctions I would encounter later in life. In other words, Dad broadened my coffee horizons, preventing me from becoming a coffee snob. What? The coffee sucks? Sure! Pour me a cup!

(The only cup of coffee I COULDN’T drink was one I poured while in the Air Force. I was participating with the rest of the Group in a war exercise, and we were “tactical,” meaning we couldn’t make noise or use flashlights at night. It was the middle of the night, I had just been waken from my sleep to take over guard duty. I had only about 15 minutes to get ready, so I set to boiling some water (the chemical flame was hidden) and pulling the freeze-dried coffee and condiment packages out of a MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat) bag. There were some really handy things in there; in addition to salt and pepper, there was coffee creamer, cocoa powder…there was even powdered ketchup to be reconstituted and put on reconstituted hash browns or the hot dogs! The water boiled, I opened the coffee packet and dumped it in the cup. I fumbled around in the dark for the packet of creamer, opened it and poured it in. I stirred everything up and took that first sip…and spit it all out! I had dumped the powdered ketchup into the cup instead of the creamer! ACK! Feeling the need for caffeine outweighed my disgust at the flavor, however, I choked down half the cup before I just couldn’t take it any more.)

As an adult, drinking coffee because I could, I learned that it isn’t the stimulant effect of caffeine in the coffee that can keep me awake at night; it’s the diuretic effect. Coffee won’t chase away the afternoon nods at the office, but if I drink too much coffee before bedtime, the term “wee hours” takes on an entirely different meaning!!

A few years ago I read The Sugar Busters, a book which scared the hell out of me for the amount of sugar I was taking into my body daily. I set my mind to try drinking coffee without sugar, and I tried it and…it wasn’t bad! Not too long after, I learned that it was cream in my coffee, among other dairy products, that was exacerbating my near-chronic post-nasal drip. So it was either start drinking coffee black, or quit drinking coffee all together.

Black is beautiful. I don’t know if my mother made it so strong that it even kept cockroaches away from the house, or if “they” are just making coffee more mellow these days, but I made the transition to black coffee with no effort. It seems to me that as children, our taste buds are so sensitive that we really CAN’T stomach flavors like coffee, or brussels sprouts, or snails, and everything goes better with sugar. But as we mature, so do our taste buds.

Or have we just killed them with coffee?

Tell me how it is that you came into coffee’s clutches, or how you’ve managed to avoid getting caught in its aromatic grasp. What is it that you like most about coffee? What is it that you hate? When is your favorite time of day to have a cup? How do you take yours?