At first, you know nothing about coffee

Happy birthday to my sweetest, dearest, and sometimes idiot neighbour, Tristan, who turns a glorious 21 today. /mwah

I took the day off work today because I was in excruciating pain this morning. I had trouble sleeping because I was woken up by my stomach putting me into maxtreme pain, and that’s really not cool, and I was also on the verge of throwing up which was also severely uncool.

While most people like to try and be productive on their days off, especially if they just have a cold and can very well still do other things, I spent a lot of my time napping and trying to reduce the effects of my interrupted sleep last night.

I thought I would share a random little story about coffee.

I am not a coffee person. I will admit that I was. I am more of a tea person. For me coffee is more like a treat that I might have once a month when I feel like I’ve been good. Otherwise, herbal teas do me.

I was a coffee person in my early years of university. I was used to getting to school before 8:00am, but getting to university by 8:00am (even when classes did not start until 9:00am) was a different story, since it took about an hour to travel. I would often carry a thermos of soup during winter, and during other months, I would fill my thermos with coffee.

The kind of coffee I drank was just from our freeze-dried jar of cheap coffee in our family’s kitchen cupboard. It didn’t bother me at all. Just one spoon, and mix.

I did not like to add sugar or milk. I liked it plain black.

Little did I know that there was actually a world of coffee out there to be explored. I am by no means a coffee enthusiast, though I do know a heck of a lot more about coffee types now than I did back then.

But this story is about my first… well, coffee shot. I knew what a cappuccino was, basically a coffee with milk. But what the heck was a macchiato, and a cafelatte, and why did people ask for flat whites and long blacks and what the heck did they mean?

Needless to say, I was a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know about coffee and people made such a big deal out of coffee orders.

I used to work in an office where everyone seemed to love coffee to bits. I would be puzzled and frown at the fact that they could go for two coffees in the morning and still go and buy some during the day. To be honest, I never understood the appeal, and most of all, I could never understand how people could spend four dollars a day on coffee, every day of the week. Why, I thought, when I can just bring coffee from home?

Yeah, the taste, the flavour, I know.

Though it took me a long time to understand and appreciate non-freeze-dried coffee, and to appreciate coffee straight from beans, or what have you (see, even now I am not sure what I am talking about), it was partially because my first experience having something that was actual coffee sucked.

Probably because I pretended I knew what my co-worker was talking about when he said he would get me a “really nice espresso shot”.

I didn’t know that it would be ground coffee that was literally like a shot of alcohol in a miniscule cup that tasted bitter than bitter melons dipped in a pint of beer mixed with way too much lemon juice.

I wish someone had actually told me what the hell an espresso shot actually was.

But then again, I am an idiot, and I simply nodded my head and accepted the offer. After that, I secretly tried random types of coffee on various menus, and pretended I knew what the fuck I was ordering, oh I’ll have a long black, or a piccolo latte, and would try not to be startled at the size of the serving, and would try extremely hard not to spit a mouthful of wonderful freshly ground coffee across the table for the excruciating bitterness that hit my tongue.

It’s funny, because I liked plain old bean water when I had freeze-dried coffee, nothing added, but my tastebuds suffered when I had a cup of real coffee.

I suck.

Coffee is totally not for me.