So it comes to one of those days where I’m like… fuck it, what an exhausting day, whose idea was it to try and blog every day this month… that’s right, it was my idea.

It’s not so much that I don’t know what to write about. Now that I’m dedicating time to writing, the time it takes to write and prepare a blog post is painfully obvious compared to whatever cadence I was doing before. I could start writing a blog post, then just come back to it whenever I felt like it. I might spend a week or longer writing about my travels or writing about some outfit (because I have a lot to say about clothes). But here, I have no choice. I’m pooped.

It has felt like a long day, even though I took a lunch break that was a little over an hour. I was mostly working in the living room, playing a handful of my playlists on our television sound bar via Airplay. It was fun. I suppose I got sick of working at my desk.

I stole the idea of this post from my friend Mitch who wrote a similar post about his journey with coffee.

I’m a coffee snob and a soy milk bae (soy before boyssss), but most alt milks make me happy cos I’m a lactose intolerant poo-bag. Here’s my journey of coffee:

2009: Instant coffee, mostly to keep me awake during university lectures. Who knows if it actually did anything, though. Once a day in the morning, all fine.

2011: I was working at a small design agency where I took it upon myself to caffeinate by grabbing a latte before work. I was a frugal little shit, so I was also a lactose intolerant in denial because I didn’t want to spend the extra 80 cents on soy. Sad face. My stomach was not happy. I alternated between flat whites and lattes before I gave up because I often ended up pretty sick at work. (This might have also had to do with poor nutrition at the time, but anyway.)

2014: This was the year I started drinking absolute shit. I went to Starbucks and drank their Frappuccinos for breakfast. I can’t imagine doing it now. Nick would join me at times and we became that cute couple with the matching whipped cream drinks. It wasn’t long before I ditched the whipped cream, because, again, I had to stop being a lactose intolerant in denial. It wasn’t long before I reverted to soy chai lattes, not particularly keen on getting on coffee again.

2015: I had a brief stint with matcha (green tea) lattes, dirty chais, and matcha lattes with a shot of espresso in them. Some people think that whoever orders a dirty chai or a dirty anything is a dickhead, well, you can go ahead and think that. My reasoning for choosing this drink, with soy milk of course, was the fact that I love, love, love the spiciness of chai, and I also love the bitterness of matcha, and sometimes I just want a caffeine boost in there. So sue me.

2017: I went to almond mochas for a while, because I wanted something that was more in the line of coffee, and I got a bit bored of soy and tried all the alt milks, but not everywhere has oat. So boo. My friend Chris really didn’t get what was so good about oat milk and I scoffed at his response. Anyway, every coffee shop does mocha bloody differently (some use cocoa, some use real dark chocolate, and overall you get a spectrum of “more chocolate” to “more coffee-like”), and I learned that making almond milk uses a fucktonne of energy, so I went in search of something else.

2018: I think it was around this year that I started buying beforeyouspeak single origin instant superfood coffee, which I still drink at home, to this day. I slowly began trying batch brew and cold brew, which I found I quite liked depending on the weather (hot weather = cold brew, obviously), and if I felt like something “light” and wanted a coffee without milk. I gradually went back to soy flat whites for a white coffee.

I usually drink at least two coffees a day, one upon waking up (which serves as a pre-workout energiser—I used to drink pre-workout prior to working out, but I stopped about a year or so ago), and another in the afternoon. I sometimes drink coffee again in the evening, such as at 6:00pm or even afterwards. The timing of coffee consumption does not interrupt my sleep, rather, it is how much caffeine I’ve had throughout the day that does. I once had three cups of coffee in a day, along with pre-workout in the morning, and an espresso martini, and I found myself feeling restless during the night and not having good quality sleep. I generally don’t have trouble falling asleep at all, so I notice that amount of caffeine affects more the quality of sleep and how well-rested I feel.

So here we are today! I do still drink beforeyouspeak at home, and I have Minor Figures oat milk based drinks when I want a cold coffee at home. If I visit a new cafe and they have batch brew, I’ll usually get that. My heart lights up when a place does batch brew. 🧡 I think it lets me get a good idea of what the coffee is like. And it is tonnes better than long black.