An Ode To My Favorite Hot Beverage
By: Dea Ratna
Tags: Tea, Coffee

For the past year, since my visit to my cousin’s roastery in late 2019, I’ve picked up the habit of drinking coffee almost every morning. My history with coffee is different than most, I believe. I can’t remember the first time I tasted coffee, but I do remember that when I was in college, coffee didn’t seem to have the effect that it was supposed to have. It didn’t keep me up at night. I do enjoy the taste, though, but I never regularly drank it.

In comparison, I grew up with tea. Having grown up with a Sundanese family from both sides, tea was a staple at every family gathering. (Fun fact, in West Java, the commonly used word for tea is actually the word for water in Bahasa Sunda, cai. No, it has nothing to do with the commonly used word for tea in many cultures, chai. Complete coincidence.) It’s the drink that my mother would give me every time I have an upset stomach. It’s the drink that would accompany almost every single meal in the restaurants we stop at on our way to visit our families. There has never been a day where I didn’t have tea in my home.

Though coffee has existed for centuries in Indonesia, it is currently going through a surge in popularity. Coffee shops were popping up everywhere before the pandemic made going out dangerous. The specialty coffee market was booming. During the pandemic, people were making coffee at home or buying giant ready-to-drink bottles from those aforementioned coffee shops. Kopi Susu, or milk coffee, is currently the most popular drink around.

My own relationship with coffee before this year was complicated. I’m an anxious fella that easily slips into a fit of anxiety, and that’s without any caffeine in my system. I would go months, even years without drinking that bittersweet beverage. The times that I do, my heart rate would skyrocket and I would often curl up in my bed trying to ease the pounding in my chest.

But I still love the thing.

I love the smell of it. I love the taste of it.

But I can’t have it. So I left it behind, secretly longing to taste it again.

When I visited my cousin’s roastery, I learned a few things. One of those things is that some coffee actually has less caffeine than tea. That was a revelation. I’ve never had that kind of panicky reaction with tea, so a cup of coffee with less caffeine than tea should be fine, right? I drank some of his coffee and I was… fine.

I did not become a stuttery, anxious mess.

It seems the key was Arabica coffee. What I didn’t know back then was that most instant coffee, the type that I’ve been almost exclusively consuming, was made with Robusta beans. Same with coffee in most chain restaurants, they’re made with the high-caffeine Robusta. Home brewed Arabica beans, by comparison, could contain half, or even less, the amount of caffeine.

A whole new world opened up for me.

I fell into a rabbit hole of making coffee on my own. Right now I’m partial to my V60, though I also own a Vietnam drip, a French Press, and a Moka Pot. I’m by no means amazing at it, but I enjoy my black filter pour-over coffee. Sticking to local, I’ve mostly consumed Indonesian-grown coffee. I recently fell in love with Papuan Wamena coffee. It’s so good. My favorite thing about this coffee is that sweet aftertaste. My mouth feels like I just had a very sweet drink, but there’s nothing in my cup but hot water poured through a coffee bed.

Every day I start my day with a cup (or two) of coffee. Except when I feel a bit off. For those days when I have a cold, or menstrual cramps, or just not feeling good in general, there’s nothing I crave more than a nice, warm, fragrant cup of jasmine tea, the tea I grew up with, the tea that my mother gave me every time I was sick. It’s my chicken soup. It’s my constant.

I’m so bad at sticking to a habit, but making coffee somehow has been something that I fell in love with and can see myself doing every morning for the foreseeable future. Coffee is my new love and obsession. But tea, sweet, old reliable tea, will always be my home.