My very own version of the coffee rant.
By: Daniel Fonseca Yarochewsky
Tags: Morning Routines, Rant, Coffee, Thoughts, Lifestyle

I’m a man of many cups of coffee. The first one is almost always the most pleasurable but also the quickest one — it’s the first sip of a ritual that starts every morning. Then comes the second, rushed, as if trying to make up for its lackluster second-character. The third and fourth are indulgences. They don’t need to be there, but they’re the most loyal, sticking together with me as I go do other things on my day.

There was of course a time when I used to have only one cup, or more precisely two shots of espresso lost in a cup of hot milk. That first dreaded serious attempt of getting caffeine-fixed because one day you just couldn’t have planned that your daily twenty-four hours could slip away so fast. And so along comes the latte, conceptually simple, the milk hugging the coffee grounds in all its fat and sugar as firmly as it can. The Red Bull of the environmentalists? The Adderall of the conscious?

From the many paths one can take to reach purity, the capuccino, for instance, being a gentle one, mathematically defined as a reduction in milk to the proportion of coffee, the sugar road is definitely the longest and rockiest of them. It offensively fights the naturally bitter kick of the pure form, and takes you from the patient two, three-cup ritual to a marathon of sheer frenzy that urges your senses to dismiss any calculated thought. A genocide of delicate ideas and sensations.

Some theorists argue that coffee is a “grown-up drink” because it’s elevated in bitterness, known as a taste modality we take the longest to develop and appreciate. I, on the other hand, posit that it is so because, perhaps for being bitter and requiring a slower drinking pace, it’s a drink which sets an initial calmer scene to only slowly take you to a sharper state of mind. And what sugar does is completely eliminate that first considerate moment that adults very much need to think the hard things through. It’s like when you’re trying to have a dream but there’s music playing on the background, and while you want to go somewhere different you just get led up to these known, trivial situations that the music reminds you of.

When you finally make it to the pure form where milk, sugar and, God forbid, syrup are completely out of the picture, you will eventually find yourself wandering through the varietals, origins and brewing methods. A whole new world will have opened up to you. Be aware, though, as some of the choices you’ll make going forward will likely impact the rest of your life.

You find out that there’s velocity to coffee, and that each brewing method goes in a different slot of your day. I used to rush through the coffee shop in the morning and get a cup of the already-brewed first batch, only to have the time to glacially walk to class. Or I can go out in the middle of the afternoon with coworkers, and ask for a pour-over because it takes enough time for me to catch up with someone. Or I press an espresso after lunch because it’s quick and small enough it won’t interfere with my satiety.

Later you learn that some geographies can produce earthy, more chocolate-like tastes, others more fruity, sour finishes, and altogether they can be so creepily specific that they’ll record some sort of memory inside, just like food does. The exact flavor of my Hebrew classes on Wednesdays. Ethiopia. The one corresponding to my mornings in Miami. Nicaragua. The one I drink when I visit my parents. Brazil. And sadly we don’t control memory; the one I mistakenly ordered on a plane, the unimpressive one at a lavish hotel, or the various, torturous ones when I ran out of my subscription plan.

Anyway, all I’m saying is there are many ways to make memories in this life, but drowning them in 2% fat milk is just not going to give you very precise ones. There are many versions of freedom, but the best one is likely not to choose from almond, oat, or cow. There are braver fights for sugar to fight, just not against bitterness.

Some say pineapple doesn’t belong on a pizza. I don’t have a dog in this fight. For tomorrow morning, I’d like to believe in a new chance to create a moment: Colombia poured over. What will that possibly remind me of?

I take my coffee black, no sugar or milk on the side.

Winter, 2020.