The author and his muse.

I first started drinking coffee when I was 17. I’m 37 now and unless a physician makes me quit I will be a coffee drinker for the rest of my life.

Not that there was ever any real question of my quitting coffee. The reasons for starting to drink coffee never entered my mind and only flippantly do I entertain the notion of quitting it in favor of green tea. After 20 years of coffee drinking I know exactly how I like it and exactly what I want from it and I see no reason to change.

I like it black and always have. I first started drinking coffee because I had the dim idea that it would be writerly to go to a diner and drink coffee and experiment with smoking, which is what me and my best friend did, skipping class on occasion to do so I’m sorry to say.

I’m not sure when I began to need coffee to function in the morning – must have been as a freshman in college, and in those days I drank coffee copiously and at any hour of the day, an excessive attitude somewhat typical of that age. The cigarettes, regretably, stayed with me, too. Cigarettes go with coffee like… well I don’t have the right simile here. Like a loaded sap to a noggin? Like a black t-shirt and jeans? Like jazz records on a rainy day?

Cigarettes is a topic best covered at another time but I spent a great deal of my 20s with them and my old pal coffee. It got us up, got us off to class, kept us company in the afternoon and evening, sheltered us through the shifts we worked as a waiter. I quit smoking when I was… hang on, I’m counting on my fingers – I guess I was 25. Crumpling up the Winstons produces drastic changes in your life and you have to rid yourself of old associations. I mean, you’ve now trained yourself that nothing goes with a coffee – or a beer, or work, or sex, or conversation – like a smoke, and you have to rid yourself of those connections. Some people quit other things that make them want to smoke. I went vegetarian for a while, started working out, learned to enjoy wine and scotch. I never thought of quitting coffee.

In fact, with my rediscovered senses of smell and taste, I began to enjoy coffee more than ever, and it was perhaps around then that I settled into patterns I’m still following today.

I like coffee in the morning. I like to drink frequent, small cups of black coffee. I’d rather drink several small cups that are hot all the way down – I mean steam still rolling off the empty cup – than one big coffee that gets cold before it’s finished. I like to drink coffee out of ceramic or paper, never metal or plastic. And I’ve come to realize that coffee should never, in my case, be sucked through a hole in a lid. If coffee is to go, it should be taken somewhere and the lid removed so that you can drink it as God meant you to. And we’re done with coffee by ten or eleven in the morning – usually 2-4 cups. In the afternoon we switch over to several small, hot cups of green tea.

Besides those simple rules, I’m not especially complicated in my love of coffee. I’ve begun to learn a bit about what roasting means, and how different roasters impact the taste of coffee, and I’ve developed an appreciation for the consistent roast, especially on the dark and full bodied side, which is my favorite flavor of coffee. And I’ll admit I like Starbucks but I’m equally partial to McDonald’s, a diner, the gas station, an independent coffee shop, or a mom ‘n pop bakery. Doesn’t matter where you get it, particularly, what matters to me is how I enjoy it. And boy, do I enjoy it.

Be Sociable, Share!

•