Thoughts on Coffee for May 12, 2017

I like coffee. I have a cup in the morning and usually a second cup in the early afternoon. I will usually drink decaffeinated coffee in the afternoon or evening. I like my coffee dark and strong. There are many jokes there, no doubt, but I will refrain. Coffee has many attractions for me. I love the smell and I really love the taste. The darker the roast the more I love the taste. I like the various flavors of “creamers” that you can add and I like the caffeine. Coffee is a psychological pick-me-up as well as a physical pick-me-up and I like that. As I write this, I am sipping a cup of coffee to get the focused and creative juices flowing. Coffee is calming as well as invigorating.

Growing up I was a tea lover. I loved strong tea with no sugar. I was raised in a household where there was a picture of ice tea at every meal. Our family was tea drinkers. When I got married I was introduced to Earl Grey tea and now when I drink tea, it is Earl Grey. I usually start the day with a couple cups of coffee and end the day with a cup of Earl Grey (yes it is hot). My love for coffee came working in the tech industry. I was a computer programmer before and through the “dot.com” era. As a programmer, I would work long hours with few breaks and coffee was the life blood of my department. Projects for programmers at the drawing of the personal computer age would come late and would be needed yesterday, so programming for 19 hours straight was not unusual. Coffee kept me going as well as my addiction to writing good code. I never felt more “in the zone” than when I was doing those long coding sessions.

Today, coffee has entered the “nerd” realm with various types of brewing. There is the Aero Press, Chemex makes the best, I am told, products for “pour over” coffee and of course the is the French press which has been around for a very long time. It seems that coffee snobs have their best way and their best equipment to get the best cup of coffee. At a recent conference, they had the big dispensers of industrial coffee for free and a small table with two people creating Pour Over coffee with Chemex equipment. Each cup of Pour Over coffee was $4 and the line for that coffee was out into the parking lot. I like my coffee strong and black.

Lastly, if you search the internet for "Coffee studies" you will come up with more studies than you can read. Some will say that coffee will kill you and other say it is the venerable fountain of youth, curing all your ills. It is clear, no matter who is right, that people love to study coffee and the effects on people. When people speak of fake news, I think the top of that list needs to be coffee studies. People love coffee, so if shocking news, even manufactured news, is published, people will click and money will be made and the coffee will flow.

So I do not think it will kill me, and I will pretend there are heath benefits, but whatever the studies say, I like my coffee…

#Coffee#