From Costa Rica to Costa Coffee: Bad Coffee is better than No Coffee

            When I was small, my parents made a family brunch just about every Sunday.  It never struck me as strange then, but looking back it seems a grander production than was justified by our little family of four.  I can still smell the plates of scrambled eggs, the crispy bacon layered over paper towels, bowls of stringy hash browns, the grapefruit halves, blueberry muffins, orange juice, tomato juice, and, of course, coffee, pots and pots of percolated coffee.

            After the meal I would dally at the kitchen table with my parents because it seemed part of the family ritual, a ritual organized around coffee.  For as far back as I can remember (I must have been only 3 or 4), my parents would drink coffee and talk, and I would drink “nick nick” and listen.  I was under the impression that “nick nick” was half-coffee, half-milk; I later found out that instead of coffee, my mother had substituted black tea. Humph! When they were kids, back in the good ol’e days before cigarettes caused cancer, I’m pretty sure they got the real deal.  But what difference does that make? For a four year old, the amount of caffeine in black tea was certainly something, and I had already begun to identify as a “coffee person.” Indeed these were the innocent days of what has become a caffeinated life. And little did I know then that coffee would play such a crucial role in forming my sophisticated, worldly identity.

            I can’t remember my first cup of coffee, but I do remember shifting from taking sugar to going without as far back as high school. You see, I’m a man of refined tastes. I own a Chemex and a cafétiere. Any coffee drinker worth her cream knows that coffees are as complex and wondrous as any fine wine out there: I once had an Ethiopian that began tart like apples but finished with the strangest note ever. What is that that? Is that a hint of…blueberry? And to this day I’m just a coffee and milk guy, a purist, an evangelist of the whole bean. Nothing fills me with more dread than the thought that I might accidentally ingest sweetened coffee. Seriously. And don’t get me started on “flavored” coffees.  Coffee already has flavor: that’s why I love it.  A Sumatran coffee tastes nothing like a Kenyan or Colombian or Hawaiian. With the natural variance of coffees from around the globe, who needs the addition of Hazelnut or Cinnamon? Or both?!  “Flavored” coffees are for politicians, heretics, and felons.  “Flavoring” coffee is like doodling on a Van Gogh or tinkering with a line of Shakespeare. It’s perfect as it is….  [continued after the break: click "read more"]

These guys work really hard for very little money.

Well, not always.  I mean there’s some really bad coffee out there. But coffee drinkers around the world agree: bad coffee is better than no coffee. In fact, it seems odd to think that most people drink bad coffee. Why? Because it’s cheap, sometimes even free, a price that must be some sort of miracle of American corporate capitalism. Despite the fact that the coffee must be flown in from the four corners of the globe, it’s cheap enough to be free.  At a lot of places that you have to wait or work for even a few minutes, it’s just sitting there. Free. For the taking. To anyone. So, what could a third-world coffee farmer (much less a farm worker) possibly earn? Maybe that’s why they call is “free” trade. Hmm. Someone out there is getting the used grounds on this deal….

Anyhoo, for “cream” we dump in a “non-dairy” powder to form an evil concoction the likes of which Henry Jekyll never dreamed.  And voilà!  Is it even coffee?  It has caffeine in it. The brown liquid produces a scent that triggers dopamine receptors. It’s hot, and the “creamer” readily dissolves producing a coffee color. And if you get beyond that taste of dirty dish-water, it does taste something like coffee. But, still, is it coffee? Maxwell House certainly doesn’t taste like a bean that a Central American peasant took out of the ground with their bare hands.  And will we one day wax nostalgic for the days before non-dairy creamer caused cancer? But, hey, I’ve gotta have my caffeine. So, if my fix leads to global warming or me dying of cancer or a Costa Rican living in poverty, well, I’m just not gonna think about that.  I mean, what can I do?  Coffee drinkers just gotta take the bad with the good.

            At one time—in the days before the coffee shop revival of the 90s—there was almost nothing but bad coffee in the world (by which I mean my world, middle America).  If you think Folgers is bad, have you ever had Folgers Crystals, or Nescafe?  My God!  The thought recalls memories of dragging my butt through spring finals week my sophomore year. During my third all-nighter in a row (before a Physics exam), we had gone through all the coffee. You should have seen the desperation in the residence hall. Oh, the horror! As the panic set in, I can recall the sonorous moan of collective weeping. In the suite across the hall, students were on the phone WITH THEIR PARENTS—you know, those people we only contacted when we were out of money. It was a scene defined by hysterics and desperation that I have mentioned to therapists no less than three times.  Thankfully, my roommate, a green haired kid from Frisco named Hal, always seemed to have the good “stuff,” in this case two bottles: one of Mini-Thins, an over-the-counter stimulant abused by over-the-road truckers, and another of Nescafe, a dehydrated form of coffee invented for GIs during WWII, a wonder of the atomic age. 

Hal offered me dibs. I hemmed and hawed, but my rule of thumb was to always select the least illegal option offered me by people with green hair. When Hal popped the top on the Mini-Thins and muttered “good shit,” I felt more secure in my choice of the Nescafe.  Hmm. What to do?  I couldn’t possibly drink the stuff.  Should I try to dissolve in a Coke?  Should I make a sort of paste in an attempt to get it down more quickly? Hmm. I began spooning the freeze-dried crystals directly into my mouth and washing them down with desalinated tap water.  I know, I know: but what my solution lacked in wisdom or creativity was certainly made up for through sheer bravado. By the time that the burning sensation had spread upward from my nostrils and into my ears, I judged that the caffeine in my system would get me through to my last exam. My digestive tract has never fully recuperated from the mass stripping of stomach lining; I was, after all, ingesting a dehydrated acid.  But I am wiser for the experience. And I got an A in Physics.

Imagine my dismay when I arrived in England for my junior year abroad.  Yeah, yeah: they are a tea drinking nation, but who knew they didn’t drink coffee AT ALL?!  That is, except for Nescafe…but that option was now thoroughly out of the question.  No worries, mate.  I got with the programme and became a tea drinker, but I quickly realised that tea drinkers aren’t anything like a coffee drinkers.  Tea is about much more than the tea, and so much more…social.  Whereas coffee is normally a solitary experience that arises from the fiendish need for caffeine, tea seems about the need for people: you simply must have tea WITH someone.  So, I had to make a friend, a half-Welsh half-Italian bloke named Moksha (his hippie parents named him for the Hindi word for “enlightenment”).  And, of course, only an ill-bred savage would offer a teatime guest ONLY tea; civilisation depends upon providing your guest with a finger food or a tea biscuit.  “Mok, can I offer you a cucumber sandwich? A digestive biscuit?” Of course, we Yanks have a difficult time sustaining anything like civilised behaviour.  But I was able to fake it for 10 months…for the most part.  Oh, hell! I tried the best I could….

When I returned to the UK last summer, I was relieved to discover that the McCoffee industry had taken root in Jolly Olde Englonde. Phew! Moksha was equally pleased because he’s half-Italian, and we all know Italians love their coffee. Of course the British now have Starbucks, but the most prominent franchise is the ubiquitous Costa Coffee, a version of Starbucks that plays up its faux-Latin roots. Fine, fine. Wink, wink. Your Cockney baristas are delivering to my palate a brew of Central American origin. Sure, I believe you. But there’s just one problem: as it turns out, Europeans don’t really distinguish between espresso and coffee. Our filtered coffee is an oddity, a curiosity, an unusual cousin of café that most Europeans just can’t get their heads around.  So, if you happen to find a Starbucks, you can get a regular cup o’ Joe, but unless you are in a touristy area of London, you will probably have to settle for a watered-down espresso—the pejoratively named “Americano”—at Costa Coffee.

Oh, and there’s one more problem: Costa’s espresso sucks. “Pardon me, Moksha, you do realise that this coffee really isn’t very good?”

“Hmm. Yes. I know, mate. Pity.” Mok pauses a moment to mull it over while staring at the paper cup.  Then he looks back my way with a devilish grin. “But bad coffee is better than no coffee….”