On Brewing Someone a Cup of Joe

I don’t like mornings. They’re often cold and dark and unwelcoming. Every resolution, every promise I made to myself the night before to get up early, to eat better, to work out suddenly pales in comparison to five more minutes of sleep. But, eventually, when the flame of snoozing burns too close to the end of the wick of reality, you have to get out of bed.

The world is harsh and unwelcoming and cruel so you do what you can to make it a little more hospitable: some people prepare themselves a nice cup of tea or a bit of breakfast, or if you’re a psychopath you rip open a can of Coke and then “reply all” to every email in your inbox. For myself and many others, a nice hot cup of coffee is the best way to ease myself back into reality. I make coffee every day. I basically never fuck it up because coffee is pretty simple to make: you get some ground-up beans and pour hot water over them. It isn’t rocket surgery or brain science and I’ve done it thousands of times…and yet, whenever I’m in an office setting and someone asks me to make a big pot of coffee or I have a visitor to my apartment and I (stupidly) offer them a cup of joe, I get extremely nervous! Let’s try to figure out why, shall we?

Possibility number one: I almost exclusively make a single cup of coffee per day. So, if I have to make a big pot, my crippling fear of doing math immediately kicks in. Suddenly I’m standing in front of the coffee machine shaking in my boots and trying to remember how to do fractions. And don’t even get me started if I’m supposed to do it on a coffee machine I’m not familiar with: French press? Drip? Espresso machines that spew steam like they’re some kind of angry dragon?! I’m completely lost and on my way to third degree burns.

Possibility number two: What if you like your coffee differently than how I like my coffee? What if you’re a lumberjack of a human who likes their coffee black as the cold winter night and strong as the axe Paul Bunyan killed trees with? What if you like Sweet and Low or pumps of flavor or exotic creamers and a pad of butter in your coffee? What if you care about the plights of animals more than I and require the milk of some kind of plant that I didn’t even know could make milk?? (I mean 20 years ago if you’d told me that I’d have almond milk, soy milk, AND oat milk in my kitchen…well I wouldn’t have been paying attention because I was an even dumber 10-year-old)

Just thinking about all the things I don’t have to offer a visitor is making me anxious. So, while I try and calm down, how about you let me know if you’re a master of the jumbo pot of coffee, the king or queen of the cold brew or the wonderful diner waitress who makes sure your cup is always topped off?