How did you get into coffee?

Cafe Society
1

I never really drank coffee. I tried some when I was a teen and found it was only tolerable when it was 1 part coffee to about 12 parts milk and 10 parts sugar, at which point I might as well get a vanilla milkshake for all the coffee I could taste. My stepfather drank coffee but he never offered me any and I never asked. My dad also drank coffee, but he frequently commented that “It’s not the caffeine that keeps you awake, it’s the awful taste”, but then he also drank 6 cups a day, so it was bit of a mixed message there.

I recently watched the Healthcare Triage episode about coffee, which pointed out that coffee drinkers tend to have better heart health, longer lifespans, and most importantly to me, better mental health and a lower rate of Alzheimer’s. And while Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’. * So figured maybe I should develop a cup a day habit and see if it helped. I went over to Starbucks on my way to work, got a blond roast, and tried some coffee.

If the barista had come by at that moment and said “You got pranked! We just crushed up some charcoal and added some water and gave you that instead of coffee!”, I would have believed him. That stuff was awful. I seriously wondered how anybody could have started drinking that crap x thousand years ago when some indigenous person tried some coffee in wherever it grows.**

But then I like beer, and I remember forcing down some Steel Reserve and Olde English 800 when I was in college and trying to fit in at some parties. Although I eventually made my way to some great craft beers, I can see why it’s an acquired taste. Then again, beer at least has the decency to get you drunk after you’ve had a few of them. The caffeine in coffee just makes me more aware of other people.

I’d kinda like to avoid getting coffee through the fru-fru drinks that are 90% cream, sugar, and artificial flavoring, because I’d rather save my calories for some great BBQ or cake or whatever, but if coffee is beneficial, I wouldn’t mind adding some to my diet.

So how’d you get into it, and do you have any recommendations for coffee that doesn’t suck (and also doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars a cup - I’d like to keep this to a $5/day or less habit assuming I cultivate it).

Then again, given the experiences I’ve had thus far, I might just get my health benefits by adding a couple of miles to my every-other-day run and listen to some books on tape while doing so.

Suggestions?

** Wikipediatells me it originated in either Yemen or Ethiopia.

2

Get thee to a Dunkin’ Donuts!
They have better coffee than Starbucks at about 1/100th the price.

Try cold brewed - pricier, but better (IMHO).
If you want to make your own, I find that my Aeropress makes the best tasting coffe, although it’s a bit of a process.

I avoid milk, so I use Vanilla Soy milk in my coffee, and think it tastes better, with 0 fat.

3

I first tried coffee when I was in the Boy Scouts, when we would put a spoonful of instant coffee in our hot chocolate, creating a poor man’s mocha. I don’t think I drank black coffee until college, and I drank it mostly black until I moved to New England, where I started drinking it “regular” which means with cream and sugar. I went back to black when I tried to lose weight, and I still drink it black today, though I switched to decaf years ago.

4

When I was a young thing selling used cars on a used car lot. The kind with zillions of light bulbs.

Every morning, all the dealers and salesmen met at Sambo’s for breakfast. Cigs, coffee, food, laughs, lies, deals. Good fun.

I had to have something to do, so I started drinking coffee.

5

This likely won’t be much help, but my grandad taught me to drink coffee before I started school. I drank it like he did back then: a third of a cup of reallllllly strong coffee, 2/3 cup of warm milk and three teaspoons of sugar.

Over the years I’ve wavered on sweetening it, but I still use a couple of ounces of milk to a 12 ounce mug. Currently, I use a couple of packets of stevia too.

You may want to start with a coffee/milk/sweetening combo. Stay away from the skim milk, but anything 2% or richer works. Save the honey for tea, sugar (cane sugar if available), splenda or stevia are all good though. Light roasts have a little more caffeine. Dark roasts are for folks who like it more in-your-face. If you make it at home, get yourself a grinder (blade grinders are ~$15 and burr can be found for under $100). Even mid-grade beans will make a decent cup of coffee if they’re freshly ground.

Find yourself a coffee spot other than Starbucks for when you drink it out. Yeah, free wifi is good, they play some good music and all, but you’ll find better coffee elsewhere.

6

Step 1: Avoid Starbucks unless it’s a caffeine emergency. Their coffee is awful. They over-roast their beans, which is where that charcoal/ashtray flavor comes from.

Step 2: Cold brew is smoother and less acidic, so it might be a great place for a newbie to start. It’s really easy to make at home, too. There are pitchers and things you can buy, or you can make it in a bowl and then strain it through a cheesecloth - seriously.

Step 3: Nothing less than 2% milk, but preferably cream. Not that artificial creamer crap – you want rich, delicious, real cream. Don’t be afraid to make your coffee super light to start, and work your way up to less cream.

Enjoy your new master! :smiley:

7

I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was 31 or 32. I always thought it smelled great but tasted bitter, and I’m very sensitive to bitter. I eventually decided I wanted a caffeine kick in the ass on some mornings, and a friend helped me figure out I prefer low-acid coffees. Allegro’s Rwanda Nkora Akeza and Costa Rica Dota are two I like, and I actually like McDonald’s coffee, too.

8

Spent a month in Kotzebue, AK. It was a matter of survival.

9

Dunkin Donuts is much better.

In college, my boyfriend’s roommate drank coffee all the time. one day I broke his carafe. :frowning: I ordered him a new one, but it took like ten days to get in, so I started buying him coffees every day - it was exam time! And thus I bought myself little ones. And I got to liking it.

BTW, that boyfriend’s roommate and I are celebrating 20 years together next year.

10

I got a job that required me to be up and alert at 5:00 am. Coffee made that feasible.

OK… slightly less infeasible, at any rate.

11

Except that’s not at all true. A large coffee at DD and Starbucks are about the same. They’re both around $2.

As for better? I do slightly prefer DD, but Starbucks is a lot better in their brewed coffee than they used to be. They no longer have the over-roasted taste they did, once they shifted to the Pike’s Place or Pike’s Peak or whatever it’s called brew several years back. Before that, yeah, they were all overroasted, at least for my tastes. I actually, dare I say, prefer McDonald’s to both.

Anyhow, for the OP, I got into coffee when I worked at a neighborhood coffeeshop for several years in college.

12

I began drinking coffee when I was up early on Sunday mornings to deliver papers.

13

I have always loved how coffee smelled. I just didn’t always like how it tasted. As I got older, I slowly developed some appreciation for the flavor of coffee as well. I tried it several times in high school.

It was early in college before I started drinking it regularly, mainly because I worked at the campus bookstore where the free employee coffee machines upstairs were always ready, almost 24/7.

My preference for coffee has always been no (or light) sugar and heavy on the cream. I kind of like Coffeemate as a cream substitute, but that powdered stuff you sometimes see is dreadful. (That said, I never drink coffee black. The powdered stuff is still better than nothing. I know it’s unusual to demand cream and forgo sugar, but that’s me. Maybe it’s how the fat coats my tongue?)

I also tend to prefer light roasts and low acidity in coffee. I would just as soon eat charcoal as drink French roast.

All of these preferences match up to how I like my tea (cream, no sugar, mostly), so that might be a useful starting point: see what you like in other beverages and then find a way to get coffee to match that.

14

So you remember when you were choking down that Steel Reserve thinking to yourself, “Good fucking god, people like this shit?” That wasn’t because it was Steel Reserve and not some fine craft beer brewed with love and rare hops. It’s because alcohol tastes awful until you’re used to it.

Ignore all of this advice about drinking Starbucks, or avoiding Starbucks, or cold brewed, espresso, french press or whatever. It’s coffee, it’s going to taste bad until you’re used to it.

I mean, you can drink a Steel Reserve now, right? Probably tastes bland and not particularly good, but you don’t wretch when it hits your lips. Same thing happens when a regular coffee drinker sips some crap from the gas station. It’s not, you know, good, but it’s not like we all fall over while loudly announcing that the coffee has gone rancid.

So that’s your answer. Force yourself to drink a cup or two every day and in a week or so you’ll be OK. Doesn’t matter where you get it from, although I’d honestly suggest something a little weak at first; generic DD coffee would do fine. When I was in my early 20s I decided I wanted to learn how to enjoy coffee, and I wanted to enjoy it black because my wife demanded cream in her coffee and you can’t always get cream. Sometimes you get 2%, sometimes it’s non-dairy creamer, sometimes it’s the powdered shit. If you like sugar they might only have sweet’n’low or whatever. Nuts to that. Drink it black and you’ll never be wanting for the right accouterments.

15

If your drinking powdered (or most artificial) creamer in your coffee, you ARE drinking it sweet. There is a butt load of HFC and/or sugar in that stuff. It’s one of the first things a nutritionist will tell a newly diagnosed diabetic.

16

I respectfully disagree with these statements. It’s equally as bad as Starbucks, just in the opposite direction. That said, they’re both significantly better than the coffee my father used to make!

For me, Mom and Dad would always have a couple of cups in the morning, and then we’d go visit my Grandmother where there would be more coffee. Now Mom didn’t want us kids having coffee (it would stunt our growth, she said, as she and Dad puffed on cigarettes), but Dad would let me drink some (more like coffee flavored sweetened milk) at Grandma’s (this was during my single digit years). As I got older, I guess Mom didn’t mind stunting my growth as it might mean not having to buy new pants every 4 months, and by my mid-late teens I was drinking a cup a day in the morning before walking to school. In later years when I actually got to drink good coffee, my palate started getting more refined - and if I wasn’t drinking the swill my father seemed to like (see smoking - Mom quit but Dad never did) or the sludge that would come out of the percolator during my USAF days - I could keep reducing the milk and sugar needed. Today, I can drink a good cup black, though I prefer a little milk and sugar (not as much as is typically put in a NYC regular).

17

Given my optimal choice, I’d prefer half and half or any real dairy. There is still some sugar in any dairy product, of course, but not much compared to what people may add in other ways.

Anyway, what I like about creamers is not just sweetness. I’ve tried drinking coffee black with and without sugar and it doesn’t work for me either way.

18

To answer the OP, I started drinking coffee in highschool. My dad is a big coffee drinker and he always put sugar and half-n-half in it. I did the same until just a few years ago when I decided on a whim to try it black. I liked it and drink it that way to this day.

$5/day for a cup of coffee seems crazy to me. In fact, buying a cup of coffee from a barista seems like a waste of money to me. Making it at home saves boatloads of money and will result in a much better brew. Stay far away from gimmicky machines like the Keurig. I highly, highly recommend a french press. It’s laughably easy to use, by far makes the best coffee of any of the brew methods, and once you’ve bought the apparatus there’s no recurring costs (filters, those stupid K-cups, etc). Find yourself a cheap burr grinder (not a blade grinder) and if you have city water with a noticeable chlorine taste get yourself a cheap filter pitcher. Those, plus something to heat the water in is all you need and in aggregate will probably be cheaper than a regular drip coffee pot.

Use whole beans freshly ground every morning. The beauty of the french press is it’s easy to make it stronger or weaker with almost no extra effort. I get my beans from Costco, about $18 for a 3lb bag which lasts me over a month. This is cheaper than Folgers at the supermarket (and I use an old 3/4c measuring cup for my coffee scoop—I like my coffee strong).

I find Starbucks to be a vile, revolting brew. I can only assume it’s the coffee equivalent to PBR: it has a hipster following and people drink if for the image, not the actual quality of the coffee.

19

Starbucks is about as “hipster” as McDonald’s and soccer moms. There’s nothing hip about it. And PBR is a decent macrobrew. :slight_smile:

20

One of the high points of my life was walking into an airport Starbucks and saying, “Gimme a small cup of coffee.”
:slight_smile: