Me either. I have also read or heard somewhere that Jay Leno doesn’t do “hot liquids” either. I remember this factoid because we also share a birthday.
Coffee is gross and I do not enjoy drinking it - hot or cold, in a cake or in candy or ice cream. The closest I will come to ingesting coffee is tiramisu cake and if it’s got too strong of a coffee flavor I’ll leave it on the plate.
Tea I can take or leave. Naturally, I prefer it cold. But with tons of sugar (or rather, Splenda)
I also cannot stand the taste of beer and I am going to bet that I have a total aversion to “bitter” since both beer and coffee would be considered “bitter” beverages…right?
I love the smell of freshly ground coffee. When I was very little, I remember being able to scoop a small handful of grounds out of the tray on the coffee grinder at the grocery store, and I walked around smelling it while my mother shopped.
I’ve only tasted it once. I took my brother to the doctor’s office after school one day, probably in 1973. I was dying for a drink. The only thing they had was an industrial coffee maker in the waiting room. So I made a cup and took a sip. It was so gross and disgusting I couldn’t even swallow it. I had to run outside and spit it out. That’s my coffee drinking experience.
I actually love coffee but I used to hate it, too. And I can certainly see how people might hate it! It’s strong and bitter and definitely an acquired taste, like fish and such. I don’t ask anyone like it, all I ask is you taste it once, and if you still hate it, move on with your life.
I’m a tea drinker – sort of. One cup a day at most and never two (dries me out). And always hot.
Once nice thing about tea is the variety: green, black, flavored, etc. (I don’t care for herbal teas). You can pick what you want to match your mood. But don’t get Lipton, which is awful.
As far as Starbucks is concerned, they aren’t in the business of selling coffee: they’re in the business of selling milk. The less coffee you get, the more expensive the drink.
Ok, at first glance that sounds bizarre. Coffee is awful and bitter and chocolate is sweet and tasty, right? But that’s only because no one ever eats chocolate without a ton of sugar and milk or milk solids in it. Plain cocoa powder and baker’s* chocolate are very bitter, almost as bad as coffee. On the other hand, coffee loaded down with cream and sugar, or (better yet) coffee ice cream are things I find quite tasty.
There are more similarities too. Both are made from beans. When chocolate was first enjoyed by people in Central and South America, they made an unsweetened, hot drink from it, similar to how we enjoy coffee today. Once people figured out how much better it was with some sugar thrown in though, no one ever went back to drinking it the old way.
The conclusion I draw from all this is that we are using coffee beans all wrong. Only coffee ice cream and coffee flavored cakes (like tiramisu) are good, and drinking black coffee is like making hot cocoa without the sugar.
*I know Baker’s is a brand name, but I don’t know the generic name for the stuff. Is unsweetened chocolate the word for it?
I say, try it. If you don’t like it, try it again.
I know people think that’s crazy, but maybe coffee is like an ornery old beat down dog. . .hard to like at first, but once you do, it becomes your best friend. It’s warm and comforting and delicious. All of us coffee drinkers felt the way you all do at one point.
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Now I want a cup of joe.
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That’s one of coffee’s charms. Sometimes, I’m not even thinking about it, but once it enters my consciousness, it calls out to me and only quiets when I drink some.
Besides. . .what an AWESOME thing to do: pick a berry, dry it out, roast it, grind it, run hot water through it and drink it. Elemental and earthy and basic. They were probably doing the exact same thing in Mesopotamia.
OK. . .go back to beating up on coffee. The beat down was really upsetting me, though.
Pepper Mill and I both love the smell of freshly-brewing coffee (hard to pass the Starbucks at the Mall), but hate the taste of coffee in any form. We both like tea, for the record.
In my case, I blame my grandmother’s weekly coffee. We used to get together at her house every Sunday – the whole extended family – and she’d make a huge pot of coffee in the brewer that she never properly cleaned out. You could smell the metallic tang of bad coffee throughout the house, and I never liked it.
While I enjoy the smell of coffee, I also hate the taste. Similarly, I love the smell of beer, but I don’t think that I have ever finished a bottle or can of the stuff. With beer, the first three or four mouthfulls are good, but then it just starts to taste more and more bitter and sour until I can’t swallow it without grimacing. I can’t even get one swallow of coffee down without making an involuntary face.
Herbal tea has no flavor that I can detect, although it smells nice. Black tea and green tea are OK, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get some. I really like the Tazo chai latte, but that’s because it has some kind of ‘peppery’ essence to it that makes my tongue buzz pleasantly. If I could get that mouth feel without all the sweetness- does anyone have any suggestions? I don’t know if it’s the tea or the chai spices, but I love it!
Oddly, I don’t mind other bitter/burnt things- I used to chew up aspirin, I like bitter chocolate flavors, and I’ve purposefully grilled brats until they were carbonized on the outside.
Hmmm. I don’t like the smell of beer, for the most part, but my beef with beer is that one swallow fills me up. Maybe it’s overcarbonated or something, but I can never finish a beer. I like a nice lager, but I’ll never drink it all. I want a beer on hot summer days-and I wait 10 minutes and the craving passes.
Coffee lover’s are upset about the beat down here? Mercy me. I don’t see why I should have to like something that I have tried many times throughout my life and have never developed a taste for. I don’t mind coffee with a healthy dollop of French Vanilla flavoring in it, but other than that, it’s never something I would choose off a menu. It also rips the hell outta my GI tract, but we are veering into TMI territory there…
Know what else? Flavored coffees are apparently misleading. Here at work, they brew several kinds of flavored coffees. Tiramisu, chocolate, cinnamon something… there are all kinds of them. You walk by and the whole area smells heavenly. But according to the people who drink it, the coffee doesn’t taste like it smells. To quote one person, “actually, it tastes like ass.”
Actually, I’m being nice. I utterly loathe the vile, bitter demon-spew that so many of my acquaintances gulp down by the quart. If I believed in Hell, I would expect it to have a Starbuck’s in every pit. I can hardly stand the smell of the stuff (which even most coffee-haters seem to like). It smells like someone is burning a skunk at the stake. For that matter, freshly-brewed skunk-ash tea would probably be preferable.
Glad to see I’m not alone. I want to like coffee. It smells so good, and all those things they make at Starbucks look so good, that every once in awhile I’ll be tempted to try them in hopes that my tastes have changed. It always goes the same way:
Spouse orders yummy looking coffee drink.
I look at it, think “that looks good…maybe I should try one.”
I order the smallest, yummiest looking thing I can find.
I taste it.
I make a face, say, “Eww, that tastes like coffee.”
Spouse finishes it for me.
So far the only coffee flavored thing that I like (and I like it quite a lot, actually) is coffee ice cream. Especially in a mud pie.
Oh, and Coca Cola Blak isn’t bad. It tastes kind of interesting, actually. Coke and coffee go surprisingly well together. Any other coffee-haters tried it and liked it?
I don’t like coffee at all. I’ve had two cups in my life (one regular, one iced), in situations were I tried to drink as much as I could to be polite. Ick.
Tea, on the other hand, is great. I’m another one who generally doesn’t like hot drinks, so I’ll have my tea iced if possible. If hot tea is the only option, I wait until it is more like lukewarm tea.
I never have liked coffee much but I what I really hate is the culture surrounding it. You ever notice how people say “I am going to drink MY coffee” like they would have gulped down someone else’s. Why do they say that? If someone went around saying “I am going to drink my whiskey”, it would tend to amplify the way the issue sounds.
A few months ago, I was really sleepy in the mornings so I started getting black coffee from the cafeteria at work. Coworkers noticed and must be a real coffee lover to drink it straight up. I explained that it would taste like shit no matter what I did with it so there is no need to kid ourselves and add extra calories in the process. I quit that short-lived nasty seeking a while ago though.
