I Drink the Wrongest Possible Coffee

I drink the wrongest possible coffee. I've been chewed out by baristas - one even snatched away my cup and insisted on starting over. Friends have made pukey face at me, questioning why they'd ever taken me seriously as a food/drink tastemaker. It's bad. Real bad.

The only reason I'm disclosing this publicly is because despite my deep shame, I suspect I may be on to something. Let's go ahead and tear the Bandaid quickly...

Here's what I do. I go to the best coffee place I can find, and order a single espresso to go, ensuring plenty of cup capacity (See? You're wincing in pain already!). I add a heaping teaspoon of sugar, and top off the cup with milk. So much milk. And that's it.

I understand the many reasons why this is disgusting and wrong and bad. The result's a couple notches on the wrong side of "lukewarm" - offering none of the kinetic jolt of a hot cup of coffee nor the refreshment of iced coffee. Just a thermally flaccid cup of mildly sweet coffee milk.

I've smeared ketchup on the steak. I've scraped the fish out of my sushi roll. I've sprinkled chili flakes on my corn flakes.

"You idiot," you might respond, "Just order a frickin' cappuccino. That's what you're doing anyway, and you'll get the benefit of delicious frothy milk. You get the kinetic jolt, whatever the fuck that is, and spare yourself the guilt of offending baristas and traumatizing friends!"

I like cappuccino. I actually like it a lot. But I'd dispute the notion that this is my ticket out of pariah status, because ordering cappuccino in the middle of the day (which is when I drink it) makes you a Philistine, bare minimum. And there's a fine line between Philistine and pariah.

Also: frothing the milk doesn't just yield hot milk. It changes the texture, the vibe, it's a whole other drink. You might say that it's a better drink, but here's something I know, in my shmucky naïveté, that you don't: how my way actually tastes. You've never tried it. Why would you have? It's the worst way to drink coffee! So you don't know! But I do! And that, reader, is why I'm writing this.

One huge advantage of my wrong way of drinking coffee is that it's the antidote to overly-roasted, overly-acidic coffee, such as, geez, I don't know, I wanna say, maybe...Starbucks? Heard of it?

There's almost nothing you can do to Starbucks coffee to mollify its signature sooty/smudgey acridity. Cappuccino masks it a bit, but it's like turning down the volume of a Sid Vicious record. The relative volume might be lower, but it's still raucous loud music. If it annoyed you before, you'll still be annoyed.

But my way balances it, even making a virtue of it. This is not the juvenile baby bottle pablum you'd imagine. The grind of the acidity/burntness contributes a pleasant dissonance within the immensity of milk (you don't get this with regular coffee). It's the only way to make Starbucks enjoyable for anyone not previously addicted to their scrapey scrape. It's like ingeniously setting a flawed gemstone to make it show its best. It's coffee jiu-jitsu

Finally, there's a consideration only a former starving musician would consider. Coffee isn't food. It provides neither calories nor nutrition. This quantity of milk is bona fide food, elevating coffee from an empty, cumulatively expensive vice. So tell me how disgusting I am as I ingest 8 grams of protein and a modest but useful 100 calorie boost - real energy to burn, as opposed to pure caffeine squeezing away at your poor besieged adrenal glands.

You can go chomp on some crappy protein bar, but I've downed delicious coffee milk with much the same nutrition for a buck less, and it keeps me awake, and it's the only way to make Starbucks taste good, and the flavor - which you've never experienced despite your superior sniggering - offers a pleasant dissonant grind within a balanced context, like beer. People like beer. Maybe you don't. Maybe you only drink straight vodka, 'cuz beer's too disgustingly dilute and your body has chemical needs. Mommy needs her medicine.

Also: I can slurp it down at any pace that suits. I won't burn myself nor brain-freeze myself. It makes itself generously available. Hell, it even quenches thirst. Can your straight espresso shot do that?

So...whose coffee's wrong again?


I do have a latte counterargument. Don't think I don't. But I can't ask you to read more than 750 words on this.