ECKLEBURG
2004-09-28 - 3:58 p.m.
Have you ever wondered why you like coffee the way you do? Did you do a scientific taste test with varying degrees of sugar, or sugar versus blue artificial sweetener vs. pink artificial sweetener vs. yellow artificial sweetener? Does the amount of milk or cream or half and half or non-dairy powder (and are you SURE that you use the one you like the best) does using more or less of one of these affect the mount of sugar you prefer, or vice versa?
Or were you like me, and you were sitting at IHOP super late with your friends one night in your early days of high school and you decided that you wanted coffee for no particular reason aside from it seemed like the thing to do. So you ordered coffee and you then had to guess how you liked it – probably two sugar packets and two cream, because 1 of each didn’t intuitively seem like enough and three was too much. And that is how I decided how I like my coffee.
That is until I got older and decided to switch to the artificial sweetener because my belly is getting bigger and switching is easier than actually dieting. Of course for several years I was artificial sweetener colorblind.
And now I must admit that when I go to a place with multiple snooty flavors of coffee, I just guess. At least with wine you can use the aesthetics of the labels to decide. With coffee, you just have nouns (vanilla, mountain, berry) and adjectives (Dark, Bohemian)
Grumblecake likes hers with lots and lots of half and half (thank god for Costco Sized half-and-half). But I think it is mainly because she really secretly doesn’t like coffee as most of us know it, and she has discovered that she can add enough cream to make “coffee milk,” which is like chocolate milk or strawberry milk, but coffee flavored. She originally tried with actual milk, but found that she needed enough milk that it got cold, and coffee milk must be hot. Hence the more “concentrated” half-and-half.
For me, I have decided to challenge my coffee beliefs to the core, the see what I like, and truly KNOW how I like my coffee. So I am going to conduct a series of tests be making two cups of coffee in the morning, each exactly the same but with one variable different.
Test One: Blue vs. Pink. We’ll see which artificial sweetener is better. Answer tomorrow (hey, a cliffhanger ending for my blog, what an idea!)
