Coffee

A guest at the hotel came to the front desk earlier today and asked, "Where's the best place in town to get a good, strong cup of coffee?" I paused and thought about it for a second (even though there's only one coffee shop and it's pretty good, it's Wednesday and I'd just gotten on shift) and he said, "Oh, you must not be a coffee drinker."

"Actually," I replied, "I'm an avid coffee drinker," and I proceeded to sing the praises of the local coffee shop and various stops for a cup between Reno and Palmdale.

I'm a big fan of good coffee. I've met a friends while hanging out alone in coffee shops, start my mornings with an almost religious ritual of brewing the stuff, and enjoy trying new roasts and variations from wherever I can get it. The smell of fresh coffee usually gets me ready to be human, and by the time I'm through with a couple cups I'm typically able to pretend I'm a functioning person. Of course, I wasn't always so jazzed about java, but once I started drinking coffee I never really let up.

When I first moved away from home I didn't drink coffee all that much. I'd take a couple cups of Foldgers with cream and sugar to kick start my mornings before the weekday commute to Lancaster from Mojave, brewing it in my bedroom in my tiny coffee pot while I watched the sun go up in the desert. After a day of classes I'd have to wait for my friend Jim to get out of his improv class, so I'd walk over to the Starbucks a few blocks from the college and drink coffee for a couple hours. I started taking it black after awhile to get the unadulterated caffeine inundation flowing from ceramic mugs and paper cups with paper sleeves, and once I'd moved to Lancaster itself I started checking out various independent coffee shops to see what their brews were all about.

One day a classmate told me about a benefit show at a coffee shop conveniently located a few blocks away from where I lived. I walked to the recently opened Sagebrush Cafe in Quartz Hill, listened to a few sets while I drank their awesome coffee, and noticed a flyer for an acoustic night ever Friday. A few days later I found myself there again, drinking coffee and listening to music, and I did that as often as possible there until the day I moved from the AV for good. It was there at Sagebrush, though, that I realized I couldn't go back to drinking crappy coffee at home, so I applied the knowledge from my short time working an espresso machine and my many hours sitting in cafes to my morning joe.

After years of going out of my way to get decent coffee and drinking the stuff daily, my coffee maker's power switch fell off. The day my dinky little coffee maker died was the day I learned the value of a French press; hot water, coarse grounds, and a little patience grants me an pure cup of dark roasted beauty, complete with the oils typically trapped in paper filters and a taste that-- if done right-- can caffeinate me to a point of a potential cardiac event. Later on, my friend Kristine introduced me to Turkish coffee and I learned what it really meant to be buzzed off of a cup to the point of a heart attack. After trying coffee prepared via Chemex, Aeropress, and essentially every method  imaginable to combine ground beans and water to form a beverage, I've stuck with a drip maker (it's easy) and a French press (it's delicious).

I'm not good at a lot of things, but I'm pretty good at haunting coffee shops and drinking coffee.