Confessions of a Coffee Virgin

My name is Jason, I'm 30 years old, I live in Seattle, and I've never tried coffee.  Not "never had a full cup", not "don't like coffee", not "don't drink coffee for health reasons", full-on never tried it.  Not even a sip.  I am a coffee virgin.

But that is about to change.


I'm starting this blog to document the loss of my coffee virginity and my first forays into the world of arguably the most popular beverage in America (if not the world), mostly for documentation purposes, but also because I expect to have a unique perspective to offer.  I'm a grown-ass man with a well-developed and mature palate, and I'm usually pretty good at writing about what I taste.

But before I begin my deflowering, I'd like to talk a bit about how I managed to make it to 30 without ever trying coffee, and why I all-of-a-sudden have decided I need to experience this beverage.

For as long as I can remember, I had an irrational aversion to coffee that bordered on phobic.  As a kid, I couldn't even bring myself to utter the word "coffee" or even write it, let alone try it.  Which was odd, considering both my parents loved coffee—in the mornings, in the afternoons, and decaffeinated and cut with whisky and whipped cream as Irish coffees at night.  I've long pondered the source of this phobia, but can't really place its origin.  Suffice to say I've spent much of life rationalizing it—I built up an elaborate psychodrama where coffee represented everything I hate about "adults" and industrialized society and saw my abstinence as a refusal to assimilate.  I also considered it to be culinarily bankrupt, a substance devoid of pleasant flavor that is only tolerable either drowned in cream and sugar or through the sheer associative force of caffeine addiction.  My image of coffee was basically the stale and burnt pot of cheap pre-ground Yuban perpetually festering in teachers' lounges, office break rooms, and shitty diners all over the country.

Not that I was anti-caffeine, of course.  Through the course of high school and college, I graduated from soda (especially SURGE) to energy drinks and finally to tea as I grew sick of the sugary acidity and palate-wrecking artificial flavors.  I am now, and will probably always be, an avowed tea snob, and the sort of tea I drink these days is probably comparable to coffee in terms of strength and body.  I'll talk about my tea at greater length in the next post, because it will be the basis of comparison for my experiences with coffee.  Needless to say, I am unquestionably a caffeine junkie at this point in my life.

So, why start drinking coffee now?  I can't honestly say for sure, but it seems to have something to do with my move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle.  The coffee shop culture up here has a much more relaxed and inviting vibe to me, and while I hear the quality of coffee in SF is comparable (and possibly even superior) to that found in Seattle, it somehow feels more like it is appreciated for culinary reasons than as a stimulant here.  In my neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the majority of cafes roast their own beans (or are part of a chain that does).  There is a profound sense of artisanship at most of them, and something about that is helping me to see coffee in a different light.  Rather than some foul-tasting commodity beverage whose only function is to keep zombified 9-to-5ers slaving productively away, I'm starting to see it as a potentially-delicious beverage that can have great depth and nuance of flavor, analogous to craft beer or fine wine.  As a self-declared foodie, I can't help but feel like I must be denying myself some great taste experiences by not drinking coffee.

I also went through a phase of reading Beat literature recently—it seemed to fit with the huge upheaval I went through during my moving process—and as most people know, the Beat movement was basically powered by coffee.  Well, and benzedrine and marijuana, but coffee is probably the most iconic psychoactive associated with that movement.  There were, in fact, plenty of intellectual movements throughout Western history that were associated with coffee and hanging out in cafés—it was not always the sad, artless fuel of the wage-slave.  Just as my romance with the Beats inspired me to develop an appreciation of bebop jazz, so too it seems to be inspiring my desire to learn to appreciate coffee.

So yeah, that seems to be it: colder weather, a slower and more inviting artisanal coffee culture, and a shift in association from "oppressive adulthood" to "art and intellect fuel".  In my mind, coffee has gone from being something that "I can't imagine why ANYONE drinks" to something that "I can't imagine why I don't drink".

Let the deflowering begin!