I Will Disrupt Your Coffee

Introduction

I want to disrupt your coffee.  I’m using the word “disrupt” because it’s so current and powerful.  Dang it!  I just realized maybe it’s already passé… maybe “disrupt” was current when I started the sentence but lapsed by the end.  Whatever.  I’m going to use it anyway.

(By the way, I’m just being flippant with the title of this post.  I hope to disrupt your coffee, but I don’t kid myself that I have much influence over my readers.)

What I’m saying is, I’m a newcomer to drinking coffee—in the last week or so I finally learned how to make it, albeit in a very old-fashioned way—but I’m going to have the audacity to try to get you, a coffee veteran, to change your approach to this ancient beverage.  That’s what I understand this whole “disruption” thing to be.

The ask

I’m going to ask you to consider drinking your coffee black from now on.  It’s that simple.  I’ll provide the rationale as we go along.  (If you already drink your coffee black, read this anyway because it might give you a pleasurable smugness.)

I am emboldened to suggest this because I’m not the first one to do so.  I learned this when talking to my daughter about the soda tax passed two years ago in nearby Berkeley.  Berkeley is the first city in the U.S. to pass an excise tax on sugary drinks, and according to this article it’s working out well.  Berkeley’s law covers “flavored coffee drinks,” a category which includes not just premixed, bottled beverages but also any coffee to which a barista adds sweetener:  “The distributor [pays] a tax based on the quantity of sweetener used according to the printed instructions,” according to this article.  (If you add your own sugar, oddly enough, it doesn’t get taxed.  A little loophole, I guess.)

So, how is it that Berkeley voters—despite fierce opposition from the American Beverage Association—gave this complicated proposition a landslide victory?  Simple:  Berkeleyites (aka Berzerkers, Berkleyistas) are enemies of freedom.  I don’t mean to imply that that’s a bad thing.  I myself am an enemy of freedom.  Society gives us freedom and what do we do with it?  We read Us magazine, buy microwave popcorn, and rudely lash out at strangers via the Internet.

What’s wrong with cream and sugar?

Look, I have no real problem with putting cream and sugar in coffee and am not here to render any expert opinion on what a cup of coffee ought to be.  As coffee achievers go, I’m pretty much a dabbler; I only have coffee when I really need the caffeine (though that’s more and more often these days).  For most of my life, I tended to dress up that rare cup of coffee with sugar, or maybe Sugar In the Raw if I was feeling all fancy, and either cream, half-and-half, or milk.  This increased the charisma of the beverage, and to this day I enjoy that flavor.

But then the other morning I had an epiphany.  I was rushing to get on a very early conference call (the downside of being the odd West Coast employee) and made up some instant coffee.  The brand I use—never mind what it is, especially since I’m about to bag on it—is fairly upscale and describes itself as “amazingly close to a freshly brewed cup of coffee.”  I used to tolerate this product okay, but either my jar has gone bad or my tastes have changed… this time, it tasted awful.  It wasn’t just bitter—it was sour.  I added plenty of sugar and milk but they didn’t help.  And then I thought, wait—is that what we use cream and sugar for?  To dampen the flavor?  That might make sense with a lousy product, but aren’t most coffee drinkers buying pretty good stuff?  The fresh beans, the Peets, the Keurigs, and all that?  Why would you dilute that?

Think of it this way.  Imagine you lined up a row of giant mugs, each a quarter filled, with a variety of coffees progressing from barebones to deluxe:  Brim, McDonald’s, Peet’s from frozen ground beans, Peet’s from their store, Peet’s from beans you grind to order, and whatever is served at the Four Seasons Hotel in Florence.  If you took a sip of each, you’d surely notice a great range of quality.  Now add a normal amount of sugar and cream:  you’d still notice a big difference, even if you used the same grade A organic cream and pure unadulterated cane sugar in each mug.  Now imagine adding more and more cream and sugar to each mug, tasting each at intervals.  The difference from one cup to the next would get blurred.  Eventually they’d all taste the same (i.e., like sweet cream).

So assuming you’ve settled on a favorite brand of coffee, something very upscale and high-quality, perhaps to the point that you even have a favorite bean and/or a favorite roast … why would you then go and add these very basic products—cream or milk and/or sugar—which blunt your coffee’s distinctive flavor?

Is coffee too bitter to drink black?

Perhaps you just like coffee better with cream and sugar, full stop.  And no, it’s not because you’re some kind of wuss and find the undiluted flavor of coffee too bitter to handle.  You don’t mind the bitterness; you just like a little cream and sugar, and you are this close to abandoning this essay except that on some level you’re enjoying your growing hatred of me and my unsophisticated opinions.

You know what?  I agree with you—coffee isn’t that bitter!  Nobody is trying to cover up the flavor!  Meanwhile, even if it is a tiny bit bitter, humans can learn to enjoy bitterness.  I give you the India Pale Ales that are all the rage nowadays.  I really do love them, and know from personal experience that they’re an acquired taste.  I remember the first time I had a Racer 5, which—at 75 IBUs—is a pretty bitter beer.  Man, I hated it.  But now it’s one of my favorites.  (My absolute favorite is the Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which is rated at 90 IBUs; when I tried that one for the first time, I was far enough into IPAs that I loved it right away.)

And—though I’m no expert on coffee—I gather that to the extent that it is bitter, this is a failing.  This article suggests four possible causes of coffee being bitter:  it’s brewed wrong, the grind size is wrong, the water is too hot, or the brewing equipment is dirty.  So a really good cup shouldn’t be that bitter anyway.  So why do we sweeten it?

I don’t know for sure how people get into the habit of putting sugar and cream in their coffee, but I’d guess that when they started drinking it, the flavor struck them as unusual and they dressed it up to make it more familiar.  From there it just became habit.

“But wait!” you may be thinking.  “It’s not that!  It’s just that coffee with cream and sugar tastes really good!  You’re overthinking this!”

What makes us enjoy a flavor?

Let’s not be so hasty.  Let’s think about this.  What makes us decide something tastes good?  I read some article on sweetness and I’m not going to do try to dig that up, but it was something to the effect that we humans are hardwired to like the flavor of things that are calorically dense.  This was an evolutionary adaptation, a way nature gets us to lay in all the calories we can when they’re available, to avoid famine.  So a sweet tooth is pretty unsophisticated, isn’t it?  Like kids with their damn sodas and candy and Froot Loops!  Loving sweet things is natural … but I think it’s also kind of weak.  Fat isn’t so different … it’s calorically dense, too.

But coffee?  Black coffee has almost no calories.  Maybe we like it because, as described by this article, “caffeine enhances dopamine (DA) signaling in the brain.”  In other words, coffee produces a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.  But a) people also like decaf, and b) if this was only about caffeine, people would just pop NoDoz.  So coffee provides a more sophisticated enjoyment than mere dopamine response.  It appeals to our cultured side, not just our primitive impulses.  (Maybe this is why dogs and cats don’t crave it.)

So why blend this acquired taste with extra stuff?  Is it really necessary to pile these treats on top of each other?  If so, why not make every cup of coffee an Irish coffee by adding whisky, and/or always having a donut with it?  

I have two problems with this treat-upon-treat enhancement of coffee.  First off, the cheap dopamine buzz of fat and sugar seems like a vulgar addition to a fairy sophisticated product.  Nobody adds sugar or fat to an IPA, after all, and  I’m not the only person who considers it a travesty to put corn-syrup-laden ketchup on a hot dog.  Second, coffee isn’t a treat—for so many of us, it’s a habit we indulge several times a day.  If we can learn to enjoy it on its own merit, we don’t only elevate our taste, but we avoid gratuitous sugar and fat (and the temptation to ever make do with non-dairy creamer and/or Sweet'N Low).

I’m not saying we should cut out cream and sugar entirely—just that we get over the habit of always including them.  I think they really are just a habit, a rote add-on to the coffee ritual.  I remember watching a colleague customizing his Starbuck’s coffee:  first a splash of milk, then a splash of half-and-half, then two packets of sugar, then a little shake of cocoa on top.  He assembled this concoction several times a day.  I asked him, “Why not add the sugar first, when the coffee is hotter, so it’ll dissolve better?”  He shrugged and said, “I’ve always done it this way.”

Trust me:  it’s not hard to learn to like coffee black.  It took me all of three cups to see the light, whereas it took at least a dozen introductions to IPA before I acquired the taste.  (I’d inherited a bunch of it after throwing a party a few years back, and by the time they were gone, I was a convert.)  Black coffee is actually pretty dang tasty.  And you know what?  Now that I have a taste for it, I’m more versatile:  I can drink it black as a matter of course, but next time I’m at a fancy restaurant with the cute little pitcher of cream and the little hinge-lidded cup of fancy brown sugar cubes, I can fuss pleasurably with all of that because it’ll still taste good to me.

One more rationale

I’ll give you one more reason to drink your coffee black:  it makes you more cool.  At least, drinking black coffee makes me feel a bit more cool.  Not many behaviors can achieve this sense of cool.  I could smoke a cigarette, but that would just make me an idiot.  I could drive a sporty little convertible, but that would feel like a pose.  I could wear a badass leather jacket and/or ride a Harley, but—being a forty-seven year old dad—I would look ridiculous.  But to like my coffee black … that’s a little bit of cool that is still within my reach.

(This isn’t a male macho thing.  Drinking coffee black is also cool for a woman.  For example, the woman celebrated in the Cake song “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” would surely drink her coffee black.)

Call to action

To be clear, I’m not asking you to give up cream and sugar altogether.  I’m suggesting that the next time you have a cup of coffee—which is probably only hours from now—you not add anything to it.  Give this a taste.  If it doesn’t appeal to you, taste it some more and contemplate the flavor for a moment.  What’s wrong with it?  Couldn’t you learn to like this? 

Take like a week.  See if you don’t develop a taste for pure, adulterated coffee.  Assuming you do, now you can ask if there’s any reason to go back to cream and sugar.  And if there is—if you just plain enjoy that more—well that’s fine too and now you know your preference is real, and not just a habit born of unthinking repetition.

(Should you put milk in your tea?  That’s a whole other question….)

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No Mo' NoDoz



Introduction

My beloved NoDoz has been off the shelves for almost a year. (Okay, it’s not actually beloved. I don’t love NoDoz the way I love, say, a good burrito, or the way you love a good cup of coffee.) This post concerns a slightly frightening peek into the drug manufacturing business; why I don’t drink coffee; why I value NoDoz enough to miss it; and ultimately why caffeine pills are underrated.

No mo’ NoDoz

I ran out of NoDoz early last spring. First I just figured Safeway was all out. So I went to Elephant Pharmacy, then Rite Aid. None there either. Nobody could tell me why they didn’t have it. Finally, at Walgreens, the clerk referred me to the pharmacist, who said there had been a recall. He didn’t have any details, so I went online.

As it turns out, the company that makes No-Doz, Novartis, recalled several of its drugs, including Excedrin, NoDoz, Bufferin, and Gas-X, because it “became aware of … broken and chipped pills, and inconsistent bottle packaging that could cause pills to be mixed up.” One reader commented on the article, “I feel sorry for the people who thought they took Gas-X, but got NoDoz ... Now they’re up all night farting!” But seriously, this could be a big problem because Novartis also manufactures prescription drugs such as Percocet and extended-release morphine at this plant. Imagine a long-distance trucker getting Percocet instead of NoDoz.

Another article described the desperate measures some took because of the recall: “Can’t find No-Doz? No problem, just drink more coffee. But migraine sufferers are posting on blogs that they are unable to relieve their massive headaches that are too strong for Tylenol or Motrin. Bidders were running up the price of Excedrin bottles to $50 or more on eBay, that’s how desperate they are for relief.” As the article points out, what these hapless bidders missed is that Excedrin is just a combination of Acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine—all easy to find. Their advice to NoDozers, though, doesn’t apply to me. I’ve never been a coffee drinker and am not about to start.

Not a coffee achiever

Do you remember the TV ads put out by the National Coffee Association in the ‘80s? The most memorable is the one featuring the washed-up rock band Heart. “You are the new American society … the movers and the shakers … you are the new coffee generation! Join the coffee achievers!” As it happened, when these ads came out I was at the age where I could have started drinking coffee. The idea of a drink that could help me achieve was appealing (more appealing at that point than alcohol; no alcohol industry trade association has tried to launch an “alcohol achiever” campaign). My brother did get into coffee, and took to brewing up some pretty thick stuff—the coffee that eats like a meal, you could say. “So are you a coffee achiever now?” I asked him. “Well, I got the coffee part down,” he replied. His coffee didn’t appeal to me and I never did pick up the habit.

By now perhaps you’re exasperated. If I don’t drink coffee, why do I mess around with NoDoz? And more importantly, why don’t I drink coffee to begin with, when it’s so darn good?

Well, to begin with, I’m cheap, and yet tend toward expensive tastes. For years I never much liked beer, but only because I was sampling Coors and Meister Brau. When I tried good beer (I think Fat Tire, when it first came out, was the eye-opener for me), I liked it right away. That naturally led to an appreciation for Belgian beers like Duvel, and for pricey microbrews (my latest find being Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA at like $13 for a 4-pack). The only way to keep expensive tastes in line with my Bay Area mortgage is to avoid cultivating an appreciation for expensive stuff like fine wine and coffee.

Meanwhile, caffeine is addictive. Of course, so is alcohol, but there’s a difference: most beer drinkers are not alcoholics, while most coffee drinkers are caffeine addicts. An article I wrote years ago about caffeine ruffled a few feathers; some people really don’t like that “addict” label. But I don’t mean it pejoratively; I am talking about addiction not in terms of junkies, but as a simple matter of whether or not your habit involves withdrawal symptoms when you don’t get your beverage.

Needless to say, coffee shop chains will exploit this. Consider this article about Starbucks raising the price of a 12-oz. coffee in Manhattan to $2.01 (with tax), forcing customers to either carry change or use a credit card. Asked about this, a Starbucks VP said that “only a small proportion of customers buy just a tall coffee when they visit a Starbucks.” How nice for them. I don’t think it’s overly cynical to suppose that the extra cent is designed to drive customers toward paying with credit, which is known to drive up a customer’s total tab. Without a coffee habit, I avoid that entire retail temptation.

Coffee, of course, is much more than an addictive beverage. For so many people it is a life pleasure, and a habit, and often a ritual. The habit and ritual, I’d guess, have at least as strong a pull as the addiction. The guy with his own very expensive Italian-made espresso machine, who grinds his own beans, is at one end of a coffee spectrum; at the other end is Folgers and/or the free stuff you get at the office. I’m not on this spectrum. My use of caffeine is less a ritual than a technique: I use it to boost my athletic performance.

Why NoDoz?

“But wait,” anybody with half a clue is saying. “Why not get your performance-boosting caffeine and enjoy a delicious, steaming mug of joe at the same time by being a non-addicted, occasional coffee achiever?” One: like I said, I’m cheap (a NoDoz tablet costs like a dime). Two, I don’t have much time to ride, and if I’m fussing with grinding beans and then waiting for the coffee to drip into a pot, I’m cutting into my riding time. The very prospect of moving quietly around the kitchen brewing coffee at 5:30 in the morning is enough to keep me in bed.

But, you protest, the club ride meets at the coffee shop … what could make more sense than grabbing a cup there? Well, brewed coffee isn’t a very precise dose. I base this on an article I read about Starbucks. I gather that Starbucks’ popularity, as with so many chains, derives from its quality control—it must be among the leading chains in this domain. And yet its quality control isn’t actually that good, in terms of predictable caffeine quantity per cup. Maybe that doesn’t matter to a coffee achiever with a tolerance for caffeine, but it matters to me. NoDoz delivers exactly 200 mg of caffeine per tablet. They claim this is about the same as a cup of coffee. (I could swear that when I started using it, the package said it was about the same as two cups of coffee.) But, the article states, “A recent laboratory test [McCusker R.R.; Goldberger B.A.; Cone E.J., Caffeine Content of Specialty Coffees, Journal of Analytical Toxicology, Vol. 27, October 2003, pp 520-522] sampled a series of Starbucks Breakfast Blend brewed coffees. The caffeine dose varied from 299.5mg right up to a massive 564.4mg per 16oz cup! What’s astonishing is that the 6 samples were obtained from the same outlet on 6 consecutive days.” Man … 565 mg. If I got that much caffeine I think I’d be hallucinating.

And another thing!

My tradition of NoDozing has been further reinforced by another article I came across recently comparing the benefit of coffee vs. pure caffeine. In a recent study, athletes’ performance was measured in five separate trials with different products administered: placebo pill, caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee with caffeine added back in, and pure caffeine. The results? “Surprisingly, the only trial which resulted in any improvement in performance was when subjects ingested pure caffeine. In other words, ingesting caffeine in the form of coffee did not affect performance compared to the placebo trial. Thus, it was concluded that there is a compound in coffee that appears to inhibit the performance enhancing effects of caffeine, and to obtain the performance enhancing effects of this drug, pure caffeine needs to be ingested.”

Naturally, I wouldn’t blindly assume this study was valid. I like to do my own tests (such as this one) to see how such reports match my own experience. You might assume that my own bias might skew the results of my test. Well, the beauty of this is that I happened to run the tests long before the article came out. I wasn’t drinking coffee pre-ride to measure anything; I just tried it out. Because I keep an absurdly detailed training diary, the results of these efforts are well documented.

In both trials, I had a poor performance riding the indoor trainer after drinking coffee. I measure performance by how high I was able to get my heart rate, and how long over my target zone. (In the following accounts, “TAZ” means “time above zone.”) In both workouts I averaged far below the 19 minutes of TAZ I normally get (i.e., when using No-Doz alone). Here are the accounts of my coffee-fueled efforts.

12/14/10 Tuesday, 1:35:39 duration, 8:24 TAZ

I felt I needed a secret weapon this morning and got out the Folgers crystals. I’d never tried it before. I guess my wife’s mom must have bought them in frustration at our not having any coffee around here. So this is in addition to my NoDoz. I already have a strong association between this brand and my workouts, because on the trainer I listen to a lot of rap, including Eminem, who in one song raps, “Wake up and smell the Folgers crystals!” So I figured that literally smelling the Folgers, and of course drinking it, might inspire me to go harder. I know … grasping at straws. Anyhow, I managed to get a bit of TAZ toward the end of this tour, but mostly it just sucked.

12/16/10 Thursday, 1:00:56, 1:04 TAZ

I tried to motivate for a big effort this morning, but to no avail. My new game-changing secret weapon, Folgers coffee, is actually useless. I was trying to figure out, as I made the coffee this morning, what the Folgers crystals remind me of, and finally it hit me: Drano. They’re like brown Drano, and they have the same effect on my plumbing. Not much other effect, though. None of my other trainer tricks were doing much good either. The rap music was almost demoralizing. As Obie Trice yelled in my ear, “I’m hittin’ harder than those Hiroshima-type bombs!” I was thinking, “I’m hitting weaker than those plastic Wiffle-type bats.”

(If you think I fabricated the above study for the purpose of this post, click here.)

Meanwhile, I have other anecdotal evidence of the power of pure caffeine. About 2/3 of the way through a brutal 130-mile ride over Mount Hamilton, through Livermore, and back to Berkeley with some guys on my bike club, I was feeling pretty shot and went for a NoDoz. I split it with one of the guys, Steve Kromer, because he’d already been dragging the rest of us around and I hoped to draft him all the way home. This backfired, though: he started to feel so good following the half-NoDoz that he split off from our ride to set off alone on something more ambitious. He rode solo over Morgan Territory Road, then up and down Mount Diablo before returning home over Lomas Cantadas, a brutal climb. He ended up with 170 miles on the day with 15,000 feet of climbing. Was it the NoDoz? Well, I’d seen him drink coffee plenty of times without getting a crazy surge like that.

Still no mo’ NoDoz

Amazingly, Novartis still hasn’t gotten NoDoz back on the shelves. It’s not a problem for me. My brand loyalty to NoDoz over Vivarin is based only on a) Vivarin being unaccountably more expensive, and b) Vivarin being a round tablet that cannot be broken in half, while NoDoz is a narrow, scored tablet that I can easily divide. (A whole tablet before an evening ride would keep me up all night.) In case you’re thinking of becoming a non-coffeee caffeine achiever, Walgreens has a NoDoz-shaped house-brand caffeine tablet that’s nicely scored for sharing. (You getting this, Kromer?)
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