Coffee: Origins

Oh, not like the origins of coffee itself… I don’t think I’m qualified to talk on such a thing. I mean my personal origins with coffee.

This blog and I have had an on and off relationship for twelve years now, so I had to do a search to make sure I’m not doing a repeat topic (check the new “search” bar I added for my own personal use). What I found was a post from when I started drinking coffee daily, and a post about the nostalgia of a good cup of Dunkin Donuts pumpkin spice coffee, but no origin story of how I started drinking coffee in the first place!

It all started with my mom’s distaste for “junk food” and my dad’s love for sneaking around to get honey buns and and donut sticks when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes, he would invite me to go with him on a gas station run to go get sweets. Looking back, I wonder if he chose the gas station because $10 at the gas station would look way less sketchy to mom than $10 at McDonalds when she was reviewing the credit card bill. It was there at the gas station that I started getting gas station “cappuccinos” (aka caramel hot chocolate with perhaps a splash of espresso).

For a while, gas station cappuccinos were the only form of coffee in my life, and I’d say I was pretty passionate about them. I would tell my older relatives how I now enjoyed coffee especially cappuccinos, to which they would seem surprised and impressed until they gathered from me that I was talking about cappuccinos from the machine at the gas station. “That isn’t quite the same…” they would start to say, but then they would change their mind and decide not to burst my twelve year old self’s bubble by telling me that I was not in fact as grown up as I thought I was…

Then came the weekend my older sister Bobbie got married. It was a wedding in Savannah, GA, half way between where she lived and my parents lived. We spent a few days there to prepare for the wedding, do the rehearsal dinner, etc. and there was a very cool coffee shop right by the venue. It sported various mismatched comfy chairs, lots of light from floor to ceiling windows, exhibits from local artists. We spent a lot of time there that weekend, and I think it was my first real exposure to a true coffee shop. I loved the vibe (I still love it… I’ve been there as an adult multiple times, in fact I’m not sure if I’ve been to any other coffee shop in Savannah. Gallery Espresso.)

I was confident when I ordered my first drink at Gallery Espresso. I walked up to the counter and ordered a cappuccino, my specialty drink. I was quite surprised at the tiny cup it arrived in, and even more surprised at how bitter it was! Come to find from my coffee expert brother-in-law Nick, true cappuccinos don’t have any added sugar in them and the gas station version is a completely different breed. I found the true cappuccino to be disgusting. But, I wanted to be molded to the form of a cool coffee shop goer, and so I drank it. And the next day I had another, which somehow didn’t taste quite as bad. And that trajectory has continued to present day me who drinks at least a cup of black coffee every morning.

Though on occasion I try to drink a cup of gas station coffee on a road trip out of nostalgia, the taste is pretty disgusting to me now… whether a cappuccino from the machine or straight black from the drip. Sometimes I think I’ve become too much of a coffee snob. Sometimes ignorance is bliss with these sorts of things, then you can enjoy everything in life. Why be a sommelier if it means you won’t be able to enjoy “Two Buck Chuck” wine anymore?

Anyways… I digress. If you are a coffee drinker, I’d love to hear your “origin story” in the comments! Or, if you don’t drink coffee, but perhaps you drink something else (tea? diet coke? wine? kombucha?) tell me about that!