Now that my semester has started and I’m back in the classroom teaching digital media courses, the topic of coffee comes up quite often. I mean, I am the one who brings it up. Typically, I’ll see students with coffee drinks in class, and most often, they contain so much milk and sweetener that the coffee part is almost an afterthought. When asked, students typically respond they don’t really like coffee and rarely drink it black, let alone straight espresso.
That’s normally my “in” to begin talking about coffee. Yesterday in class, I put the coffee flavor wheel on the giant projection screen at the front of the classroom. Students were floored that coffee could taste fruity, like citrus, or have floral notes. For most, coffee was only tolerable with enough milk and sweetener to mask most of the coffee taste. That leads to the question … why drink coffee in the first place?
Why do you drink coffee? Why do I drink coffee? Are we looking for simply a caffeine jolt to jumpstart our day? Or is there more? While I tease my students about coffee, I am happy they drink it.
I am often asked about why I drink coffee. Is it simply about transferring caffeine and energy into my bloodstream? Quite the opposite. For me, it’s about the process or even ritual of making and savoring the coffee experience. While we think rituals are exclusively religious, part of the definition includes “a solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.”
There’s a process or order for my morning coffee routine. It’s so ingrained into the start of my day that I look forward to it when I wake up. Fill the water kettle, turn it on, weigh the coffee beans, grind the coffee, pre-rinse the pourover filter, and begin brewing. It’s a mindful ritual. I do most of the same things each day, including smelling the freshly ground coffee before dumping it into the filter.
Don’t get me wrong, there are “perks” … literally … for drinking coffee. However, I’d enjoy everything just as much, even drinking coffee without caffeine. The ritual is so much part of my day that whenever I travel and where I go, I never leave home without a way to grind, brew, and enjoy coffee, whether in my van, in a hotel room, or visiting family.
Coffee is an experience. It’s more than a beverage, but a process or ritual to enjoy and even find meaning in. Especially when traveling in Nacho the Van or bikepacking, there’s nothing better than waking up and beginning the process of making coffee … even if, at times, doing so, still cocooned in a mummy sleeping bag.
Why do you drink coffee?
