Coffee Talk

I like coffee. Hot, iced, room temp, I don't care, as long as it has the important attribute of being coffee. Not a drink made with coffee, and not coffee adulterated by sweetener and lightener. If I could find a way to avoid having to add water, and just chew roasted, ground beans, I might do that.

I like the dark and the bitter. I like coffee that fights with you even before you drink it. I want a cup of coffee that I will remember, long after I have thrown out the cup, realized that it wasn't my cup and that it wasn't supposed to be thrown out, fished the cup out of the garbage, washed it thoroughly and left it to dry, only to have some guy bump it off the counter and have it break so it gets thrown out anyway. Like long after that.

I want the coffee that eats like a meal.

But, and this is important, it is my belief that each of us can only ingest a specific amount of caffeine in his or her lifetime and once you get past that amount, you are in team-foul territory. I reached my personal point of no caffeine in the summer of 1999. I was drinking about a gallon of iced tea a day and suddenly couldn't sleep. Weird, right? So I switched to decaf. Don't hate me, haters, While I can ingest a small amount of caffeine (in the form of chocolate, generally) I try really hard to avoid drinking hi-test coffee. Sometimes it might have no impact, but it might also give me the jitters, the sweats, the unquenchable appetite and the cravings and that's a game of chance I'd rather not play.

So, yes, I drink decaf (it does have a little caffeine in it, but so far, not enough for me to decide to move to Postum) and I like it. Dark, bitter decaf is what I'm all about. This has put in the position of trying out different coffees to find the right decaf for me. For a while, I have been drinking Keurig pods -- they are pretty good but they take exactly the kind of effort I am worst at: "effort." We have a coffee shop in the school building (don't ask) and I often get my coffee from there and the premade, room temperature decaf is wonderful (as is the fresh triple decaf espresso in a little cup). But go to the store and the options are more limited.

I first ran into the Chosen Bean a bunch of years back. Cold, bitter, delicious and more expensive than any coffee has the right to be. Also, not carried by most stores so hard to find. I started ordering it by the box from California and it came packed in cold packs and only occasionally spilling all over everything. I found that they had 2 formulations, one of which was a concentrate that I was supposed to water down. No thank you. I just drank the concentrate. Mmmm Mmmm good. But I couldn't afford to keep drinking it and still be able to pay for luxuries like oxygen so I backed off.

Then I found Coldbruh with its pseudo-hipster name and its Sunny-D vibes. It is in squeezie-bags guaranteed to dribble all over me no matter what I do. The flavor is not as strong or complex as the Chosen Bean but this is available at a local store and it slightly less expensive than the Chosen Bean stuff. It also uses the "Swiss Water" method.

Here's what I know about the water situation. From what I recall, to get caffeine out of coffee beans, you have to rinse them with water and who knows what else. Apparently, doing that sucks out other important flavor crystals so decaf lacks some of the flavors and crunch of regular coffee. But water that has absorbed all the other nasties can still suck out more caffeine without bothering with the other stuff. So coffee people get this water that is already full up of other stuff so that the water only attacks the caffeine. It's like science or something. But both the Chosen Bean and the Coldbruh (and Power Coffee Works in Jerusalem) use this method. It is, clearly, an expensive method. Remember, American Cheese is cheaper than Swiss Cheese. So there's that, but who wants to put cheese in coffee?

Then I heard of another brand, "Stok" with a line over the O. It was significantly cheaper but it was available at Shoprite and I practically live at Shoprite so this looked like a major win. I'm willing to ignore the line over the O in the same way I could look past the man-bun on the Coldbruh. I drank it. I don't know if it was the lack of Swiss water, or the fact that it was slow brewed, but the coffee lacked any will to fight. It wasn't bad, per se, but it lacked depth and character. It just wasn't that great. I looked at the ingredients (DECAFFEINATED COFFEE (WATER, DECAFFEINATED COFFEE), NATURAL FLAVOR.) and I noticed that the drink has 3 carbs per serving. I have no idea where those carbs are coming from. Look at the ingredients. What is providing carbs? "Natural Flavors"?

And as I finished the first 48 ounces, I noted that the bottle says, "Coffee Beverage." What the heck is a coffee beverage as compared to coffee? And with those ingredients? Do we have to call it "cofee" so that it isn't held to the standards of actual coffee?

Those are my choices. I also drink a lot of decaf (not herbal) iced tea. Don't get me started on decaf tea.