I just got out of a terrible talk. The talk was good. Well, maybe at least — I wouldn’t really know. I fell asleep. Partly that’s a quirk of my metabolism, partly that’s because it was over my head, and partly because someone put the wrong coffee in the carafe.

The rules are simple:

1. Go ahead and drink decaf. Don’t let anybody give you crap for it. You’re an adult and, like all adult decisions, only you are qualified to decide.
2. Don’t tell me it tastes the same. It doesn’t.
3. Don’t serve me decaf without warning me. Yes, I do drink the stuff from time to time (like when I’m cold and want something warm, but rule #2 isn’t idle talk. If you do try to pass decaf off as the real thing, I might write snarky things in my blog about the etiquette of serving decaf. You don’t want that.

I would conjecture that people who drink decaf interchangeably with regular coffee are either used to tasting cream and sugar, and really can’t tell the difference, or are trying to nurse themselves out of a massive caffeine dependency, and can tell the difference but need to lie to themselves about it.

The latter group I can respect somewhat; there were a few times in college when I really just needed to take a coffee hiatus. I’ll admit that — to me — decaffeinated coffee is like non-alcoholic wine: it just doesn’t taste right. I’d rather drink water. (Speaking of which, if you’ve ever hypothetically tried to get female friends drunk on non-alcoholic wine as a psychology experiment, you know that it won’t work — they’ll notice straightaway.)

My opinions on the cream-and-sugar crowd are well-documented. It doesn’t make you a bad person, any more than drinking PBR makes you a bad person, but taking your coffee that way indicates that you have a different set of goals for your coffee experience than I do. It’s cool; I’m a beverage pluralist (more or less), just stay the heck away from my coffee.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get some real coffee into my system so that I can keep my eyes open.