Oh. Hmm. There seems to be a blog about liquids. And I seem to be an editor. That’s weird. Somebody should have told me.
Anyway, it looks like we’re back from an unscheduled vacation. Where did we go? Um, nowhere. It got hot, and my modus operandi shifted from, “Run around like crazy drinking random liquids at odd hours” to “sit directly in front of the fan and try not to do or think anything, ever.”
Due to a long-ago bad experience with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, I’ve avoided the stuff for a long time. At the least, I wouldn’t pay money for it.
Recently, I’ve been at two different events where I didn’t have to pay money for it, so I threw caution to the wind and decided to give it a fair shake.
First, I was at an event where there was a big old box (yes, box) of their hot coffee. Not that it was all that hot, but there was also a microwave — we scientists are clever. Taken black, it’s… drinkable. In fact, it would even be good if it tasted less acidic. It’s got a mild nutty flavor, pretty inoffensive, but it left a sort of bitter taste in my mouth, and the farther down the the cup I got the more I could swear I felt my teeth dissolving. Probably that was psychosomatic though. Anyway, it’s a lot better than, say, the coffee you’d get at the 7-11.
Then there was Free Iced Coffee Day. Boston being Boston, it was chilly and rainy. What else would you expect on May 15? Thankfully, the line was short. Now, apparently people in this part of the world (at least the ones who patronize Dunkin’ Donuts) take their coffee with cream and sugar, because if you don’t specify that’s what you get. I found this out the hard way, but then, this is one of my few opportunities to explore Bostonian culture (how many times have I said that?). Anyway, the iced coffee tastes like sweet milk. With ice in it. It was colored like it had some coffee in it but I sure couldn’t taste it. I’m not much of an iced coffee person (I prefer iced tea), so that’s probably not the biggest loss. Does anybody drink iced coffee when it’s not free iced coffee day? I have no idea. But I’ll be generous and assume that they don’t.
It would be easy to say that I don’t know what all the fuss is about, but then again, I’m pretty sure Dunkin’ Donuts’s stranglehold on New England predates Starbucks and all the other quasi-upscale coffee shops (yes, black coffee from Starbucks is better than Dunkin’ Donuts, and if there are options in downtown Boston other than Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts, I’ve not heard of them). And besides, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is a slightly cheaper, I think, and if all you want is something to wake you up and keep you from freezing to death, then that’s a valid selling point.
So while I don’t think there will be much Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in my future, I’m still happy to report that at least in once specific instance it’s at least somewhat better than the swill they serve at fast food restaurants (true story: I once ordered coffee at a Burger King. I added one mini-carton of non-dairy creamer. It turned white), and that the locals aren’t all totally crazy.
I mean, except for the driving, the accent, and the baseball.
For kind of a while now, I’ve been on a dark coffee kick. From a strictly political standpoint, that’s dangerous; some would claim it’s a slippery slope from there to being another Starbucks drone. I disagree; I think that 20% of the problem with Starbucks is soporific music, and the other 80% is the fact that most of their beverages no longer classify as coffee. They certainly do roast their beans a bit dark, and that may not be to everybody’s liking, but that’s a standard coffee-house aesthetic decision, and not a sign of the apocalypse.
So, after working my way through a pound or so of some Viennese Roast that I bought out of the bin at the local co-op, I found myself at Trader Joe’s in desperate need of coffee.
Having recently acquired a $5 gift card, I stepped into a Starbucks yesterday - for the first time in a while (yay for living in a city where the number of small independent coffee shops actually outnumber the chains). I was downtown, at Astor Place, and wanted to sit down to read for a bit. After nearly backing out after seeing the swarm of NYU students buzzing around the place, I decided the line was moving fast enough for me to pick up a caramel apple cider — pretty much the only drink I get there anymore, since I no longer have that sweet tooth for frappuccinos that my 15 year old self had and I don’t have a high opinion of their coffee, tea, or cappuccino. As I was idly looking at the menu overhead, I noticed the board looked… strange.
| Coffee | $1.10 | 10 |
| Tea | $1.10 | 0 |
| Caramel Frappucino | $4.79 | 300 |
If you find yourself in Toronto on a bright Monday morning in startlingly-early spring, you are likely to want coffee.
If you want coffee, you are obviously going to want good coffee.
If you want good coffee, you’re going to want someplace hip. I know, it’s not fair, but you and I both know that any random hole-in-the-wall with schizophrenic music is going to have way better coffee than Dunkin Donuts Tim Horton’s. And you didn’t really travel this far to go to Starbucks, did you?
So go ahead and try the place on the side street where the surly, bearded, flamboyantly gay barista actually asks of your non-coffee-drinking friend: “Is he actually going to sit there and not drink anything?” The espresso base will be outstanding and the pour will be more artful than any you’ll find in any business district in stodgy old America (oh look, a rosetta!). You’ll probably interrupt your thought experiment on what, exactly, that guy’s problem is to leave him a tip, and your friends will do the same while pondering where the sugar got hidden. Because face it: you got what you wanted, which was a good coffee, and the rest is just details.
There are probably two dozen coffee shops that fit that description in Toronto (or, really, any city worth a damn), but, for us, Bulldog Coffee did the job perfectly.
Think Coffee
248 Mercer St @ 3rd St. (map)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 228-6226
Gtalk last night
Y: do we have our date tomorrow?
Y: i read reviews for think coffee
Y: apparently, you have to go early so you can go and “pretend to work”
Y: i challenge you to a 7:30 date
Me: …
Me: you’re trying to kill me
And this is how I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:30AM and drank the best cappuccino I’ve ever had. Read the rest of this entry »
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:
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.
Doctorate qualifying exams. Imagine that grad school is like a fraternity; qualifiers is our version of a hazing. It comes from a somewhat bygone era when intellectual inquiry was the main reason people went to get graduate degrees. And maybe there was indeed such a time that existed when people didn’t mind taking 6 months off their regularly scheduled lives to complete a 12 page research proposal that they fully intend to never carry out. Or maybe professors just want us to go through the exact same hysteria-inducing pain that they went through half a century ago (ok, maybe just 3 decades).
Either way, I have 12 pages of science stuff to write over the next 3 weeks. I could try working from my apartment and inevitably get nothing done, I could go to the school library (which I adore and love to death), but all of those will probably get old after a few couped up days. So I figure that while I’ll go to the library in the evenings/nights, this might be a good opportunity to scout out all those lovely coffee & tea houses in the city that I would never go to otherwise once I’m full time in the lab.
Generally speaking, I like my coffee like I like my women: strong, full, rich, and apocalyptically dark. Wait. What? That can’t possibly be true.
I drink coffee. I’m drinking coffee right at this second. In fact, since I’m a grad student, drinking coffee is like a quarter of my job description. If you were wondering, the other three quarters are devoted to drinking beer, doing actual research, and stalking people on Facebook reading France24. That’s also why I’m writing a blog about liquids: only about 15 people in the world care about my research, and there are about as many people who write blogs about the news as there are who read blogs about the news.
I make a small enough amount of money that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would subsidize my health insurance if my university didn’t just give it to me. The upshot of this is that you won’t find me at Starbucks every day (though I’d go to Cosí first anyway. Or Tosci’s if they’ve paid their taxes this week).
But I’ve gotta have my coffee. I can’t read papers without it; I’d fall asleep in 10 minutes. It’s empirically true for all grad students — I’m a scientist; trust me.
Thankfully, my department anticipated this and installed a coffee machine in our lunchroom/library/spare meeting room. They know how to keep us happy, I guess. Of course, it benefits them, too (not having to leave to get coffee means we work more, at least in principle), and it’s not very expensive. It’s a nice perk, though.
This is what you do to get coffee:
In other words, it’s so simple that even a grad student can do it. The machine has an internal storage compartment that collects spent cylinders. The only time you have to interact with it beyond what I just outlined is if you draw the short straw and try to make coffee when the trash bin is full, or when the water jug is empty (it draws water out of a water-cooler-sized jug of New England’s finest because there’s no plumbing in that room).
The coffee selection isn’t terrible. There are four kinds of regular coffee (though I only drink the “Extra Bold” - which isn’t all that bold in my opinion), two kinds of decaf, and three kinds of tea. The tea is the most insipid stuff I’ve ever encountered, but the coffee isn’t ghastly, just a tad weak.
Now, as I’ve mentioned, my politics might be described as left-of-center. The fact that every single time I make a cup of coffee I produce a K-carcass that goes directly into the trash doesn’t make me entirely comfortable.
On the other hand, it’s free coffee, and it’s not really any worse than the mountains of paper cups a routine Starbucks-goer would produce (the department provides us with mugs). The coffee is even free-trade, even if the water might not be.
For better or worse, the coffee machine is a fixture in my life. Every day at or just after lunch, I grab a cup of coffee in a combined effort to fend off food coma and avoid working for a few more minutes. There’s usually a fair number of people in there eating lunch and drinking coffee; it’s sort of the social anchor of my day.
Sometimes, though, early in the morning or late in the afternoon, I’ll sneak over to Cosí by myself to grab a cappuccino.