Coffee

COFFEE

At the big age of twenty I am sad to admit that I still don’t fully understand the obsession with hot drinks. Whilst I admire the notions of a hot cup of tea and it’s apparent ability to make you feel cosy from the inside out, I have always had an aversion to hot liquids. To illustrate the magnitude of my distaste, I will reveal the embarrassing secret that I don’t even really like hot chocolate. I am a self-diagnosed chocoholic so it pains me to admit to this betrayal of the cocoa fandom, but seeing as this is one of my first blog posts I can’t imagine my revelation will cause too big of a stir. 

That being said, while travelling in Asia this summer I discovered a truly shocking love of coffee. Coffee was always my number one most hated hot liquid, my Starbucks order is a Caramel Cream Frappuccino and the smell of Costa alone makes me uncomfortable. My past interactions with coffee have been purely transactional. This time last year my mum told me that she read an article on the benefits of black coffee and relayed the info that drinking two cups a day makes people lose weight. I spent the next month holding my nose and chugging coffee as if it were a beer keg at a frat party. After a month of holding my nose and drinking my daily steaming mug of rancid I faced the cruel reality that I, the true mug of this tale, had actually GAINED four pounds. Thus my hatred intensified. 

However, being a skint backpacker made me decide to set our feud to one side. While in Bali I said yes to a free trip to a coffee plantation. It was here that I was introduced to vanilla coffee, and goodness gracious was this sweet nectar of the gods my cup of tea. Truthfully, I don’t know if I meet the criteria for being a coffee lover when what I loved about it was the fact it didn’t taste like coffee, but at least now I can say yes to meeting up with friends for coffee dates (5 points to me for getting one step closer to being a functional adult).  

The range of coffee, from avocado to the most expensive Luwak coffee  that earned the plantation its ‘cat poo chino’ name (please don’t make me explain it), shocked me. It shocked me that this many coffee options exist in the world and yet the British nation, a nation associated with tea and coffee, are happy to accept an Americano as an adventurous order option. It was at this point that I realised that I didn’t hate coffee, what I hated was the glorified dish water that dares to call itself coffee. 

As I have grown older, the burden of replying ‘no thanks’ when anyone asks if I ‘fancy a cuppa?’ has grown heavier. My family have always assured me that my tastebuds will change and I will grow to like it but after trying the treasures of the plantation, I vow to thee that I will never settle for the classic Kenco coffee. 

People always talk about about how travelling changes you. On my last morning in Vietnam, while my friend and I mourned our final free hostel breakfast, I stared into my steaming hot cup of vanilla coffee and realised that travelling may not have changed me, but it had changed my tastebuds forever.

Present day: me enjoying a coffee from Temple Coffee, Leeds,
a place that also strives to surpass traditional caffeine confines :)