Coffee For the Non-Coffee Drinker

I have found that the particular tastes, expectations, desires and demands of the “non-coffee drinker”, in regards to drinking the drink that they do not drink, to be fascinating. On a regular basis, I am called upon to prepare a beverage for the person who introduces themselves by saying “I normally don’t drink coffee. What would you recommend?” Others who might more accurately describe themselves as “infrequent coffee drinkers” have done so just enough times to acquire a taste for something that almost tastes like coffee, but as little as possible; still others desire the taste, but none of the other things that go with it (caffeine, sugar, fat, etc.) As a coffee drinker and server I am called upon to step out of myself and imagine what it would be like to (apparently) not like coffee very much, but perhaps just a little.

This is no small challenge, but it could easily have been a bigger one. Some grateful visitors from the midwest recently expressed, with some emotion, their relief at being served coffee “by someone who actually drinks it”. They then proceeded to describe, with distaste, coffee servers back home who had no taste for what they were serving, and therefore were unable to provide a product they had any personal or emotional stake in. Needless to say, my visitors were unable to derive any satisfaction from that coffee experience. It was a pleasure to provide that for them, but it was also educational for me, because it reinforced a suspicion of mine - reminiscent of the old adage (which I shared with them) to “never trust a skinny chef”. Coffee is food, as I have said before; and if you don’t taste the food you are making, how can you know whether it is any good?

Fortunately, I like coffee, and I have some strong opinions about what makes it good. Because of this, I also have opinions that need to be overcome if I am to sensitively provide service to people with different tastes than mine. I still have trouble with the concept of the raspberry mocha, for example - for me, it seems tantamount to pouring ketchup on a juicy slab of prime rib - but I think I am able to serve one that will satisfy the person who orders it. I can find the good in it - the fleeting aroma of good espresso as it disappears under a flood of syrup; the magical, alchemical intermingling of espresso and chocolate; and, well, I do like raspberries. I could really enjoy drinking some espresso while eating some fresh raspberries and fine dark chocolate. So, that’s the key - using my imagination.

Another instance in which this challenge crops up for me is serving decaffeinated coffee. Coffee that has had the caffeine removed has been altered, and there is just no way around this. Caffeine is part of the intrinsic flavor of coffee just as alcohol is part of the intrinsic flavor of gin. I can’t imagine drinking non-alcoholic gin. Now I have drunk good decaffeinated coffee, and recently; but it is a different beverage, a changed beverage, and as such it is not the one that I prefer. Coffee - and espresso in particular - contains several volatile chemicals in addition to caffeine that are stimulating, a rather complicated mixture of oils, esters, acids, sugars, etc. Some have been found to be vasodilators (i.e., chemicals which cause the capillary vessels to expand, thus increasing blood circulation, giving one that slightly “flushed” feeling), others raising the blood sugar level, some actually helping to release endorphins, and so on. The very act of drinking a hot beverage is in itself stimulating. It’s not the lack of caffeine as stimulant that I am challenged by; rather, it’s the lack of caffeine as a building block of coffee’s complex molecular flavor structure. Everyone knows what it’s like to try to cook from a recipe, get one tiny thing wrong, and have the whole thing go in the trash. Getting the salt and pepper wrong on a plate of eggs can make them completely inedible for me. It’s the same with the caffeine in coffee - without it, the coffee just tastes kind of funny.

However, I think it is to my credit that I have mastered the skill of proffering a beverage which I do not (okay, okay - seldom) drink. So far, I’ve received only positive feedback on the decaffeinated espresso beverages I’ve served, and as for the decaf brew, I never let it sit past the expiration point. I feel confident that I have the ability to craft something that might not please me but may please another, and I consider that an achievement worthy of some degree of pride.

That having been said, I offer to you an example of one of the moments that truly make my job worthwhile: A text message from a hard-to-please customer shortly after serving her a beverage I’ve definitely had to learn to make the way she likes it.

Coffee By Any Means Necessary

Coffee is food, but it is also an experience. As such, whatever parameters one chooses to frame that experience are a matter more personal than scientific. Everyone comes to coffee with a different set of biases, expectations, and desires; it is entirely up to you whether you enjoy your experience with coffee, whatever the circumstances, as there are an almost infinite number of methods for mediating, reducing, or purifying it.

My brother (a more than 20 year veteran of the industry) and I enjoy diner coffee, which we sometimes refer to jokingly as a “coffee-like beverage”. It’s rather like the cigar and wine aficionado who occasionally will light up a convenience store stogie with some cheap alcohol in a paper cup: Within some parameters, less subtle tastes may be called for - the backyard barbecue, the church potluck, etc. Coffee is a social drink almost more than alcohol, as it is consumed in the daylight hours when our mate-prowling masks are hung up in the closet. Because of this, it is sometimes necessary to drink “bad” coffee with sugar added for social purposes. In actuality, the only truly “bad” coffee I have ever had was in a resort in Mexico, a drink I hesitate to even grace with the name, unmatched in its foulness; it bore a certain resemblance to standing water in bird baths, or dredgings from an estuary. Because of my deplorable addiction to caffeine, I was forced to drink this concoction, which was clearly prepared with nothing but contempt.

By contrast, I have had “coffee-like beverages” in roadside diners that, while inferior in most respects, were prepared with some friendliness, if not actual love, that were quite passable, even palatable. Even a tepid or oleaginous cup can be tolerably ameliorated by a bit of maple syrup left over in the pitcher from breakfast. French roast is another type of coffee that seems self-defeating in that any recognizable flavor profile has been annihilated by the beans having been roasted beyond all recognition. Still, when you’re in a recording studio at 3:00 AM trying for the 96th time to eke out a memorable solo, a cup of steaming French roast seems like a godsend. Conventional wisdom in the coffee industry is that a full French roast is a way to squeeze the last bit of profit out of an inferior crop; but it may be argued that, like blackened catfish, what was originally a method for retrieving opportunity from the brink of disaster now becomes something people look forward to on the menu.

In light of these observations I want to report on a couple of recent “coffee-like beverages” I succeeded in enjoying. The first was a decoction of Vietnamese coffee, pictured here.



The coffee is served as it drips from a small metal filter basket directly into the cup; the grind is set to espresso, so the drip is glacially slow. One’s meal may be half over before the coffee is ready to drink. The beverage itself is charcoal-like, a true unabashed French roast, with overtones of kerosene. What’s more, when cream is requested, what one gets is sweetened (with corn syrup) condensed milk from a can.

This may sound abysmal to the sensitive, but to me, as I gnawed on a skewer of Mekong style grilled pork, it seemed fitting, it smelled evocative, it tasted curiously good. It is a rough-and-ready coffee experience, one suggestive of war zones and streetwise creature comforts. It is coffee that at one time or another was the best that could be accomplished with the materials available, and has since then become a regional delicacy. In fact, most haute cuisine bears a similar history; a solid majority of the dishes listed on the prix fixe menus of French restaurants were originally considered “peasant foods”. As for the coffee, I consumed every drop and regretted none.


Another recent potation to grace my palate was a canned iced coffee beverage from Tasco, purchased from one of White Center’s myriad Southeast Asian grocery stores. Reminiscent of Starbucks’ “Frappuccino” - albeit obviously “creamed” with some sort of coconut-derived glycerides that are probably lethal to the cardiovascular system - it was sweet, but not too much so, and reasonably pleasant tasting at room temperature. Couldn’t they have added some sort of whey or milk solids to make it taste less like palm oil? Of course to do that they would have had to add a lot more preservatives, and as it is the ingredients list is refreshingly short.

Part of the enjoyable experience of consuming this decidedly augmented coffee product was shopping in an Asian grocery, looking at all the pictures on the thousands of different cans - most without any English on them at all - and trying to guess what was in them. Fortunately this particular product was friendly to the illiterate Westerner.

In both of these instances, context is all. Available cuisine is often the most common mitigating circumstance surrounding coffee consumption; one can tolerate a mediocre or even sub-par shot of espresso after a sublime Italian repast, and the same is true of Southeast Asian cooking. What I am curious about and would like to explore is the taste of outstanding gold-standard Vietnamese or Thai coffee. Perhaps it would come in the form of a piping hot press pot of coarsely ground single origin coffee from the region. I can think of more than one small batch specialty roaster in Seattle that may offer mainland Southeast Asian varietals (as opposed to the already familiar Indonesian, Sumatran, or Javanese coffees). I will investigate the matter, and report back my findings.