Monday, May 19, 2025
I wake up thinking about my breakfast coffee.
The coffee pot was never much of a consideration, because analysts always said that the cheapest electric coffee maker performed comparably to more expensive models. Hello, Mr. Coffee. We were together for years.
Now, however, a Nespresso machine commands the countertop, with all the bells and whistles.
Slowly but inevitably, we bought into the whole coffee craze that demands exotic beans and unique flavors. We love our coffee machine, which produces rich espresso with milky foam. Finding the best cup of coffee has become a national obsession, with its own lingo and prestige products. Coffee drinking has become like everything else these days — bonkers. And obsessive. And expensive.
With social media fanning the fires of coffee rituals and preferences, you can’t just grab a cup of joe anymore. And heaven forbid you like almond milk with your coffee and the café only serves oat milk, or (kill me now) non-dairy creamer? If you want a skinny latte and you only find half-and-half in the fridge, it kind of stops the peaceful rollout of the day.
The New York Times reported last week that a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania is using fluid dynamics to study the most efficient way to pour water over coffee grinds in a funnel.
Apparently slow and high is the way to go.
Bonkers.
I’ll tell you about my most unusual cup of coffee. We discovered it in Indonesia, on a tour of a coffee plantation. Our guide led us to the coffee shack where the local specialty was being produced. What I saw were cages of coatimundis, large rat-like animals indigenous to the region. They are fed coffee beans, which they eventually excrete. Then workers extract the beans from their poop, wash them, roast them and make coffee.
I did drink the coffee, and I did get sick, but it’s unclear whether the germs came from the unusual journey of the beans or the bad local water.
My jazzy new coffee machine uses aluminum “pods,” which cost $1 a pop. And not just any coffee. I must have Café Bustelo, a super robust Cuban variety. I don’t believe rodents have anything to do with its process from plant to pod. Café Bustelo started out in a Brooklyn grocery, developed by a coffee maker who emigrated from Cuba with the recipe.
I confess to feeling cranky if I don’t get my coffee just the way I like it. If we’re on the road and a motel serves dishwater, it’s a bummer start to the day. I realize it all sounds entitled and spoiled. Because it is. Consider the disturbing world spinning ever further out of control. How does a cup of coffee signify? I think it does, because it’s a tiny way to control some small daily event in our lives. We can make a good cup of coffee every day, exactly the way we enjoy it, with sugar and 1 percent milk, but we can’t move the world on environmental issues, or gun control, or corruption in government or rising authoritarianism.
Many people are frustrated with the state of the union and searching for ways to become empowered, to do something, anything, to make things better. So we become obsessed with our coffee. And we obsess about the machine we use at home to brew. Nespresso? Press? Drip? And we obsess about the mugs that hold our coffee. Porcelain? Ceramic? Double-walled glass? We can sweat the details because it’s relatively easy, and satisfying. We can treat ourselves to a luxury experience even though the markets are tanking.
The bad news is that the administration’s new tariffs are going to make our small daily pleasure even more of a luxury.
According to CBS News, “Coffee prices were already sky-high before President Trump’s tariffs, with unfavorable growing conditions in Brazil, Vietnam and other key markets crimping supplies. The retail price of ground coffee hit an all-time high in March of $7.38 a pound, up 84 percent from $4.30 in January 2020, government data shows. Currently, a 10 percent base global tariff is in place on all U.S. coffee imports. Countries including India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other coffee-producing nations are subject to even higher levies, which the Trump administration has paused for 90 days.”
People are frazzled. They may not abide going without coffee. Suddenly this is reminding me of the other beverage-inspired pushback, the Boston Tea Party.
Copyright 2025 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
