An Ode to Coffee.

Ode to Coffee

O! coffee, where art thou
When I need thee now?
In thy many flavoured blends
A hot cup would be godsend.

I cannot keep awake
Without a short coffee-break.
With thy life-giving aroma
Save me from going into a coma. 

Java, Colombian or French Roast
Thy every flavour, I will toast.
To the end thy loyal slave
Three cups a day I will always crave.

(Inspired by a very sleepy seminar) 

..."To the end thy loyal slave??" Nice touch man. Brilliant. Street creds to Ranjit Nair's limericks.



I love coffee.


I think that bears repeating: I. LOVE. Coffee. Regrettably, coffee was originally like wine to me. AKA disgusting and needing time to cultivate the lust for (btw, never have and probably never will had any opinions towards wine other than bleck...three years later and I'm still working on it...or should I say avoiding it like the plague. Perhaps beer would have been a better analogy...). However, considering the fact that I started drinking coffee out of desperation and four hours of sleep nightly, the germination period was not-so-surprising-but-still-remarkably brief. For a while, I needed the frothy, creamy, sugary extras to drink it down. Hell, for about four years I washed my taste buds in that garbage. Mochas, lattes and frappuccinos...pretty much any fancy Italian word for "yummy delicious coffee inspired drink" that you can come up with. It wasn't until this year when I hit monetary rock bottom that I realized what coffee was all about.

Drink it black and you won't go back.

Yeah, yeah, the Starbucks frappuccino is awesome, but really it's a desert. Malty, sweet chocolate, steamed milk (bleck...take it soy ladies and gentlemen, then it won't taste like milk halfway spoiled to yogurt) and rich roasted grit with a little bit of an iron twang to it; it's a fabulous post-killer-exam delicacy. But the real thing, the coffee you bust out for all nighters and rainy days and morning get-your-ass-out-of-bed kickers, black coffee is the one and only elixir which can chase the symptoms of a body pushed to inhuman limits away. There's no better way to tell the quality of the bean either than by drinking it black because honestly, if it isn't good black is it really good at all?? For those of you still scratching you're head I'll tell you- NO. No it isn't. That, and you're most likely to find the world's greatest coffee at the world's most obscure places. Which, in turn means that you get to enjoy the added pleasure of avoiding hipster teenagers, indie wannabes, curt and fastidiously fashionable businesspersons, and the starving artists types. If that isn't a draw enough, I don't know what is. I really don't. Because fact is, you'll never find more posers anywhere in the world next to the amount that trail through Starbucks hourly. Some of the most interesting people I have ever met have been black coffee aficionados, connoisseurs of the true art of coffee brewing.

Ironically, all of them have been employed baristas at one point.


Moral of the story?
I desperately need some coffee right now.