Notes from a two-week trip in September 2022
6 September, Bluestone Lane Coffee, Washington DC
Today’s test: order something other than cappuccino and try to get it right.
I’ve got a Long Black. A “Medium” that’s still larger than any coffee I can manage.
There’s no milk in the counter next to the sugar and stirrers. No half-n-half packets. I’m terrified at the prospect of drinking this filter coffee decoction-look-alike, of this size that too.
I’m annoyed that it’s not easy to understand which types of coffee come with milk, which types of coffee you can add milk to, and which are this kind of potion.
And then it strikes me that the “Black” in Long Black is an indication.
Two sachets of sugar have gone in. Wish me luck.
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For someone who’s had coffee all of 20 times in her life, the US was a crash course on coffee drinking.
Despite coming from Tamil Nadu, known for its rich filter coffee, I’m a resolute non-coffee drinker. I’d never had coffee or tea until I was 17, but upon starting college, it got a little difficult without drinking either. I don’t remember what exactly was difficult, but I made myself develop a taste for the Singaporean teh-c (tea with condensed milk), which effortlessly made way to chai once I reached Mumbai and later, Delhi.
I grudgingly let coffee into my life only during travel – when I needed a “wake-up” shot, or when visiting people with VK and it just made things easier for the host if both of us agreed to have filter coffee.
That said, I’d been adventurous enough to try different kinds of tea in cafés in Germany and Netherlands and Russia, and found them unbearable and unfinishable. So this September, I decided to jump headlong into coffee drinking in the USA. I wasn’t going to pay five dollars for chai tea latte (ugh!) or for a tall glass of hot water with a bland teabag in it.
It was an adventurous, nerve-wracking, and fashionable ride. I had cappuccino, diner coffee (which I was more excited about for the “diner feels” and the idea of free refills, than for the coffee itself), and several drip coffees, for which after my unfortunate experiment described above, I learnt to ask for milk.
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As with everything else, the USA offers a million options for coffee (and milk!) that while queuing up in a café behind people who knew what they wanted, I’d panic and go for the first thing that seemed intelligible to me. And most often this coffee was part of my first meal for the day, so I’d also have to contend with a million options for breakfast – giant-sized muffins, cookies, bagels, sandwiches, croissants. This was after I’d already shortlisted which café to go to from the million options around me.
So imagine this sight: me with a tall cup of coffee in one hand and a giant cookie/croissant in the other; carefully placing these on a counter to add sugar and milk into the filled-to-the-brim coffee cup; trying to make it quick because there are people waiting to access the same counter; taking a sip to check sugar and milk levels (sometimes bending to the cup placed on the counter rather than risk lifting it); and once this process was complete, carefully putting the lid back on the unwieldy cup of coffee, and walking to a seat in the café with a fast heartbeat that I’d have to calm down before taking a sip of caffeine.
Now you get why I said it was an adventurous and nerve-wracking experience.
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Despite all this, I quickly got into the fashionable game that is coffee-drinking in the US. While I leisurely strolled around DC by myself in the morning, most others had somewhere to get to, something to do; airpods in their ears, dressed in business casual or formal wear, with fashionable bags, people queued up for coffee on their way to work, with a colleague, or worked in the café – Macbooks open, a sip here, a bite there, a call every few minutes. On several occasions, I felt out of place sitting there drinking coffee among these people who looked very busy, while I stared into space (and at them).
There was a certain charm to this busy-ness, a sense of importance and contribution to something, all enabled by coffee. Add to this atmosphere the people at the ordering counter with their cheery, mechanical morning greeting (“hi-how-are-ya?”), their kindness while I worked on a response to the greeting (did they even want one?), their helpful suggestions (“I’d suggest you don’t get the caramelised onion-focaccia toasted, but we can do it if you really want it that way” – of course, I took their recommendation and ate a stone cold, chewy piece of bread for breakfast), and their patience while I fumbled with payment methods or wondered how much to tip them.
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The coffee experience was different in New York because I stayed in an Airbnb that had a coffee machine. Every morning, I had to choose between caffeinated and non-caffeinated, and then between dark roast and French roast, Macademia dark roast or some other flavour whose name I didn’t bother registering. All these options had already clogged up my mind. All this decision-making had to happen while my mind jabbered on about the wastefulness of this kind of coffee, since the capsules are single-use only.
But this was nothing compared to the frustration of getting the machine, a smart-looking Keurig, to work. The first time I waited for many minutes for coffee before realising there was no water in it. I poured the water and sheepishly asked the host for help, and he just pressed something and voila! it was ready. (Then I had to face 3-4 non-sugar sweetener options the host had). Every single time after that, though, it was a game of cajoling the machine to dispense its watery brew, pressing the giant “K” button repeatedly to get the process going, and praying for the best. Occasionally, there would be a whirring that would get my hopes up, but if I checked after a minute, my cup would still be empty. Most days it somehow worked, in between the 5-6 times I would press things here and there, so I thought I’d figured it out. But on the last day, I spent twenty whole minutes on the process with no results. I gave in and looked up the process on YouTube, but I was doing all the things right! I finally gave up, tossed out the unused capsule and asked VK to get me a cappuccino from outside.
I was done with coffee.
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But not before I decided to make the most of the most coffee I’ve ever had in life. Towards the end of the trip, I bought a cup of drip coffee “with a little milk (regular), please” and made VK record me walking down a street in Brooklyn, cuppa joe in hand.