Descriptive Essay On Coffee

I : A Cup of Coffee

When people observe me in my natural habitat for a number of days, they often ask, “How much coffee do you drink?” and inevitably, “You take it black?”

In society in general, and American society in particular, there seems to be a type of cultural fetish surrounding the act of drinking coffee. Drinking cup after cup of coffee signals honesty, business, a type of down-to-earth tireless commitment to go-go-go! We always know when the boss is on screen because they shout, “Go get me a coffee!” to a quivering underling. Not drinking coffee is its own kind of political alignment. Tea, juice, and water drinkers are hippies and hipsters, health hacks and boring people, the type that have never needed caffeine the way the movers and the shakers do. How you take your coffee is also important. Black coffee drinkers are stoic and intense. Complex, milky, or sugary drinks are for weaker, more valuable members of society, particularly teenage girls. Everybody just hates those complex orders. I’ve often been told, “Wow, that’s great. I wish I could take my coffee

As I reflect now, I realize that drinking coffee had always signalled adulthood to me. Coffee drinkers were grown-ups who knew all the answers and called all the shots. Indeed, my first sojourn into the world of coffee drinking took place when I was away from home and just starting to think for myself. It was a month-long intensive summer program in the Maine woods that trained me and then tested me on thirty-two outdoor skills: canoeing, navigation, fire building, axemanship, and more. My unit cooked boiled water on a rinky-dink coleman gas stove, which we then bored into a tin percolator full of generic brand coffee. The result was a tolerable cup of coffee, especially when combined with instant cocoa powder. I returned home a changed woman, all grown-up. Equally proud of my ability to fell a tree and drink a cup of