Apparently coffee, as well as being the only thing actually worth being alive for, is good for you. One cup, administered early in the morning, makes your heart healthier. So says a scientist anyway. Or, more accurately, so says someone who has talked to a scientist and has subsequently written it up for an audience of the you and I’s, what they call laypeople. Given how often things go awry in the long journey from experiment to Twitter headline though,it’s reasonably safe to assume that coffee isn’t actually all that good for you really, and that actually the original article was about something else entirely. I hear they’re doing a lot of things with Ozempic at the moment. Yes, some Reach intern probably got coffee confused with Ozempic.
I’d have an easier time believing the latter. For my money, it’s tough to see how coffee possibly could have health benefits. When I have too little or too much, I get a headache. Relentless consumption throughout my 20s means my teeth are stained a permanent sepia. And after two cups of a morning, my heart and my colon are set in fierce competition to see which will explode first. And Big Coffee expect me to believe that somehow this is doing me favours?
But let’s put my arse aside for a moment. Regardless of what scientists and journalists think, I can say with total authority that coffee is absolutely ruinous not good for the health of one’s social life. No one is duller than the person who says around 11am “you’ll have to excuse me, I haven’t had enough coffee today”. If you don’t believe me, just try having a conversation with someone who is seriously and studiously in to coffee. The type of person who insists that the coarseness or otherwise of a grind makes the blindest bit of difference. That knows what a tamper is for. That has hard and fast rules about the temperature of milk. After just a few moments in their company you’ll find yourself frothing over with an intense disgust. Listen too long and you’ll become entirely convinced the only thing coffee is actually any good for is dumping over them.
You think I’m exaggerating, and admittedly I’m given to that. But let me try to prove my case: my favourite coffee is a flat white. Specifically, my favourite coffee is the oat milk flat white with one sugar made by the only little independent cafe in my neighbourhood. It’s made by the same long-haired man in the same baseball cap every time, and he infuses it with a special magic that no one else in the world is able to replicate. I’ve tried at home, armed with a boxy DeLonghi grinder and an Aeropress, using the very same beans the man does. It doesn’t work. Only he is able to coax from the bean the complex notes of fruit, floral, and nut needed to make the perfect flat white, and so at home I tend to opt for an espresso, and for the espresso I prefer a lighter roast. Although my preference in drinks is generally bitterness, I prefer the sweeter tone of the lightly-roasted bean.
By the end of the paragraph above, you will be thinking that you would like to beat me with a large stick, or whack me with hammers, or put me in the stocks and pelt me with fruit and anvils. No one could blame you for any of this, because to be subjected to someone else’s thoughts on coffee is its own unique type of torture. The worst part is everything above is true – that’s really how I feel. I am my own worst enemy, and no one is more insufferable than me. That’s how I know so well that none of the world’s other irritants can compare; not the friend-of-a-friend explaining his love for ice baths over his fourth drink, nor the street preacher extolling the redemptive powers of his specific brand of spiritual enlightenment, is as obnoxious as the coffee fan. Coffee talk is the nadir of conversation, the absence of a topic. The only thing worse would be writing about it.
Matthew Weldon's Dangerous Thoughts 