Proper Coffee Good …

There’s a Marilyn Manson track – I Don’t Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me). I’m not particularly a Manson fan, although I wouldn’t be offended if you put his music on, so I bring this up purely as a counterpoint to the following statement:

I Like Coffee, But Coffee Doesn’t Like Me

Or at least, so I thought.

Through my adult life I have swung between drinking – pretty much exclusively – tea or coffee. I can even remember the tipping points between the two – tea until I worked on Sainsbury’s at Locksbottom in ’94, then coffee until I stripped out and re-built my kitchen in ’99, at which point it was tea until … but you get the point.

In late ’05 I was working on a project in Burgess Hill, and was going through a coffee phase. Around that time I became “ill”. Not bed-ridden ill, but just “nagging slightly under the weather, headaches & cramps” ill. It lasted long enough that I went to the doctors and had some blood test done (I hate doctors, needles and blood tests) but the result was there didn’t appear to be any reason for how I felt.

At Burgess Hil I started to notice patterns in how I felt on a particular day, and eventually tracked it down to … coffee. There were two catering-size tins of instant coffee in the kitchen, and I eventually realised that one was decaf – and that when I had the decaf, I didn’t feel so bad. I guessed that the nausea etc was due to the caffeine, stopped drinking coffee to test the theory – and hey presto, felt much better.

Of course, I immediately went back to tea. But hey – I still felt better. I “know” there’s less caffeine in tea than coffee (I actually did an experiment with a mass spectrometer on that very subject) so assumed that I had an intolerance to high concentrations of caffeine. Fine, no more coffee for more, move on with life.

Fast forward to August this year. I’m working in a senior position on a “very important” bid – total value somewhere in the region of £350m – and there’s a submission coming up. In order to stay alert during the ridiculously long days that we’re working, I resort to coffee – in the full knowledge that it’s going to make me feel ill, but also knowing that once the bid is in I can cut the coffee out and will feel better.

It so happens that there’s a Costa Coffee shop just outside the office, so my routine is to go out of the office to get a “medium white” (medio white Americano) a couple of times a day. The coffee tastes pretty good, and going out serves the dual purposes of (a) keeping my intake somewhat in check and (b) getting me some fresh air for five minutes.

Strange thing is, I don’t get the nausea. This coffee doesn’t seem to be affecting me. After a little experimentation it appears that I don’t have a problem with “proper” coffee – just with instant. After four years of abstinence, “real” coffee (by which I mean ground coffee, brewed in a filter machine, cafetiere, espresso machine or whatever) tatses fabulous.

Only question is … how is instant coffee different to “real” coffee? Apart from being freeze-dried, it’s still coffee from a coffee bean. Be interested if anyone can fill me in …

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