What happened to my coffee?

I’d like an extra-large, soy, fat free, sugar free, decaf macchiato with no whip, extra cinnamon and two pumps of caramel syrup. Did I miss something there? Coffee was never even mentioned. It’s come to the point when I go into a coffee shop and order a coffee, I’m asked what flavor I want. Well, I’ll tell you what flavor I want, I want coffee flavored coffee.

I’ve been thinking back to the day when the only questions asked about coffee were cream or sugar. Coffee was strong and hot and generally served in a large, heavy china mug.   I started drinking coffee when I was a sophomore in high school. The first coffee I ever bought was at Leonard’s drugstore.  This was back in the days when pharmacies had soda fountains and lunch counters. They had a sign behind the counter that said, “Our coffee may not be very good, but it is only 5 cents”. But they were wrong though, their coffee was great. It tasted just like being a grown up.

I had to join the Navy to find out how really dreadful coffee could be while at the same time being absolutely necessary. I checked onto my first ship as the junior corpsman assigned to the dispensary. My first job was making coffee. We had one of the old fashioned 30 cup percolators so that our Chief Petty Officer wouldn’t have to walk down to the Chiefs’ galley to get his coffee.

I got up early, went into the dispensary, and got the coffee urn. When I opened it up to start making coffee, I discovered it was really dirty. So, I set to scrubbing it until it shined. I then made the coffee exactly like the instructions that were given to me.

The Chief came in and got a cup of coffee.  He stopped midway through his first sip and a strange look came over his face. He looked at me and said, “What the hell did you do to this coffee?” I was stunned, I just looked at him and said, “Well, I started out washing the pot“.  He cut me off right there and said with dismay, “You did what? You ruined it! You never wash the coffee pot!”

At first, I thought it was some type of practical joke. Then I discovered that Navy Chiefs do not joke about coffee. He was deadly serious that washing the pot would ruin the coffee. And it wasn’t just the pot that was never washed.  Those heavy mugs that every Chief Petty Officer constantly carried were never washed and hardly ever even rinsed out. The inside of his mug was stained a deep black. I’m sure he could have brewed a cup of coffee simply by pouring boiling water into the empty mug.

But for truly bad coffee, nothing could hold a candle to the thick black liquid brewed in the crew’s galley. I’m not sure exactly how large those coffee urns were but they looked like they must have held at least 20 gallons. They weren’t emptied until all the coffee had been drunk and that might take hours. If you were drawing the last of the coffee from the bottom of the urn it oozed into your cup. You could stand your spoon in it. But when you had the midnight watch it would keep you awake. This was the only time that I’ve ever drunk sugar in my coffee. I think that it actually turned it into molasses given the consistency of it.

After college I discovered that the Marine Corps also ran on coffee. A Marine Corps breakfast was a cigarette and a cup of black coffee. However, for those of us in the infantry, most of our coffee was instant and made in a canteen cup. We often added some powdered cocoa to it to make it palatable. I guess you could have called that Marine Corps mocha.  Now more than 40 years later I still cannot abide instant coffee. 

I remember once seeing a poster of a Marine Sergeant holding a cup of coffee and saying, “Latte is French for you paid too damn much for that cup of coffee.”  Although I have to admit, at times I venture to the dark side. I still avoid syrups and flavors, but I do like my Cafe Americano, a double shot of espresso with an equal amount of hot water. And it does taste like coffee, a whole lot like coffee.  It would certainly keep me awake on the midnight watch, and probably for another two days as well.