I knew just by the smell.
Years ago, I took the Pepsi Challenge and, after merely hovering my schnozz over the cup, I could discern which liquid offering was Pepsi and which was the Real Thing.
For one, Pepsi is more carbonated. So the fizz tickling my nostrils was a dead giveaway. For another, Coca-Cola tends to have a “heavier” smell, a “darker” smell, which is also reflected in its taste.
Coke makes me say, “Whoa!” Pepsi makes me say, “Sparkling excrement.”
I put those same senses to work yesterday while waiting in line at the Starbucks location within walking distance of my parents’ house. One of the employees was manning a table featuring two unmarked carafes and urging customers to take the “Starbucks Via Taste Challenge.”
My first thought: I can do this.
My second thought: I can ace this.
With my fellow Starbuckers looking on, I first smelled and then sipped. Actually, the taste part was redundant and the barista knew that the instant I smiled.
But, kudos to him, he kept a straight face while asking me if I was sure. Not sure so much as absolutely sure. I assured him if I was mistaken, he could operate the laser while it removed the Starbucks mermaid tattoo from my ass.
Turns out I was correct. Either that or the threat of seeing my naked butt scared the poor fellow so badly he would have agreed to anything, even if I told him the sun was actually a large Frisbee.
Admittedly, the Via wasn’t terrible but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s still the end result of adding a pouch of powdered coffee to a cup of boiling water.
Which prompts this question to Starbucks is: Are you out of your f****ing mind?
You can call Via “ready brew” all you want (after, according to the barista, spending some 20 years developing the product), but all the PR-slash-astute marketing in the world can’t disguise the fact that what you’ve developed is still instant coffee.
And by instant coffee I mean a concoction that starts off as quality-challenged beans before being soaked in an open sewer, stored in someone’s armpit for several weeks and then run through whatever further processes are needed to guarantee it will survive a nuclear holocaust.
For Christ’s sake, if you’re going to waste all that time and resources reinventing the wheel, give us a rocket ship, not a frickin’ horse.
When I’m offered coffee by our New Zealand friends, I know for a fact they’re about to blow the dust off an old jar of Nescafe that’s been tucked in the back of the pantry for the better part of this century.
When I mention how my favorite coffee is the brewed variety, I draw blank stares, as if I’d just created my own language. This in a country where people regularly use the terms “away with the fairies” or “box of birds” to answer the question, “How are you?”
New Zealand, you see, went directly from instant coffee to espresso machines, skipping right past the filter stage in the process.
And now Starbucks wants to take us back to the bad old days of serving what is little more than cups of hot, black water?
The mermaid on my ass is grimacing at the mere thought of such blasphemy. And, believe me, that is not a pretty sight.
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It tastes like someone poured heaven into your mouth. And then kissed your hot tongue.
July 31, 2009
Our friend Steve busted his cherry yesterday and I was there to witness the momentous occasion.
Before you get all sweaty, I am not talking about sex. I am, in fact, talking about something far more important than sex — coffee.
And by coffee I mean Starbucks. And by that I mean the best coffee on Planet Man, as opposed to the hot, brown water served up on other, less sophisticated worlds.
Steve was a fortysomething virgin when we crossed the threshold of the Napier Starbucks. I found that fact both intriguing and disturbing. This, after all, is a man who possesses a lengthy and fascinating CV: ex-Army, spent several years eating reindeer jerky while living in Norway where he learned to speak several Scandinavian languages, immigrated to New Zealand, became an IT dude, grew bored with that and now works for Customs, where he hunts down illegals, both human and pharmaceutical.
Steve knows coffee. After all, this is a man who owns a $2,500 Isomac Millennium, a technological marvel that does everything but transport the green beans out of South America. Given a burro, it might just do that as well.
Steve could charge good money for the liquid manna that flows from that machine’s grouphead and yet . . . And yet he had never set foot in a Starbucks, the Mecca, the Valhalla, the Promised Land of all things caffeine.
Until yesterday, that is. And I sat right there beside him, nursing my tall mug of filtered coffee, while he sipped a tall black. And smiled.
Another convert!
Well — maybe. Somehow I think Steve went home today and hugged his Isomac and then turned it on and moonwalked around his kitchen as black gold brewed in the machine’s chromed guts and all thoughts of Starbucks hissed away like so much spent steam.
The thing is, other than the brief overview above, I don’t know that much about Steve. He’s more Viking Woman’s friend than mine. They met when Steve was an IT guru in the same hospital where Viking Woman worked. They met one day when she came storming into the building’s sub-basement demanding why her office’s Internet connection had been cut off.
“Because you did a search for ‘oral sex’,” Steve said.
“I work in Sexual Health,” Viking Woman said. “That wasn’t a search; that was research.”
“OK, fine,” said Steve.
“Wanna go for a coffee,” said Viking Woman.
Or something like that.
The thing is this: the three of us bonded over coffee.
Twenty years ago that wouldn’t have happened. Before Starbucks launched its goal of world domination, coffee was something you saw sitting in a stained glass carafe in a greasy-spoon cafe, fit not for drinking but rather for paving your driveway.
I didn’t touch the stuff until I met Viking Woman. She was in sales at the time and it was not uncommon for her to down 40 cups of the elixir — every day. Which would explain why she tended to bounce around rooms screaming, “Let’s go!!”
(Editor’s Note: Viking Woman is now on a cleansing regimen, which includes eliminating caffeine from her diet. That headache? It’s real now. And, oh yeah, “go” has been replaced by “go away.”)
We dated at the Starbucks in Peninsula Village, gazing through the mist issuing from our cups, kissing bagel crumbs from each other’s lips. Coffee tasted like love in those days.
I guess, in a way, it still does.
Except now I drink mine while wrapped in my housecoat, hunched over a computer in the spare room, while Viking Woman sips hers between layers of makeup as she dons her Woman Warpaint before blowing air kisses at the back of me as she heads out the door to work.
Some days, after she’s gone and the caffeine hasn’t quite flushed sleep from my system, I close my eyes and take a hot slurp of coffee. It tastes of new relationships and shy glances and holding hands and the shivery quiver of anticipation. It tastes of past lives and promises made and vows kept.
It tastes of all the bright todays and brilliant tomorrows.
Right there in my mouth.
If Hell is a warm Coke, then let the sinning begin.
January 30, 2009
When New Zealand’s dairy industry went all greedy-guts, I stopped eating cheese. Anyway, it clogs the arteries.
When the price of petrol went up 30 cents a litre over the last three weeks of January alone, I parked the car. Anyway, walking is good for me.
When the crumbling economy cost me a full-time job and most of my freelance work, I tightened the budget reins. Anyway, who needs a plasma TV? And I’m nearly positive, if I wait long enough, my clothes will come back into style.
And so it goes — you adjust, you scrimp, you roll with the punches. You pray a lot. You cry a bit. You bang your head against the wall until the plaster loosens.
But — at the end of the day — you do survive.
And then comes a double whammy that I’m reasonably certain will crush the final drops of humanity from the broken husk that is my spirit.
You guessed it — my caffeine supply is under threat.
Oh, sure, we all know it’s an insidious drug but it allows me to get through each penny-pinching day without gathering up a vacuum hose, duct tape and car keys.
The first whammy: Starbucks — O Valhalla! O Elysian Fields! — announces world-wide cuts to stores and staff. Is it just me, or is that comparable to God downsizing angels AND manna?
And then — second whammy! — today I read how lower sales figures have Coca-Cola scrambling to rework its advertising campaigns by jettisoning the “Classic” from Coke Classic.
(Something about kids being confused by the term “classic.” Christ, if we dumped everything kids don’t understand, there’d be no vacuum cleaners or lawnmowers or clean dishes. Or imperial measurements. Or parents, for that matter. Or cricket. Oh, wait, no one understands cricket. Bad example.)
I know, it’s a mystery to me too how Coke could be in trouble. I drink gallons of the stuff, all by myself. Just ask the bathroom scale. And my bladder.
Although I will admit the “Classic” was a bit redundant. That’s akin to me referring to myself as Great and Wonderful when, like, it is already so obvious to everyone.
The “Classic” part only came about because, in April 1985, everyone at Coca-Cola died and was replaced by mindless drones with a plot to destroy the world. And that plot was called New Coke. I think it lasted 12 seconds. Or about 13 seconds too long.
You can hurt a man in a lot of nasty ways — I know, I’ve been married twice — but you mess with his Coke and you’re asking for a whole lot of trouble. Shake-the-can trouble. Chug-a-lug-and-burp-the-alphabet trouble. Laugh-until-it-spurts-out-your-nose trouble.
Goodness and justice and puppy dogs and girls in summer dresses did eventually prevail and the drones received a good and proper rogering. The “old” Coke made a triumphant return as Coke Classic and, after being renamed Coke II in 1992, the interloper finally faded into history seven years ago, to gather dust with other useless items: disco, boy bands, Dan Brown’s keyboard, Pintos, Paris Hilton’s acting career, George Bush, senior and junior.
You can well imagine my absolute horror at this double shot of bad news, arriving as it has so soon after the hardships of 2008 were dropped on my doorstep like a burning bag of dog doo.
I’m not ashamed to admit I would spend my wife’s last dollar on a bottle of Coke. Asked for a condemned man’s final meal, I’d request Coke and, um, you know, whatever the chef feels like throwing together.
If you told me Hell was a place where you were served nothing but warm Coke, I’d still skip merrily through the fires of eternal damnation.
Unless Hell, like Vegas, is a Pepsi town. In which case, I am pretty much hooped.
