One month ago, A Dutch Bros. Coffee opened up in my neighborhood. It replaced a Salad and Go, which was of no use to my wife and me. We like salads, but prepackaged salads just aren’t appetizing as one you can customize, like at a Salata. As a coffee drinker, I had mixed feelings.
On the one hand, this might change entire traffic patterns around our neighborhood. This was the first Dutch Bros. to open inside of the loop in Houston. I was not familiar with the Arizona-based company, but a friend of mine from Arizona said it was very popular and good. Before it opened, John-Henry Perera, Food Editor of Chron.com said:
“Is it going to be a cluster when it finally goes up? Rice Village is a few blocks away, and we’re already in the early parts of the college football season. To everybody living nearby: Good f—ing luck.”
Great. More traffic in Houston.
On the other hand, I could walk there, and having a coffee shop so close is extremely convenient for securing my morning coffee fix.
I’ve used a Keurig machine at work, or just quickly poured some black cold brew from my fridge at home. (Cold brew is an excellent coffee solution, by the way, for camping.) Keurig coffee is always terrible though, no matter what brand of Keurig cup you use. Cold brew, I tend to chug; sometimes I just want a hot cup of coffee to savor over the course of the early morning.
I enjoy coffee. I like the bitterness, the richness, the flavor. I just like coffee, though, just straight, black coffee.
If you don’t like coffee black, you don’t like the taste of coffee, because that literally is the taste of coffee. “Oh but I like it with cream and sugar,” you say. Well of course, you like it with cream and sugar. Pretty much everything is better with cream and sugar. Cream and sugar are the ingredients of ice cream. If you don’t like apple pie, but you like apple pie à la mode, then you just like ice cream and are willing to tolerate the apple pie to get it.
The problem (or as I see it, the problem on top of the existing problem) is that coffee culture in America has gone way beyond cream and sugar. If the corruption of coffee with cream and sugar is like a citizen running for local office for the first time who misrepresents a $50 campaign gift, then what’s going on now with coffee is a thirty year career politician in Washington with a fake smile perfected after decades of deception.
It’s caramel and mocha and whipped cream and frothy and chocolate sprinkles and cocoa dust and cinnamon and pumpkin spice, oh god, the pumpkin spice, it’s everywhere now. Who is carving Jack O’Lanterns, and thinking “Gee, I wish I could put this into my coffee”?
Everyone in line at a coffee shop seems to be ordering these things too. At least, everyone in line in front of me. It’s like being at a bar, and you just want a beer off the tap, but the people ordering ahead of you ties up the bartender with a slew of complicated mixed drink orders that require tiny umbrellas or skewering some pitted fruit or vegetable on a stick, or zesting an orange, or humoring the customer by shaking the drink between those two metal Big Gulp cups instead of stirring it, as if they could taste the distinction.
Look just go to Arby’s then, and order a Jamocha shake, because you’re basically ordering a milkshake. It’d be cheaper too, because it’s not dispensed by the pretentious title of “barista”. Or in the case of Dutch Bros, a “broista” (no seriously, that’s what they call themselves), which is somehow both less pretentious but also even worse.
At least, if you’re out ordering an alcoholic drink, you probably have more luxury of time. It’s why you’re willing to partake in alcohol in the first place. So I guess it’s like standing in line at McDonald’s, but all you really need is some ketchup packets or extra napkins from behind the counter. At least in that situation, it’s socially acceptable to just pop up straight to the counter to grab the clerk’s attention in ahead of the line and say “Hey, can I get some more napkins?”
But for some reason, it’s not okay to lean out of line and say “Hey, I just want a cup of coffee.” They need a line for people who like coffee, and another line for all the other people who think they do. I’ve been told that they have this some places, but apparently not the places I’d been going to, so I just stopped going.
This new coffee shop is too close to me to pass up. though, and nearly everyone using it uses the drive-thru which leaves the walk-up window wide open for me.
So I’m back to being able to drink hot coffee again that doesn’t come from a Keurig machine without waiting in an insufferable line. How long that will last, I don’t know.
Honestly, if there were a coffee delivery service, where a “coffeeman” delivered a hot cup of coffee to your doorstep every morning at 6 am, the way morning newspapers used to be delivered back when people still read morning newspapers, I’d sign up.
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