Coffee, Café Culture, Culture, Chat, & Conversation...

lizkat said:
Sounds good... although even the idea of "decaf" doesn't do much for me. Maybe it's made better than used to be the case, plus there was a time when the only reason for coffee at all was to try to stay awake for the rest of a 17 hour day on the job etc.
Click to expand...
I don't drink decaf a whole lot but there are some days I want some coffee because I like the taste but don't want the caffeine kick.
 
I do find myself limiting intake of caffeine to before 3pm... having read that the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours... so I'm not sure I want that much of an after-dinner coffee sloshing around in my brain all night. So far I still have to rewind my audiobooks when I overoptimistically set a timer to 30 minutes, so I make the occasional exception when I have good coffee in the house. Maybe I'll try some decaf again, I really haven't sampled it since I was served some by an aunt back in the 80s and smiled my way through a dreadful experience...
 
lizkat said:
I do find myself limiting intake of caffeine to before 3pm... having read that the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours... so I'm not sure I want that much of an after-dinner coffee sloshing around in my brain all night. So far I still have to rewind my audiobooks when I overoptimistically set a timer to 30 minutes, so I make the occasional exception when I have good coffee in the house. Maybe I'll try some decaf again, I really haven't sampled it since I was served some by an aunt back in the 80s and smiled my way through a dreadful experience...
Click to expand...
Actually the half-life is about 12 hours. Not quarter. :)
 
lizkat said:
I do find myself limiting intake of caffeine to before 3pm... having read that the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours... so I'm not sure I want that much of an after-dinner coffee sloshing around in my brain all night. So far I still have to rewind my audiobooks when I overoptimistically set a timer to 30 minutes, so I make the occasional exception when I have good coffee in the house. Maybe I'll try some decaf again, I really haven't sampled it since I was served some by an aunt back in the 80s and smiled my way through a dreadful experience...
Click to expand...

Not a fan of decaf, either.

To my mind, it misses the whole point of coffee.
 
I was getting Peet’s dark roast coffee, but they recently decreased the bag of whole bean from 12oz to 10.5oz, without lowering the price. Interestingly, if you want the pre-ground one, the bag is 12oz still. So I got the Starbucks Sumatra one instead. Oh well, I liked Peet’s, but I don’t like it when companies try to pull the fast one...
 
SuperMatt said:
I was getting Peet’s dark roast coffee, but they recently decreased the bag of whole bean from 12oz to 10.5oz, without lowering the price. Interestingly, if you want the pre-ground one, the bag is 12oz still. So I got the Starbucks Sumatra one instead. Oh well, I liked Peet’s, but I don’t like it when companies try to pull the fast one...
Click to expand...

A price increase by another name.

Years ago, when I was a child, I remember that my mother went to university (she took a degree at night, one of two women in her class, attending classes three nights a week for a number of years, all the while holding down a day job, and also raising us), where she studied politics, sociology, economics, and psychology. And also studied industrial relations.

Anyway, I remember vividly how she explained to me - discussing what she had studied in her economics class - that you can increase prices either by simply increasing the price of a given product, - a situation where the packaging (the size, the quantity) remains the same, or by decreasing the size of - the quantity of - the product while keeping the price the same.
 
Last edited:
Scepticalscribe said:
A price increase by another name.

Years ago, when I was a child, I remember that my mother went to university (she took a degree at night, attending classes three nights a week for a number of years, all the while holding down a day job, and also raising us), where she studied politics, sociology, economics, and psychology.

Anyway, I remember vividly how she explained to me that you can increase prices either by simply increasing the price of a given product, - a situation where the packaging (the size, the quantity remains the same), or by decreasing the size of - the quantity of - the product while keeping the price the same.
Click to expand...
Ice Cream no longer comes in a half-gallon size. Orange Juice containers keep shrinking. Bags of frozen shrimp are 20oz instead of 2 lbs... that’s a huge reduction! I just wish they’d keep the sizes the same and just raise the prices if they need to. It feels dishonest to decrease the size and hope most people won’t notice.
 
While I usually drink single estate (or single country) coffee, occasionally, I like to experiment with blends.

Most of the blends one buys commercially don't really work - to my mind (and palate) - and, I suspect, that this is because they pay less heed to geography than, perhaps, they should.

In French cuisine, wines of a region often pair very well with food from that region (the same applies in Italy and Spain, no doubt), and I think that something similar applies to coffee.

With that in mind, when I blend coffees, I try blending coffees from the same area, country, region or continent, rather than mixing them.

Thus, this morning, I have been drinking a coffee which is a blend of coffees from Rwanda and Ethiopia.
 
ericgtr12 said:
Green Mountain from my Keurig twice a day here, second cup after 1:00 to give me a nice afternoon boost.
Click to expand...
Keurig doesn't touch me at all. I'd have to drink a triple shot twice a day to get my usual kick.
I drink 3-4 cups of coffee a day for a total of 6-8 table spoons of strictly fair trade Peruvian or Ethiopian.
I got through my PhD and early residency on 2x energy drink a day...I had to give in the common sense and switch when I became borderline hypertensive. (It's all self-medication as I manage to have both the baseline temperament of a turtle AND some features of ADHD).

Here's a trick though if you really need to stay awake:
Caffeine from coffee and theobromine from black tea only have partial cross tolerance (if any). So if you want to stay focused throughout the day without overdosing on either, doing coffee in the AM and black tea early PM is ridiculously effective. Too bad, black tea makes me very nauseous.
 
P_X said:
Keurig doesn't touch me at all. I'd have to drink a triple shot twice a day to get my usual kick.
I drink 3-4 cups of coffee a day for a total of 6-8 table spoons of strictly fair trade Peruvian or Ethiopian.
I got through my PhD and early residency on 2x energy drink a day...I had to give in the common sense and switch when I became borderline hypertensive. (It's all self-medication as I manage to have both the baseline temperament of a turtle AND some features of ADHD).

Here's a trick though if you really need to stay awake:
Caffeine from coffee and theobromine from black tea only have partial cross tolerance (if any). So if you want to stay focused throughout the day without overdosing on either, doing coffee in the AM and black tea early PM is ridiculously effective. Too bad, black tea makes me very nauseous.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure I would hit the ceiling if I drank that much (especially that strong), I have a low tolerance to caffein so it doesn't really take much. I usually start dropping off at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and the coffee has worn off by that point so it works out well.
 
When I was a student, I drank coffee half the day and often. half the night, or, well into the night, as well.

These days, I rarely drink coffee later than the afternoon; an exception would be when I am out to dinner - that is, in the long gone days when one dined in congenial company.

At the moment, I am sipping Ethiopian coffee with organic hot milk.
 

Similar threads

SuperMatt
Coffee and Culture Wars
Replies
8
Views
461
Herdfan
Herdfan
Back
Top