I fucking love coffee!

I fucking love coffee. Anyone who knows me knows this.

Whenever friends of mine are traveling through the Monterey Bay area, I always joking ask them to go get me a pound of Zooom! from Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company. Well, last week, Domenic Barbero took my suggestion seriously and brought me back a pound of the good stuff! Thank you, Dom!

I started drinking coffee seriously my senior year in high school. For the first time in my academic career, I had a first period class at 7:25am. I was a swimmer for 10 years, so getting up stupidly early was nothing new to me. The difference is, when you've swum a couple of miles before 7am, you're really up for the day. Blood is pumping. Adrenaline is going. Charging through the day was pretty easy.

Senior year, I wasn't swimming anymore. I was also staying out late going to shows or working on school council stuff or volunteering or protesting. I kept myself super busy that year.

So, I didn't have this morning adrenaline rush that swimming provided me anymore. I had to be at school early'ish for Photography class and I was usually running on 4-5 hours of sleep. I loved that class and never wanted to miss a minute of it!

Enter coffee.

My parents drank coffee. Not seriously. They drank what I call Gramma coffee. Occasionally. Warm, brown water that had a vague aftertaste of coffee. It was water that had been near coffee at some point.

We didn't usually have good, whole bean coffee at home. Folgers or MJB or some giant can of shit coffee. I was new to coffee and had no caffeine tolerance. Strong shit coffee it was!

I got a giant insulated mug. I'd fill it up before walking to school. It was like 6 blocks, but I spent enough time trying to get across Blossom Hill Road that it would be comfortably drinkable by the time I got to class.

I drank a lot of shit coffee. I had a part time on and off job that year, so I had a little bit of disposable income. I invested in a coffee grinder and started buying whole bean coffee to see what all the fuss was about.

I experimented a lot until I found what I liked. I tried Hazelnut and other flavored coffees. Ugh. I've never liked flavored coffee. Evil. Nasty stuff!

This was the year I was introduced to The Limbomaniacs. Their demo had a song called Cafe Latte on it. We were all fairly intellectual weirdos, so we'd go to cafes and began sampling various espresso drinks. Cappuccinos and lattes were well suited to a palette not yet accustomed to the bold flavor that straight drip coffee or espresso can offer. Milk mellowed everything.

Baby steps.

Over that year, my palette for coffee developed. I'd started to discover what aspects of coffee I enjoyed. Drip coffee. I liked bright, floral light roasts both for the flavor and the sheer punch it packed caffeine-wise. Espersso. Dark, rich, chocolaty, slightly bitter.

Getting more refined.

I graduated from Leigh High School in San Jose in June 1990. That fall I was UCSC bound.

Now, UCSC was broken up into 8 residential colleges at the time. Most were dormitories with cafeterias. Kresge College was apartments with no cafeteria. I enjoyed cooking and wanted the flexibility to eat when I wanted and/or needed to rather than deal with the schedule of a cafeteria.

I wound up in Kresge building R8, better known as The Zoo. More on that later.

I lucked out with my housemates that year... for the most part. David, Matt, Brian, and Aron were great! The three organic chemistry majors from first quarter were strange even by my standards.

So, all of us are cooking for ourselves and we're all dirt poor. Lots of burritos, pasta, potatoes, sandwiches... and cheap ass coffee. Back to Folgers... or even Safeway brand canned coffee.

However, downtown Santa Cruz and the UCSC campus had some really great cafes. Downtown we'd go to Cafe Pergolisi, Java House or my favorite, Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company.

It was at SCCRC that I learned how I've made coffee at home since the early 90s. Pour over!

I love all the roasts at SCCRC, but for a caffeine junkie Zooom!, Indian Malabar, or Full City Roast were my go to drinks. All of them light roasts that packed a massive caffeine punch. I would watch how the staff there would make the drinks and try to mirror it at home. Their light roast coffee wasn't sour... something Pacific Northwest Roasters have yet to figure out. It's alwasy really green and sour tasting from our roasters up here.

SCCRC became a common hangout with the friends sophomore and junior years at UCSC. In 1994, when I was working in Los Gatos and living in Santa Cruz, I would always hit up the SCCRC annex at the transit center to get my 20 oz. cup of Zooom! before making the drive over HWY17... it was vitally necessary to have coffee for this drive.

At this point, espresso was a "dessert" drink for me. I loved a good, rich, chocolaty double shot of espresso, but it wasn't a workaday drink for me.

In March of 1995, I moved to Seattle, a place famed for its coffee. The first coffee shop I went into was Bauhaus on Capitol Hill. I fucking loved this place. Books everywhere. Alternative and classic music playing all the time. Very social. Good drip coffee!

The first place I lived was a total shithole with recovering alcoholics and heroin addicts... right across the street from Roosevelt High School! I was working at the Kinko's in Shoreline, so I was taking the bus A LOT and for a fair distance. There was a Starbucks across the parking lot and really the only nearby coffee in the area, so I went there a lot.

A funny thing happened though. I was so used to such a high level of caffeine in my SCCRC coffee, that I was getting caffeine withdrawal headaches from the same amount of NW coffee. I started getting quad iced espressos many times a day just so I wouldn't suffer the caffeine headaches.

I learned to live with this mediocre espresso and acclimated to the lower caffeine levels of the local coffee over time.

After about two years of living here, I knew the better roasters and cafes, but I was still occasionally mail ordering coffee from Santa Cruz when I needed a fix of the good stuff. Santa Cruz Dark for Espresso and Full City Roast or Zooom! for drip.

Despite finding some genuinely good coffee and espresso here, I'd yet to find anything that matched up with what I had become accustomed to and expected from my coffee.

Fast forward 20 some years. We get a weekly delivery of Stumptown beans for making pour over coffee at home. I routinely get one to two 20 oz. Starbucks Cold Brew a day if I'm out and about. There's a gelato place in downtown Burien that makes the real deal espresso and there are a handful of other places that make decent espresso. I'm comfortable in the choices of coffee available to me, but I don't get overly excited by any of it.

We don't have a Blue Bottle or SCCRC here. Yeah, there's Stumptown and they're good, but still fall short. When people visit from out of town and wonder where all the good coffee is in the City of Coffee I say, "Seattle has a lot of coffee. Some of it is pretty good, but mostly it's over roasted or tastes like someone dumped a cup full of citric acid in your drink. You really have to look for the good stuff here."

I've found my routine that works for me, but between the coffee I was raised on in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area, and the coffee I've had traveling Europe, I'm always left just a little let down by day to day coffee experience living in the PNW.

However! I'm going to Zagreb and Ljubljana in two weeks, so I'm going to get the chance to overindulge in some rich, thick, creamy espresso for a week and I'm very excited by that!