I want a coffee…

I like my coffee to taste like coffee. I don’t want it flavoured with anything. I don’t want raspberry coffee or vanilla coffee or maple syrup coffee or peppermint coffee. I don’t want it sprinkled with chocolate dust, gold dust, cinnamon dust, or malt dust. I don’t want flavoured sugar, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, sea salt, coconut oil or butter. I don’t a want a pear juice, apple juice or cranberry juice coffee. I don’t even want milk or sugar. I do like a little rum, brandy or bourbon on a cold day, but generally I just take my coffee as it comes. Just coffee. I don’t want it frothed, I don’t want a heart swirled on the top or a cute template dusted Teddy Bear. In fact, I don’t want a picture of anything on top of it and no, I don’t want a bloody Cappuccino. Neither do I want an Affogato, a Bicerin, a Breve, a Café Bombon, a Frappuccino or even a Yuenyang. I want a coffee, a black coffee, call it a bloody Americano if you must, but just give me a coffee. Listen I don’t care about your expensive coffee making machine, I don’t care that it cost ten thousand pounds. I'm not interested that it can make coffee twenty different ways and makes noises that sound like a bad case of the flatulence. I don’t even care that it was imported from Italy and designed by a man that used to design Ferraris. I just want a coffee in a cup. Not in three chemical beakers deconstructed into its parts, not in a jam-jar or a ramekin or a champagne glass or a hand-turned wooden beaker. I just want a cup of coffee in a cup or even a mug if you don’t have any cups. I don’t want it iced, or filtered through rose petals, I don’t want it with an ice cream float or a flake or even the teensiest little bit tepid. I want it hot and strong and black and steaming. I don’t care that you trained for five years and making plain coffee is beneath you. I don’t care that you like to be called a Barista and not a waiter or waitress. I just want a coffee and preferably not one where the beans have been eaten, digested and excreted by a Palm Civit - and no I'm not impressed that it’s come all the way from Sumatra. I don’t care if it’s from Italy or France or Japan or Ethiopia or even bloody Vietnam. Listen coffee is a drink. Not an experience, not an art form, not a mission, and certainly not a performance. It’s a drink. I just want a coffee and preferably one that costs less than a fiver. 

Don't worry. I'll go home and make my own.