Bad Coffee is the Mother of Good Tea

February 20, 2012 – Bad Coffee is the Mother of Good Tea

If necessity is the Mother of Invention, then Bad Coffee is the Mother of Good Tea. I have very few real complaints from my life onboard Silhouette but one of them is definitely Crew Mess Coffee. It is the thickest, darkest, dankest coffee I have ever experienced. It makes Cuban coffee look wimpy by comparison. Any sailors or former sailors reading this blog will probably attest to the fact that this is simply a fact of shipboard life. With coffee needing to be at the ready 24 hours a day for those who need to work through the night, I don’t the large coffee pots ever get fully cleaned. I expect that the process is always ‘additive.’

In the first few weeks on the ship this was a real blessing. With the need to adapt my metabolism to the pace of shipboard life strong coffee was a blessing. Taste was sacrificed at the altar of caffeine. However, as I grew into the pace and pattern of this life, the balance shifted in my desire to less caffeine and more taste. Taste, though, was something that I was not going to find in the Crew Mess. One option is to get coffee at the guest venues, Ocean View Café or Al Bacio coffee house. But with OPP Level 2 in place, we were limited at the guest venues we could use and were not allowed to ‘carry out’ from any guest area back to our venue.

So I turned to an old friend. It was a friend who had been with me from my high school days through my young adulthood and was my constant companion till I was 35. Tea. I was a dedicated tea drinker long before I ever gave coffee an admiring glance. It was only when I began to travel around the world, changing time zones more often than I changed my underwear (okay, slight exaggeration . . . don’t get grossed out), that I needed the extra jolt of caffeine that a good cup of joe would provide. I spurned my former friend and chose to hang with the more highly caffeinated crowd. That is until the recent impasse on ship.

With no other choice I chose to dip a teabag in hot water to get me through the day. The taste was clean, crisp, and like the smell of fresh grass, brought back memories of my youth. Without the need for the continual intravenous caffeine drip I started to appreciate the purity of leaves steeped in hot water. In fact, and this will come as a shock to those who have only known me in the last fifteen years, I went five entire days without drinking a cup of coffee. (That statement alone will probably cause all coffee houses in America to ban me for life!)

I knew ships would be a life-changing experience. But little did I know how fundamental a change it would be. Even though I still appreciate a good cup of coffee, I am just as likely to choose a cup of my original hot brew.

Unless of course some coffee manufacturer wants to offer me a corporate sponsorship . . .

And the adventure continues . . .