Not long ago, I went through a long period during which I awoke every morning with absolutely no desire to make coffee. Don’t misunderstand: I still wanted to drink the stuff. With a 3-year-old and 1-year-old waking me up around — if I was lucky — 6 in the morning, I relied on coffee’s sharpening effect more than ever. I was just tired of working for it.
Picking which beans to use that day (I was always buying beans), grinding them, placing the grounds in the filter, wiping up the grounds that spilled on the counter, measuring out the water, waiting. Not long ago I loved the ritual of it all; together the steps were part of the machinery I employed to coax myself into consciousness and face the day. But now I didn’t want to be coaxed. I wanted to be woken up as fast as possible so I could tend to my kids. The routine had, at some point, devolved into yet another chore — especially once I started forgetting to empty the filter when I was done, leaving as a gift for my future self an unpleasant deposit of sodden grounds.
One day in the grocery store, I found a solution staring me in the face in the form of a surprisingly large array of instant-coffee options. Experience had taught me that it tasted horrible. In my 20s, I worked abroad at a newspaper staffed largely by expat British journalists who drank Nescafé as if it were water. I wondered what — historically, culturally — could explain this; maybe the Blitz? Nescafé tasted to me like something formulated in a malicious lab experiment involving dust and cinders and few, if any, coffee beans. It didn’t help that the dehydrated crystals resembled the droppings of a small, disease-carrying rodent.
The instant coffees I encountered more recently on the grocery store shelf looked exactly the same, albeit in some instances in slicker packaging, adorned with stylish labels. Maybe, I told myself, instant had improved. The next morning, up again with the kids, I spooned a heaping tablespoon of instant-coffee crystals into a mug, poured in the hot water and … that was it. Process done.
The coffee was fine. Not as good as a cup of freshly roasted, single-origin, shade-grown made at my favorite shop, but it was recognizably coffee. There was no process worth speaking of to enjoy, but there were no grounds on the counter, either, and I soon felt the caffeine caressing my synapses. If I had to pick one word to describe the process, that word would be: “instant.” And if I had to pick one word to describe how this simplified process made me feel, that word would be: “good.”
There was no process worth speaking of to enjoy, but there were no grounds on the counter, either.
Instant coffee reminded me why I started on coffee as a college student. I didn’t bring coffee into my life because I especially liked the taste of it, or appreciated the distinction between different roasting methods or bean types. I was aware — mostly from the examples of classmates and the movies — that it could magically reconfigure my energies, creating pockets of alertness where they otherwise might not have existed. Life, then, felt like an adventure I could arrange as I saw fit, and coffee was a tool that helped me do that. Once, coffee kept me awake so I could pick up a love interest at the airport at midnight. In my car, I felt like the hero of a fantasy story, slipping beneath the surface of the sleeping world to find another realm underneath, one where people were still in motion, still working and playing and chasing after what they wanted long after polite society had gone to sleep. Afterward, we went to a diner we liked; it was the same as always but felt completely new. All the familiar details — the grilled cheese, the mustard — were little notes stitched into a broader symphony of wonder and surprise.
Over time, coffee became less of a novel superpower and more of a familiar default, something I counted on and rarely took the time to be amazed or even especially delighted by. You would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, looking at my receipts for beans over the years, or assessing the arsenal of coffee tools I had acquired: all the grinders and filters and special little scoops; the multiple French presses; the moka pot I bought in grad school and can’t find anymore; the workhorse drip machine that remains the best way to make coffee for a group. Yes, these tools sometimes produced coffee that tasted good. Yes, they became familiar, comforting parts of my morning. But my experiments and purchases were motivated less by an innate lust for superior coffee and more by a vague sense, absorbed osmotically from my cultural milieu, that better coffee was something adults strive for.
Instant coffee renewed my appreciation for the alchemical powers that drew me to coffee in the first place. The previous night’s dishes were still piled in the sink and on the counter. My son was using maple syrup to trace an indecipherable design on the kitchen table. My daughter’s Cheerios were on the floor, and she had a look on her face that made clear she would soon need a new diaper. The scene wasn’t anyone’s idea of a soothing wake-up ritual. But coffee helped me hear that beautiful music of wonder and surprise. Old habits, coffee-related and otherwise, are gathering dust in the cabinets of my life. But in the space created by their absence, new life comes streaming in — more of it every instant.
Peter C. Baker is the author of the novel “Planes” (Knopf, 2022).
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