I HAVE been told that if you drink enough coffee you can see into the future. Certainly after two or three strong brews in a row there is that dizzy feeling that the rest of the world is lagging behind your whirling brain.
The first message for the future in such situations might be the need to cut back on the coffee consumption. Whanganui is not the ideal place to do that. We have some of the best cafes/coffee in NZ and possibly the Universe. As a fan of BBA (beveridge-based activities), I am sitting in one of those great cafes as I write this column.
The ever-expanding range of coffee types has lifted the art of ordering to theatrical proportions. There are so many combinations and variations: cappuccino, frappuccino, mochaccino, macchiato, latte, vanilla latte, Americana, short and long black, flat white, soya, single or double shot, double brewed, in a glass or a bowl? Did you want to sip that through a straw?
It is hard to imagine that in NZ 20 years ago you could only get an instantly dreadful instant coffee. Seeing an espresso machine was the equivalent of finding life on Mars. Now they are everywhere, looking like recently landed spaceships, with their complex array of shiny controls. We have now become a nation of coffee aficionados and will offer an informed critique of a particular favourite cafe to anyone who asks.
Does the coffee you order say something about you as a person? The quick trick of categorising people as latte-sipping lefties or cappuccino-consuming capitalists has become a takeaway order for media commentators. Should we mock your double-shot glass of mochaccino? Get in a flap about those ordering a large frappuccino? Decaf for the Zen, no sugars for the sweet people and double shots for the overtired, nearly retired and might-get-fired types?
If coffee is now the drink of choice for so many of us, how can the elite demonstrate their status? They could order the pretentious frazzelino. It would be served in a takeaway no-tip recyclable papier-mache cup, so it can be held without risk of burning your hand while dashing to the next appointment. The milk would be specially selected and collected from cows that eat only grass from the sunniest slopes on the top of hills. It would be flavoured with fresh Belgian chocolate flown in from Brussels and topped with a raft of organic handmade marshmallows created by redundant watchmaker/craftsperson in the Swiss Alps.
It would contain a sprinkling of nostalgia dust in the form of colourful billions and trillions (the hundreds and thousands of our childhoods are now worth much more), and be sufficiently caffeinated to maintain an over-stretched multitasking life and still remain elegantly frazzled.
The increasing use of wildly overblown language to describe coffee tastes is a concern. There is a danger that the companionable nature of a catch-up over coffee could become so pretentious and precious that, like the now much-derided hipster sub-culture, it becomes another fashion victim. ("Why did the hipster hesitate before drinking the coffee. He/she was waiting for it to become cool.")
There has been much speculation about the predictive capacity of a barista to guess what kind of coffee the customer will order as they step in the door. Talking to a couple of experienced local baristas, it seems that there are no stereotypical signs that indicate what a person will order as they enter the cafe. Unless you are a regular, of course, in which case they will remember your usual order and have it ready before you have found the newspaper and a place to sit.
[Terry Sarten is a Wanganui-based writer, musician and social worker - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz]