When making my morning brew, I started pondering how to make it more interesting.  Sure, you can add flavour (and waistline) “enhancements” like cream, sugar, maybe some vanilla…  But such unimaginativeness doesn’t last long.

What’s needed is a whole new coffee experience. 

Scouring the web for new things to do often turns up very interesting results.  For instance, there’s a whole web site dedicated to Putting Weird Things in Coffee.   Some of those weird things include cheese, meat (!) and even black pudding.  The fascination with meat is prevalent elsewhere, too. Hmm.

But you don’t need to go so far to enhance the flavour of coffee.  One simple food-enhacing staple – salt – has also been used extensively and blogged about for some time.  Clearly, it might be worth trying.

Spices, of course, have provided that added “something” to a good coffee for many years.  Adding spice instead of sugar is also a neat dietary trick for those careful watching calorie consumption.

Taking it up a level

What you put into coffee is only half of the story though.  How much caffeine you ingest daily is another thing.  Curiously, at the time of writing, 66 people “Like” this Facebook page entitled “Extreme Coffee Drinking“, which has no content and not even a picture.  As one quote says, “Coffee: do stupid things more quickly and with more energy“.

Extreme coffee drinking seems to be a sport amongst some.  It’s not merely a question of having multiple cups per day.  Whether the evidence is conclusive that lots of coffee each day can kill you, is certainly still to be debated.

Things can get a bit extreme, though.  Death Wish Coffee, as reported here, promotes extreme levels of caffeine as its USP.  A step too far?  Maybe.  But, it can hardly be contested that we love coffee, and our interest in all things joe-related, together with its growth in the West, continues unabated.  Coffee is recognised as a personal experience, so the growth of single cup products may indicate that social coffee drinking is diminishing in favour of a more insular, smart-phone focused experience.

Taking it too far?

While at university, I recall many a lovely coffee in what is now claimed to be the world’s oldest internet cafe – CB1 (Google Maps link).  I’m not sure about the validity of this claim, but there’s no disputing the charm of a good coffee shop.

But these days, though it’s not all academia, with bustling coffee shops populated by artisans, guarded closely by the intelligentsia.  Caffeine addiction and dependency/withdrawal symptoms are a real problem for some people.  Luckily, the web has many suggestions to combat this.  I suppose one could make a visit to an internet cafe and research this on his or her own…

Perhaps indulging in a caffeine kick is not the best long term policy, but it certainly starts the day well.