Boviosity!

Swiss Miss hot chocolate is mighty good, too, and there's no communal aspect to mixing a cup from a package. I knew a guy who switched to instant coffee rather than put up with the group-think, and he was quite the coffee lover. Peace of mind outweighed his love for the bean.

All coffee should be brewed strong. People who like it weak should grow a constitution. Coffee is not for the weak. Coffee is supposed to slap you upside the head and say, "Yo! Get your slack ass in gear!"

Weak coffee drinkers:

Get tough!

ff

I now realize my Swiss Miss and Sanka suggestions were wimp-ass pussitude (forgive me: I'm not a coffee drinker). Allow me to atone for my former surrender suggestion and join this band of brothers, this happy few: Death to Weak Coffee Mongers!! Trample them under our dark-beaned boots! Brew them a backbone, I say!

Believe me, the thought of smiting, with a thunder hammer, the weak-kneed weak-coffeed crowd has passed through my magnificent gourd on more than one occasion. Yet I sip the bitter tea of resentment.

The real problem is, I have no control over how these sob sisters brew the coffee, unless I'm right there when they do it, and prepared to have the same argument with them I just had two days prior. So I arrive at the coffee pot and find transparent coffee there. Lot fat of good my hard-earned coffee wisdom does then, eh?

Tea is tasty. Caffeinier, too, or so I'm led to believe.

"Caffeineier"?

Tea does have a fair dose of caffeine, though. When I was in Ireland last year we drank tea almost exclusively. We were staying in these bed and breakfast places (which are different from American B&Bs, in that they're not all chi-chi - they're just extra rooms in people's houses), and the hosts were always kind of surprised that we wanted tea instead of coffee. I guess most Americans go for the coffee. Anyway, the reason for this was that coffee in Ireland sucks. We went to a really nice Italian restaurant in Dublin, and at the end of the meal we ordered cappucino, thinking that if any place in Ireland would have decent coffee, it'd be an upscale Italian restaurant.

They gave is instant. I s**t you not. Instant cappucino. This was the best coffee in Ireland.

Anyway, the point is we drank a lot of tea, and caffeine-wise it certainly did the job.

(The weird thing about the no-decent-coffee-in-Ireland thing is that there was decent coffee aplenty in England, right next door. You can't go more than six feet or so in London without hitting a Starbucks. Not that Starbucks is all that, but at least it's up to a certain standard. And there are local chains and indy places that blow Starbucks away.)