An innocuous yet surprising thing I learned upon coming to work for The News-Aegis is that none of my co-workers drink coffee at the office.  

Diane, our ever-cheery and indispensible receptionist, informed me of the fact shortly after I’d walked through the door on my first day here.  I was surprised, not just because I’m usually the only non-coffee-drinker in any group but also because newspeople have historically comprised one of the most coffee-swilling population groups on Earth.

Somehow, despite my profession, I never picked it up.  Maybe it goes back to when my grandfather would occasionally provide me with a sip of his instant Maxwell House (made with no less than two “heaping spoonfuls”).  He drank it leaded and black, and as a four-year-old, I couldn’t understand what grown-ups found so appealing about the bitter fluid.

How much I’ve grown up since then is open to debate, but I still remember with a shudder the first cup I ever actually drank.  It was a quarter past six on a Saturday morning (much, much earlier than anybody should be awake), and I was in the middle of the breakfast crowd at Denny’s.

I’d ordered my favorite a.m. meal (pancakes with bacon and hash browns) and was looking forward to enjoying it with a tall glass of Dr Pepper.  There is nothing so invigorating as the first slash of carbonation as it burns its way down your throat in the morning.  It’s the best part of waking up.

Anyway, the waitress got everything right except that she clunked down a piping hot cup of coffee next to my plate instead of an ice-cold soft drink.  I considered sending it back, but by then it was 6:30, and I had to be where I was going by 7.   So I drank it.

People sometimes speak about a good cup of coffee, but the experience left me convinced that there is no such thing.  I read about one once, the most expensive in the world, made from a Tahitian coffee bean called the Blue Devil.  It is at the center of one of Aaron Elkins’ Gideon Oliver mysteries called Twenty Blue Devils.

Much like a good cup of coffee, however, the Blue Devil coffee bean does not exist.  Elkins made it up.  He apparently got the idea for it from a quote by Henry Ward Beecher, with which I disagree but couldn’t write for two weeks after I’d read:

“A good cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java:  such a cup of coffee is a match for 20 blue devils, and will exorcise them all.”

If such coffee could do away with 20 blue devils (apologies to our good friends in Moody), a cup prepared by a neat old reporter I knew in Chattanooga named Naman Crowe would be more than a match for 40.  We worked together on the same publication and then, years later, for the same newspaper company, and Naman distilled the most potent coffee that ever percolated.  

He was hardly recognizable without his coffee cup in hand.  He’d arrive at work every morning with a thermos he’d filled at home, and when it was empty, he’d fire up the office coffee maker, producing a brew so strong it was once observed pouring itself into a polystyrene cup.  If, as some consumer statistics I read somewhere indicate, the average American drinks the decoction from about 16 pounds of coffee per year, I always figured Naman was considerably above average.

There’s an old story about how coffee was discovered that goes back about 1,000 years to Ethiopia, where shepherds noticed that their flocks stayed awake most of the night if they’d eaten the leaves and berries of the coffee tree.  So they decided to try it themselves, eventually hitting upon the rather dubious idea of making a drink from them.  Whether that tale is true or not, wild-growing coffee trees are still found in parts of that North African nation.  

However coffee was discovered, I remain content to read about it rather than drink it.  And, incidentally, if you’d like something good to read (other than The St. Clair News-Aegis) while drinking your coffee, chase down a copy of Twenty Blue Devils.  You’ll have a good time waiting for Gideon Oliver to get to the bottom of the mysterious goings-on brewing at the Paradise Coffee plantation.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a Dr Pepper in the fridge with my name on it.