Yes, Please!
Talk to any stuck-in-the-chair writer and they will tell you the true value of caffeine. It gets the morning going and keeps the afternoon creative. Whether it’s coffee or tea for you (or, dear lord, soda), if you’re a writer you have your favorite and, like dog people vs. cat people, you’l defend your preference with vehemence.
Now, most of us fit somewhere along the coffee versus tea spectrum. Some are fully in one camp or the other, claiming those on the other side are ignorant morons who want to destroy the world as we know it. I am about eighty percent coffee, twenty percent tea. I’m a waffler.
Most mornings you’ll find me with a cup of brewed Arabica beans in hand. Side note: I mix my coffee, brewing a combo of some dark roast I had a coupon for with a flavored coffee I also had a coupon for (or was brought to me from Hawaii by my in-laws). No raspberry chocolate kids sundae junk, but perhaps a vanilla macadamia nut, or hazelnut, or just vanilla (the world’s most exotic flower, thank you).
I also drink mine with sweetened cream. Black is my jam maybe one morning out of thirty. Nope, I like mine hot, sweet, and smooth–like my jazz. Only, I don’t really like jazz. Also, I don’t like to have more than two cups, or it’s a bullet train to shaky town.
Phrase never uttered by a writer: “Thank you, I’ll have the decaf.”
Tea is mostly a bedtime drink for me, and I go whole-hog with the fru-fru of it. It’s either Honey Vanilla Chamomile or Sleepytime Vanilla about one half-hour before bed and I’m out like an original Edison bulb. Even the dog’s insistence that he needs to go outside and bark at nothing around 1 a.m. doesn’t wake me.
Morning tea (my preference when hungover) is straight Earl Grey. No cream or sugar. No lemon. That’s my wake-up wonder when body and brain say coffee is not the best choice.
You soda drinkers? You need help. It’s not 1985 and the Pepsi Challenge is not to see how fast you can get diabetes or rot your teeth from your head. Stop starting the day with a diet Coke or bottle of Jolt. Put down the energy drinks, too. They’re even worse.
So where are you in the great coffee versus tea debate? Do you secretly have a foot in both camps? Do you refuse to even sniff the steam of one drink or the other? Whatever revs your engine, enjoy responsibly.
