By Alexandra Berrocal
I was a regular tea-drinker. My aunt kept boxes of tea in her kitchen, and I visited my aunt often, so I wound up drinking tea often — I tasted chai for the first time in her house. I also grew to love gingerbread tea, which was something she always had around the holidays. If you add just the right amount of sugar, it tasted like a gingerbread cookie. I always loved that. I got to drink tea more often than coffee as a kid, so naturally, I was a devout tea drinker.
When I was a young girl, my mom always made me coffee on my birthday. It was the only time of the year where I was allowed to drink coffee, so it was always a special treat. She would make an extremely weak brew, so that it would not taste bitter. She would always put melted chocolate at the bottom, so that it would suffuse the rest of the coffee and make it taste somewhat chocolatey. I always looked forward to this.
Somehow, the switch turned. When I got older, my mom stopped making my special birthday brew. I don’t remember how or why. However, I grew to love the bitter flavor of straight-up coffee. I didn’t need to have chocolate in it, just some milk and sugar. There were even exceptions to that. I still love a good cafe de olla, a type of Mexican coffee that does not taste bitter. I don’t remember the first time I tried it, but from the first sip, I was enchanted. Also, I am a unitarian universalist, and shared church social life revolves pretty heavily around coffee. Every Sunday, after service, coffee is always served in most congregations.
I grew to enjoy the bitter flavor of coffee. I also came to appreciate Vietnamese coffee. It’s sweeter than your average coffee. This may be controversial, but I love the Frappacino bottles of coffee that they sell in most grocery stores. Yes, the Starbucks ones, although I love the Peet’s Coffee ones too. A lot of people think it tastes gross. What is gross is the Dunkin Donuts version. I don’t know what Dunkin Donuts does to its bottled coffee, so to speak, but it tastes like medicine.
I would say that the reason I prefer coffee to tea these days is that coffee simply has more body to it. Tea basically feels like glorified water to me, unless it has milk and sugar in it. Chai tea is also based on milk, so it doesn’t feel like glorified water. But even with milk and sugar, tea simply feels watery to me. Coffee doesn’t feel quite that way to me. I might feel differently if I drank my coffee black. Black coffee is similar to tea in a lot of ways, it just has more flavor, and more punch. Now, would I rather drink black coffee, or tea? Honestly, I would prefer tea. But would I prefer tea or coffee with milk and sugar? I’d take the coffee any day.
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