Are you a coffee or tea person?

When I was very much younger, living with my parents, I used to drink milky tea.  Pretty much everyone in the household did so it seemed the natural thing to do.  Then for some reason, at I can’t remember what age, I decided I didn’t like tea anymore.

I remember working for a firm of accountants who had pods of tea, coffee or hot chocolate, that you tipped into you mug then topped it up with hot water.  The tea and the coffee came in with milk, or without milk options. I was still predominately drinking white tea then.  We ran out of white tea, so I moved over to white coffee instead.  It was tolerable.  Then we ran out of white coffee as well, so I migrated to black coffee. 

I’ve never really been a big fan of milk, or dairy type products, yoghurts and the like.  It all tastes like gone off milk to me.  It therefore didn’t seem too much of a problem to shift to black coffee. 

Since then, I’ve never gone back to drinking milk in my hot beverage, or drinking tea.  The traditional sort anyway.

When I changed jobs in August 1990 the new company had a Maxpax machine.  Unlimited, short stumpy looking paper cups full of tepid watery stuff that didn’t resemble anything particularly.  I do recall getting through somewhere in the region of eight cups of this black liquid throughout the average day, until one day I decided imbibing that quantity of caffeine probably wasn’t good for me. I decided to go cold turkey and just stop, substituting my intake with water instead.  For the first two weeks I had the worst withdrawal headaches I can ever remember.

Over the years, I have refined my taste buds and consider myself a bit of a coffee snob now.  We rarely drink instant coffee, and we now grind beans first thing in the morning ready for my travel cafetiere to take to work each morning.  If we are at home, the coffee pot goes on for a good two mugs worth to start the day.

When I first started my current substantive post, one of my team kindly offered to make me a coffee and said they had decent stuff, promptly producing a tub of Azera.  I turned my nose up and retrieved my travel mug and asked her to take a deep sniff of what I called real coffee.  She never offered again.

I have never returned to tea drinking with the exception of going through a phase of raspberry tea in the afternoons but honestly found that a bit too sweet.  After a bit of research I swapped that for mint tea, and now tend to have a mint tea when I’m at home or out and about in the afternoon. 

Two mugs of real coffee in the morning, occasionally a mint tea in the afternoon, but the rest of the day its good old water.  Unless its wine Wednesday of course (in the evening)!