Canned Iced Coffee: An Aside
Ode To A Substance That Will Most Likely Kill Me
It’s four in the afternoon, I’m at a smokey bus station waiting to leave Selçuk to Pamukkale, and now seems like as appropriate of a time as any to describe my addiction to shitty iced coffee.
Every morning in Oakland, I would spend at least ten minutes preparing my coffee. I bought a $160 grinder. Fancy beans. French press or pour over, nothing else. In regular day to day life, I am the worst kind of coffee snob. But when I travel, it all goes horribly awry. Mornings start with hotel coffee, which can run the gamut from mostly undrinkable sludge to the perfectly prepared Turkish coffee I had this morning. But when afternoon comes around and I’m looking for that second caffeine boost of the day, it’s my sole motivation, my singular purpose in life to find, in summer, a shitty canned iced coffee or, in winter, a gas station cappuccino.
This is probably my parents’ fault, though certainly inadvertently. Every winter, we’d drive to Colorado to see family and ski. This was a roughly 10 hour drive, and, due to the fact that Colorado lies west of Kansas, it was godawful boring. From a previous newsletter, you may have picked up that licorice is my favorite road trip food; this is a result of those long trips to Colorado. The other was buying cheap gas station cappuccinos whenever we’d stop to use the bathroom. I’d mix them too, taking a lead from my mom. Half cappuccino, half whatever drip coffee they’d have in the huge tanks for late night truckers.
When I went to school in Missouri and was involved in a long distance relationship back in Oklahoma, I’d make that trip home on a Friday night, sustained by gas station cappuccinos. When I moved across the country from Pittsburgh to Mountain View, gas station cappuccinos. When I almost drove off the road in a rental car in Hawaii at night because I started to doze off, only to be saved by my suddenly very-upset girlfriend, that entire situation could’ve been avoided with a gas station cappuccino.
Clearly, I must not neglect my shitty coffee.
The gas station cappuccino’s younger brother is the canned iced coffee. During the summer, a canned iced coffee is vastly preferable to that hot, sugary sludge. They’re essentially the same thing: some type of corn syrup mixed with some kind of not-quite-milk and the minimum amount of coffee such that they won’t be sued for putting some pictures of beans on the can. You can buy these questionable beverages for a lot of money (Starbucks Double Shot Energy Drinks, in the US), or for hardly anything at all (whatever brilliantly terrible iced coffee I had in Palestine). They come in all sizes, but usually, they’re a bit bigger than a Red Bull and contain equivalent amounts of caffeine.
I’m not sure if you know this, but the Middle East and Asia Minor are hot in the summer. Like, why-the-hell-is-there-so-much-fighting-here-I-just-want-to-take-a-nap hot. Drawing on my experience with long winter road trips, I’ve realized that every time I feel like I need to nap, I can just grab an iced coffee from the nearest corner store. And this has worked brilliantly. I am fueled at least 75% of the time by this strategy. Even on nights when I’ve barely slept due to some unrepentant snorer five feet from my face, I can down an iced coffee at 2pm to make it through the day.
They are the way, and they are the light.
The Nescafé Xpress in front of me tastes like heaven in the worst way possible.
Shitty coffee is my sugary salvation.
Till next time,
-Esten
