Until about a month ago, I had never in my 31 years drunk a cup of coffee. I’d sipped, I’d brewed, I’d sat in dank basement coffeehouses chain-smoking for hours with friends. But never a proper cup. I’ve always maintained fond memories of the faint morning scent of boiling water passing through low-grade robusta beans—my dad downed that dreck every morning—but drinking the equivalent of what tasted like a stomped-on pile of damp leaves has always struck me as pretty objectionable. And large doses of caffeine make me fucking crazy.

After nearly 12 years without the stuff, though, I began to wonder whether adding caffeine to my diet would produce more of the hyperconcentration I sought and less of the shattered nerves I feared. Plus I wondered if Intelligentsia was really that great. I wondered if my life would improve as a result of being able to legitimately hang out in a dimly lit craft coffeehouse and pretend to read the New York Times. I wondered if I’d be tempted by pour-overs, grandes and ventis, espressos. I knew I was probably doomed to exacerbate my smoking habit, but to hell with it; I need more vices.

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And guess what? This tastes like shit. Actually it tastes more like the back of my tongue has been coated in a cigarette pack’s worth of tar and dragged across a freshly trampled tennis court. How can something so tasteless taste so rotten?

In goes one teaspoon of sugar, which flattens the flavor and makes it tolerable to gulp. Then I foolishly opt to pair my first cup of coffee with an inaugural listening of Swans’ album The Seer, a dark and formidable three-LP behemoth of goth, no-wave, and postpunk that would be better accompanied by a plague of locusts than some Folgers at my kitchen table on a chilly fall morning.

The Reds just lost and this coffee just went tepid.

I’m en route with a friend down I-65 to Louisville for a wedding. It’s a chilly and rainy day, or a scene that iPhone commercials tell me would be perfect for sipping on coffee, ordering tomato soup, and dancing in my pajamas with Zooey Deschanel. Sadly, though, I’m sipping on another “tall” coffee and playing the role of backseat driver more compulsively than normal.

Sarah Riddle

Bow Truss Coffee Company

“I appreciate having the opportunity to meet farmers and to know that once a bean is picked and processed and gets to our store, there’s very little we can do to make it better. We can just keep screwing it up, and that’s always a wonderful challenge, to help it maintain its integrity through what we’ve learned and what we’re capable of.”

But as we ironically sit in a Starbucks parking lot siphoning Wi-Fi and drinking low-grade “morning blend” brewed next to a slushie machine, my mood turns. More observant and, as opposed to about an hour ago, actually confident Felix Baumgartner is going to survive his world-record space jump, I begin to fear I’m turning into a detestable “Not until I have my coffee” morning droid.

Tim Coonan

Big Shoulders Coffee

“Four minutes is my magic number based on a lot of reading, talking with people, and trial and error. There are a few things that influence the coffee and extraction: the time, the size of the grind, and the amount of turbulence. The [Clever method] also has the added benefit of a filter—personally I don’t care for the sediment that’s real prominent with the French press.”

Zak Rye

Gaslight Coffee Roasters

“When it comes to espresso, it’s a real kind of minefield of variables that can screw up the coffee. When you’re brewing something for 25 seconds it comes down to a tenth of a degree in half a second. So every time you’re dealing with coffee and begin to ‘dial in’ you’re trying to figure out exactly how to make that coffee taste best.”