I’m envious of people’s love of coffee, but I remain resolutely Team Tea

I learned a new word this week (and I wish I hadn’t): puppuccino. Yes, in addition to paying around €2.50 for a tiny cup of frothed milk and chocolate dust for your child, (aka a babychino), you can now purchase something similar for your dog.

Le Perroquet on Leeson Street in Dublin now offers foamed oat milk and shavings of Bonio for canines. “Like any good neighbourhood spot in Paris, we now have puppuccinos available,” they tweeted recently. Now, I’m all for entrepreneurial vim and commercial innovation, as well as the right of any dog owner to bestow treats on their dog as they see fit, but . . . ya what now?

Coffee culture has long been on the rise in Ireland. In 2018, this newspaper reported that one in three Irish people buys a coffee at least once a day – an increase of 10 per cent on the previous year according to a survey by Allegra World for UCC Coffee Ireland. The number of specialist coffee houses grew by 8.5 per cent in 2016, according to Euromonitor.

Coming from a Maxwell House home, I could barely understand how customers kept their own multi-faceted, frilly coffee orders straight

UCC predicted in 2018 that the overall market for coffee in Ireland would grow by seven per cent over the next five years. Interestingly, research at the time conducted by that university revealed that one in 10 people would be happy to pay more than €5 on a single cup of coffee.

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And then Covid happened, making coffee drinking almost seem mandatory. None of these researchers could have predicted that in 2020, leisure time would almost exclusively consist of walking outdoors with a takeaway coffee cup. During the pandemic, coffee has become one of the very few discretionary impulse items that’s still available to us to buy, and hoo boy, have we ever embraced it.

Creased with confusion

In January, Tesco reported that customers were buying 45 per cent more coffee pods than they did a year previously. Researched released by the Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) in January also reported an increase in coffee-cup litter.

In some ways, I can understand the appeal. Ordering a coffee, with its myriad variations and sub-categories, allows a customer to make a number of small decisions and, to some extent, feel like a discerning buyer with choices galore in front of them. And all that for a few quid.

Back in the 1990s, I spent a summer working in a dyed-in-the-wool coffeehouse on one of Los Angeles’ more bouji beaches. I’d certainly heard of a cappuccino, but had to be brought quickly up to speed on the rest of the caffeinated beverages that people wanted. I spent my first week on the job absolutely creased with confusion.

Even the coffee-flavoured sweet in a bag of Revels makes me yelp with distaste

All day long, customers would come in and casually ask for a half-decaf, non-fat, non-dairy, vanilla latte with extra nutmeg and/or cinnamon. It may sound like a perfectly regular order now, but at the time, it sounded completely radical. “Chuh, that’s LA for you,” I reasoned.

Coming from a Maxwell House home, I could barely understand how they kept their own multi-faceted, frilly coffee orders straight. One person memorably came in to the coffeehouse and ordered a simple black coffee one afternoon. I had to ask the manager how to fix up that one.

Late-night coffee

A couple of years ago, I happened across a hardcore coffee snob in a coffee shop closer to home. He was giving it the full sommelier bit, brewing up a storm with beakers and French presses and all kinds of gizmos to hand. He enjoyed having an audience, and talked a decent patter about coffee having top notes of blackcurrant and aftertastes of liquorice.

He then proceeded to blather at length about the provenance of the beans (Ethiopia) and the farming practices that brought said beans ethically from there to here. The lecture was entirely lost on me. “I don’t care if these beans have been hand-rubbed on the moon, I just came here to drink tea and have a chat with my friend,” I thought to myself. He told me that this particular coffee would be life-changing. Trying to be polite, I asked if I could have it in a latte. I’ve very rarely seen a person be that visibly, consummately appalled.

Despite all this, I never got bitten by the coffee bug. I am resolutely Team Tea. Even the coffee-flavoured sweet in a bag of Revels makes me yelp with distaste. I can see that others derive serious sensory pleasure from their regular fix of speciality coffee, and I truly envy them that. But I remain unmoved.

All that said, I like that communities today have the local coffee shop as a gravitational centre. Covid aside, speciality coffee shops have been occupying a space in Ireland that pub culture once did.

Perhaps someday soon, when All This is over, we in Ireland will be able to access them after 7pm (Dubliners may recall with some affection South William Street’s now-defunct Kaffe Moka, a coffee shop that stayed open until about 3am). I’d be more than happy to see the proliferation of late-night coffee shops in Ireland. Where I’ll be drinking tea, of course.