I have never been much of a coffee drinker. My mom drank coffee every morning of my life, usually filling a head-sized mug with scalding water and huge scoops of Folgers Instant Coffee. She would always top off her mug with milk, turning the coffee into a soft caramel color. She drank this combination with trembling lips, afraid of the temperature, and then she would sweat from the heat.

I never understood this morning ritual. If the drink is so hot that your lip trembles and you sweat from drinking it, how is that enjoyable again?

Occasionally, I would make a child-friendly cup of coffee. This would consist of the same hot water, but it would substitute Swiss Miss hot chocolate for almost all of the Folgers. This mixture barely counted as a coffee-like substance as it only had the faintest coffee taste or smell.

My pseudo-instant-mocha-latte did not occur very often because hot chocolate tasted so much better.

When I moved to Houston I discovered the most amazing of grocery stores – Central Market. Central Market wowed me on every level, but the sample stations were especially impressive. From sampling hot fudge on vanilla ice cream, to brownies, to the ever-present bread and butter samples, the Central Market samples always delivered. These samples always included coffee.

I am not the type of person to pass up a free sample, so on every trip to Central Market I would fill two-inch cups with the following:

Salvadorean Free Trade
French Dark Roast
Central Market Breakfast Blend

These small cups slowly opened my taste buds to a coffee world that was much larger than Folger’s Instant Coffee.

I finished the transition to coffee-enjoyer in Spain. Every bar, every restaurant, every hostel offered Café con Leche. And it was awesome.

It did not matter whether I was in a large city of 100,000 people or a town of 50, the coffee was excellent. Every day I would hit up the local café to order a coffee and a chocolate croissant around 8 am. Every day I would people watch as I sipped my coffee. Every day I thoroughly enjoyed that coffee. It just made the morning so much better.

Looking back, I agree with the general premise of Folger’s advertisements; the best part of waking up was indeed the coffee I had in my cup. But while I will take the general premise, I think the specifics are simply wrong – Folgers was just bad.

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