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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2690 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 5, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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You guys like coffee? I love coffee. I'm not so into it that I have a grinder or anything, but it's almost every day that I drink some at work. I drink it black.

The problem is that I might love it too much. I get a little paranoid that I'm consuming too much caffeine. And maybe I'd sleep better if I didn't overdo it. You guys got any favorite decaf brands? So far, I've tried a total of one decaf coffee, Beaumont from Aldi. It was noticeably less good than regular coffee, and I needed to put quite a bit more grounds in it to match my usual taste, but overall, not bad. I hope some of you can report that you've tried one that's better than "not bad", but who knows.

After a few years of heavy coffee abuse, and at times low levels of amphetamines (generic adderall), I no longer get jitters or sleep problems from coffee, no matter how much I drink. There's only a subtle perking up which may be simply be conditioned reflex. Maybe something like this could happen to you, too, although I don't know whether you'd consider that good or bad.

One thing you might try is vigorous exercise after work. In my experience, that tended to drown out any residual effect of caffeine. Although some of the effect may have been the extensive hydration required.

You're pretty much in the same situation as me, then, and no, I don't think cutting it out or switching to decaf will change much. I usually drink one cup around 10 am, unless I'm unusually tired, in which case I'll start earlier and possibly have a cup in the afternoon. I also have dinner at my parents' house every Sunday and my mum and I have coffee with dessert. I don't think it affects my sleep in any way. I don't drink coffee at home on the weekends and only order it at restaurants if it's a sit-down place. I used to drink quite a bit of tea when I worked from home (usually about 2 cups a day, almost always in the afternoon) and the effects on sleep were similar. Honestly, having to get up and go into an office as opposed to working from home where I wasn't going to sleep past the start time no matter what made a much bigger difference in my sleep schedule than whatever effect a little bit of caffeine is having on me.

I says this as someone who's pretty critical of coffee culture generally; it's the only addiction that's not only socially acceptable to have, but socially acceptable to almost brag about having. There was a commercial a few years back where a guy repeatedly warned everyone not to talk to him until he had his coffee. If you say you can't function in the morning without coffee people will act understanding, if not sympathetic. Say the same thing about booze and people will start giving you pamphlets. I get that there's a difference in the relative risk levels, but an addiction is an addiction, and caffeine addiction is probably the easiest to treat (it can be done over a long weekend). I think the dividing line is whether you're doing it for the taste or for the psychotropic effect. If you're doing it for the effect then you'd be sucking down Folgers at home every day and wouldn't have a moment at work without a cup in front of you.

If you say you can't function in the morning without coffee people will act understanding, if not sympathetic. Say the same thing about booze and people will start giving you pamphlets.

You mentioned the relative severity of alcohol, but I think it's good and natural to treat addictions with greater or lesser severity based on their risks. I mean, how much concern would you want people to have if you tell them that you're crabby and irritable without coffee?

I think a more apt comparison might be made to nicotine, cigarettes specifically. Of course cigarettes, too, are more dangerous than coffee. But nicotine withdrawal won't literally kill you like alcohol withdrawal can. And if someone says "don't talk to me until I have my cigarette," everybody sees that this is a problem. But there won't be any pamphlets handed out. It's pretty clear that our responses to addiction run on a gradient. As they should.

Yep. I bought a little hand-grinder that I love, because it stops me from overdoing it. I think about 4 cups, or one french press, is the sweet spot. Pour it in just slightly below a full boil, embrace the smell, and drink it black. One cup per hour, each hour in the morning. None in the afternoon. That's the way.

I used to hate coffee.

I've recently done a total 180 and drink like 5-6 shots of espresso a day. I just get Americanos or Black if I don't to jitter all day.

If you’re into coffee for the taste this won’t work but usually I’ll switch to tea if I’m trying to cut down on caffeine.

I split a Chemex of good coffee with my wife every morning. If there's any ill effect, I sure haven't noticed it, but that is what someone that literally never skips their morning coffee would say. I used to drink quite a bit more with cream and sweetener, but when we switched over to fancier coffee, I found that I was satisfied with one good mug.

The year before last, I cut caffeine out completely for a month. While the first week was a challenge, it must be said that I slept like a baby for the entire period, better than I'd slept for years prior.

The only problem was readjusting. The day after I completed my detox I was over at my parents' house for dinner and had two cups of tea. I felt like I'd done a whole gram of coke, my heart was racing.

Yeah it’s amazing how strong caffeine is after your tolerance is reset. I remember being off it for a few months before discovering that an americano can give you an adrenaline rush.

No caffeine for me. Herbal tea only. :P

Why don't you have grinder? They're cheap. Do you just drink at work and you're in an office?

At one point I drank too much coffee (like 7 cups a day) so now I'm limiting myself to 1-2 cups a day and have been for the past 15 years, it works great. One in the morning and possibly one in the afternoon.

Yep, just at work. I figured I'd be playing a dangerous game if I drank it on weekends too. But it's not too serious either way.

I actually think getting a grinder and whatnot might actually help. It seems like its not necessarily the caffeine you like so much as the taste and experience of enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee.

Turn it into a bit more of an involved ritual and really savor a cup or two of that gourmet shit. Then once you're done, it's too much of a pain in the ass to do it all over again. Supplement with some tea if you need an extra little pickmeup in the later morning or early afternoon. That way you don't have to sacrifice taste to limit the negative impacts of too much caffeine.

Quantity has a quality all its own, but you might actually enjoy it more when you no longer have the option of just mindlessly gulping down a never ending supply of standard drip coffee.

Caffeine has a distinct bitter flavour, so all decaf coffee will have a noticable difference.

My wife and I have to do a forced detox every six months or so, over a few weeks dropping down from double shot of espresso in the morning and an afternoon coffee, to single shot in the morning, to yerba mate light in the morning, to black tea in the morning. Then we start back up at a single espresso shot and the cycle repeats as we drink more and more coffee until we need to detox again.

I like to drink lots of coffee, and generally I can stomach it fairly well. When I notice that I'm overdoing it, I either cut back or water it down. Sometimes I cut it down to a single cup a day for a few weeks. Sometimes I quit entirely for a few months. If you notice health problems that might be related to coffee, quit coffee. At least for a while. It's just a drink, you can drink other things. And the withdrawal symptoms aren't that bad, in my experience - maybe a mild headache for a day or two; nothing modern medicine can't fix.

Decaf weirds me out. Just like non-alcoholic beer. It's wrong.

I don't think I will have any withdrawal symptoms if I quit; I never drink any on the weekends. But I think you're right. I'll try quitting for a while. It's really easy to get into the habit of making some every day and then desiring the allotted coffee that you clearly deserve. It's true, it's just a drink, but there's nothing like coffee, and I don't want soft drinks, so that pretty much leaves alcoholic beverages and milk for water alternatives, and those have calories.

I would absolutely drink non-alcoholic beer if old age robbed alcohol processing from me.

Seconding the advice of swapping to black tea, with the added suggestion that I've had great success replacing half my cups of coffee per day with cups of tea.

I feel more focused and less anxious/jittery with that combination (while also being able to painlessly step down my caffeine consumption).

Why not drink water?

I do drink water. I like water.

water alternatives

Why not drink water?

Never change SouthKraut, never change.

I've tried changing out coffee for black tea. Even decaf black tea, because honestly I just need something with flavor. It's ok. Still just doesn't quite hit the same. Might work better for you.

I actually hadn't ever even heard of decaf tea. It squares with your acidity problems? I may have to try it. My experience with tea has been "meh", but I don't know if I've tried black tea specifically. The best iced tea I ever drank was some unsweetened iced green tea at the state fair when I was severely dehydrated, it's never tasted good otherwise.

Yeah, black tea doesn't bother my stomach one iota. Caffeinated lacks the raw punch of coffee, and caffeinated or not aren't really robust enough flavor wise to really satiate me. But, they are better than nothing, and closer than anything else. Especially if you are confining yourself to drinks without calories, which I am as well.

I have one cup in the morning. I love it, but after that it's decaf only. I put enough cream in the decaf not to care about the flavor. I'd probably look for carbon dioxide decaffinated beans if I wanted to drink them for flavor.

One way to get less caffine but still get some is tea. A nice green tea in the morning is very pleasant too.

Nope. Controversial opinion here, I think coffee is a flavor not a real beverage. I absolutely love coffee-flavored desserts, ice cream, mocha, stuff like that. The only time I'll drink actual coffee is if it's in a super-sweet latte or something, with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Essentially a warm coffee-flavored milkshake.

Or, if I'm trying to be responsible and not drink a meal's worth of calories in a cup, I'll just drink water.

I just don't get proper coffee just brewed in water with nothing or very little else. I don't think it tastes good, it's like stirring spoonfuls of cinnamon or nutmeg into your water. They taste good when combined with the right stuff, but not by themselves.

Coffee by itself has a bitter, unpleasant flavor and I’m convinced people who like it do so primarily because of the positive association with energy, alertness, productivity etc. that caffeine obviously has. It’s no different to an alcoholic who eventually develops a taste for a really disgusting kind of hard liquor because they associate it with being drunk.

A flat white with (relatively little) sugar is tasty, sure, I drink coffee all the time. But ‘milk and sugar’ have a much better record for being naturally tasty to people than hot, bitter, heavily diluted, nutrition-less bean stock.

The Huffington Post apparently did a video where adults try coffee for the first time and hate all but the stuff that tastes least of coffee (the mocha).

I excessively love bitter rich flavors. Like 85% cacao chocolate or dark black coffee. I wish great tasting very dark coffee existed so I could have it all day.

I like black coffee because it is so great. Huffington Post videos be damned.

It's an acquired taste. I personally wish it didn't have psychotropic effects because it would allow me to have more than one cup without feeling like crap. I've tried decaf and that actually tastes bad, so full-strength it is, though I rarely have more than one cup a day.

Try some lightly roasted ethiopian beans sometime, I find they have a much more sour, almost berry-like flavor.

No! Liquor is the wrong comparison! The right comparison is the huge amount of craft beer stouts that get made. I have tried many of these with many different subtleties. Almost all of them are bitter. But some of them are tastier than others. One of them may have some little banana taste in it. Or one tastes like chocolate. Or maybe it's just some uniquely nice bitter taste. Well, okay, I guess liquor is an okay comparison. They're both "acquired tastes". After you drink enough liquor you learn to put aside the taste of the alcohol and actually tasting the rest of it. Maybe something similar happens with coffee. I know someone who is very particular about the coffee he uses, even though he uses cream and sugar he needs his fancy stuff otherwise it doesn't taste good enough. I've tried the same coffee he likes, except black, and I have to admit, it's pretty nice. How dare you say these things about me and my fellow coffee drinkers!! You've ruined this thread!

MathWizard is right, coffee flavored stuff is good too. I'm a big fan of coffee ice cream. I probably wouldn't drink very much alcohol if I didn't like the coffee flavor that stouts have.

I quite like those absurd 12% stouts (in very small quantities), to me they’re quite sweet and have a kind of dessert malt flavor.

Have you had Lion Stout? It's from Sri Lanka if I'm remembering correctly. One of the best stouts I ever tasted. Like 10% alcohol too.

I haven’t, I’ve had Lion Lager though (it’s the most common beer in the Maldives, probably because of proximity), but not the stout.

I'm pretty sure that neither Sri Lanka or the Maldives have or had lions (well, maybe the former has some zoos), but I guess the branding works lol.

Not as bad as Singapore, which was named that way because a myopic Indian prince thought he spotted a lion, which definitely wasn't, at best it could have been a tiger unusually fond of swimming.

Supposedly IPA's have ruined the taste buds of brewers, and there is no way back. I can enjoy a good IPA. Stone Brewing always did good work. But it seems like every fucking microbrew just piled into making shitty IPAs the last 10 years. I can scarcely drink anything domestic anymore because of it.

Still enjoy a solid British pub ale when I'm not having Irish whiskey.

The reason why microbreweries pile on the IPAs is because they're the easiest to make. The bitterness hides so much that there's a large margin of error. That being said, I have some friends who drink nothing but IPAs, so I understand why these places keep making them. I can tolerate them, but it's nice to have a beer I can drink more than two of.

I have no issue with IPAs but I really dislike the ‘classic British pub ale’. I think it’s telling that even in England it seems to be ever less popular - young British men seem to prefer lagers, IPAs or guinness. The 4% British ‘real ales’ are some of the only beers I find truly irredeemable. I don’t know what people see in them.

Well, I'm drinking whatever is good enough to be palatable in America I assume. Innis & Gunn, Boddingtons, Old Speckled Hen, even Trooper goofy as it is to have a British Ale from Iron Maiden.

Old Speckled Hen is quite nice, but to me a lot of them taste almost salty? It’s hard to describe, they have an unpleasant savory taste to me.

I've tried enough IPAs to say that they're not too bad, but I'd definitely rather have a stout. Too many hops. Seems I haven't found any real satisfying middle ground between the super heavy beers (stouts) and the crisp light beers (ales, pilsners, shandies).

You like red wine? I haven't found a red wine I liked. I hate the taste of them, somehow. I like sake, I like white wines, I liked some homebrewed date (the fruit!) wine, but I highly dislike red wines, sweet or sour.

I think an Amber is what you're looking for. Either that or a heavier lager. I heard one bartender at a brewery years ago describe Yuengling as a "balanced" beer, so maybe you want to go in that direction? I know Yuengling doesn't have the cachet it used to have since it's available in more states and the craft beer scene is much better than it was in the early '00s when Yuengling had its heyday, but it's still a decent beer you can always go back to. It used to be all I drank, and I'm about to go to the bar and I think I might get one for old time's sake. I should disclose that I drink beer almost every day and that my daily driver is Miller High Life, so I'm not a beer snob by any stretch of the imagination.

Seems I haven't found any real satisfying middle ground between the super heavy beers (stouts) and the crisp light beers (ales, pilsners, shandies).

How about a nice dunkel lager? It's got the roasted flavors and maltiness of a stout but the crispness and clean aftertaste of a light lager.

I'll give it a shot next time I buy anything. I have too much alcohol in the house because I drink way too slow.

All those trips to Oktoberfest over the years still haven't really delineated the differences between all the different types of beer for me. I must not drink enough.

Have you tried Rioja? I've met several people who dislike most other reds they've tried but enjoy some Riojas. They're different from the French or Italian grapes that are usually grown in California but you can get it pretty cheaply. The Campo Viejo brand is pretty consistent and good for the mid-low price range.

I have not, and I've never heard of it but because it's a red wine I regard it with suspicion. Does it have a lot of tannins in it like other reds? That's probably what's doing it, I am told.

They tend to have softer tannins than most other reds. The Garnacha/Grenache grape in particular is on the lower end of tannins so that would be the place to start.

Honestly I'm not much of a wine person. I find nearly every wine I've ever had inoffensive. I guess I just don't get what makes wine good or not.

You know, my dad growing up used think butter was flavor. Period. Even into adulthood, if something wasn't slathered in butter, he thought it was flavorless.

These days, everyone seems to suffer from what my dad had, god rest his congested heart, except with sugar instead. That's all I can think of when I see people complaining about the taste of coffee sans sugar and cream.

Someone here once said that even modern berries have, say, 50 times the amount of sugar that actual wild ones did. I have no idea if that’s true, but it does Really Make You Think.

My mother ran into a problem where her family recipe for cranberry jelly stopped working. After a few years of debugging, and experimenting with things like altitude, it turned out to be the sugar content of the cranberries. Apparently the modern commercial breed has a lot more sugar than the old breeds. I don't know about 50 times, but it was definitely enough to cause pre-20th-century recipes to stop working.

Watermelon rinds have shrunk, too, causing problems for watermelon rind pickle.

And brussel sprouts are no longer as bitter as they used to be.

I can totally believe modern berries have more sugar. But I have wild blackberries on my property, and at most store bought blueberries are 5x sweeter. I don't know how quantity of sugar versus taste of sugar scales though. Maybe it's logarithmic for all I know. Or my taste buds are broken.

I suppose the thesis is that even the wild blackberries on your property are descended from cultivated species, but again I have no idea if that’s true.

Yeah, I also love coffee too much. It's not the caffeine that got me, at least not directly. It was the acidity. Started having more and more heartburn, until one night my stomach was just roiling and convulsing in pain. Could barely eat for days. Went to the ER, they didn't find anything that would kill me immediately, got forwarded to a GI specialist. They scoped me and didn't see anything either like ulcers or cancer. They basically just told me to lay off all the coffee. And wouldn't you know it, turns out that was it.

I mean, maybe. I was also put on a proton uptake inhibitor for a month, which kind of worked. I just felt like my stomach wasn't working anymore. Had very little appetite and little energy. Then I got off that and was on Pepcid AC at nights when my heartburn and pain was worst, while making lifestyle choices like less/no coffee. Eventually I weaned off of that, and was doing alright with just morning coffee. But the habit has been kicking in again with some afternoon coffee about an hour before I workout, along with some mild heartburn again.

Ah well. Just have to live with your vices.

Same thing for me. I really loved black coffee but the acidity eventually started to give me severe heartburn so I had to switch to milkbased coffee drinks, which works fine. A cappuccino is usually no issue.

Damn, I would hate it if I had to give it up altogether. The acidity being a problem would rule out even crappy decaf! Very raw deal. Everyone tells me that a similar thing will happen to me and my love of spicy food as I grow old, but I hope not.

Yeah, this all happened in the months preceding my 40th birthday. I can confirm getting old sucks ass.

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