Decaffeinated, briefly

The unnecessary, and questionable, benefits of a month off caffeine

I had my first cappuccino 50 years ago this year – a lot happened 50 years ago this year – but in retrospect, besides it being the year of my first trip abroad, probably nothing else quite as momentous happened as my discovery of Real Coffee.

They were, after all, related events.

Understand, coffee in the United States in 1975 was…coffee, yes, but only barely. It was weak, it was pedestrian. By contrast, Italian drinks were exotic: A latte could have been a moment in an opera, perhaps a pause right before the aria…an espresso sounded vaguely like something very fast, or something expressive, we didn’t really know. A cappuccino? Well, it could have been something akin to one of those aggressive guys with cameras, or perhaps even a sexual thing.

The very words themselves were exotic; turns out that espresso drinks were, too.

So in 1975, there I was, in Rome, staying in a $3.50 a night hotel room, sat in a sidewalk cafe (itself something entirely alien to a kid from the car-centric California suburbs), sipping a milky, strong cappuccino, and falling madly, deeply, in love.

That I would find my one true love, my best-ever cappuccino, not so far from home, at the blessed (and I presume, still operating?) Cafe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach district, was one of the great ironies of life. Still: It was in Rome that the romance began.

50 years later, and like most long-term engagements, the relationship has had its ups and downs, usually depending on the time of day and my quality of sleep. I have been dangerously over-caffeinated, spent far too much time in cafes, and have gone through all the phases of coffee fanaticism, from drip to French press to espresso and back, and from black to cafe au lait to latte to breve latte to mocha to soy latte (ick) to soy mocha (slightly better) to oat milk latte (better still) to cortado to Turkish coffee (ewww) to Vietnamese drip (ca phe phin, damn!) to Vietnamese egg coffee (YUM!) and back to cappuccino. In recent years, I’ve largely gone back to black, though the allure of hot milk is eternal.

Egg coffee makes a Frappuccino seem like a diet drink.

Through it all, I have maintained that I drink coffee for the taste, and not for the caffeine. I like to think that I have plenty of my own energy, thank you very much, and I don’t need a drug to get going in the morning.

That it has occasionally been the last thing I think about before I go to bed means exactly nothing. I think.

When I’m on El Camino for a month every year, I rarely drink coffee when I get up. Instead, I immediately start walking, and only stop for coffee (and food) after I’ve walked eight or 10 kilometers. I find that if I have it first thing, I’m strong out of the box, but am then quite liable to have a catastrophic blood sugar drop in the middle of nowhere, which is one of the less-nice things that can happen on El Camino.

And if I’ve had a croissant with my cappuccino – croissants being another thing I discovered 50 years ago, come to think of it – then I’m well and truly screwed.

I think I drink coffee less for the taste or the caffeine, and mostly just for the drinking-of-coffee itself. For the ritual. Making it at home, certainly, but more often just out at a cafe wherever I am, be it Peet’s Coffee at 20th and J Street when I’m in Sacramento, or one of the endless number of cafes on my long and winding road around the globe.

Being out in public, writing, and drinking a coffee – besides the walk to and from, that is probably my basic activity in any given day no matter where I am. (I’m not proud of this, but it’s a life.) And this is something that the Vietnamese share with me; Asia in general is coffee country, and Saigon is notorious for it. It even has an entire building containing dozens of coffee shops:

Though you are more likely to encounter it just about anywhere, at insanely low prices (15,000 dong is about $.60) …

Vietnam is CRAZY for coffee, and any given block will literally – and I’m not exaggerating – host a half dozen cafes. Coffee is served on the street, brewed over wood fires or on the backs of sleek motorized cafes…there is even a free coffee machine at the hospital. I honestly don’t know how people process all that caffeine.

But despite this half-century romance – and my current hometown – I decided last month to take a month off of caffeine, mostly because I had been having a hard time sleeping, and wanted to test the not-unreasonable theory that caffeine was the culprit.

Happily, that experiment is now over, I am back in the warm arms of my morning flat white. It was an interesting journey. I can’t say that I had all the advertised benefits – you supposedly start sleeping better, your skin clears, your energy explodes, etc – because I also just happened to already be 60 days into my 100 days without booze or weed experiment. (It was the last way I had left to “experiment” with drugs, but that’s another story.)

So I can’t honestly tell which effects of my various “sobrieties” manifested in which way, because of the absence of which drug.

But I can tell you which sobriety was the hardest to maintain.

Coffee. Easily. Booze and pot, I just stopped, and I wasn’t even slightly tempted – even at Burning Man, for cryin’ out loud. I had no cravings. I’ve had a couple of slips, but for the most part, I’ve done 120 days with very few, and it feels good.

But that’s another post.

But coffee: Quitting wasn’t that hard, though my body certainly had some reactions. The lack of caffeine messed up my sleep cycle at the start, and I put on several pounds. I was assured by a doctor friend that that was because I was retaining more water, because I wasn’t drinking a diuretic (or two) every day. Maybe, but I also had cravings, not necessarily for coffee, just just to stuff my face. Similar to how when people quit smoking, apparently. So yeah, I felt it.

Coffee…quitting was good, but at the end of the day, or rather, the month, I was left with a simple question: Why bother? The more research I’ve done – if I could drink it, at least I could read about it – the better coffee looks. It has serious benefits to heart health, it has anti-cancer properties, anti-dementia effects…this stuff is NOT to be missed.

And my sleep has improved with being settled down as much as anything, I think. Getting back on caffeine hasn’t hurt it. Much. It’s a trade off I’m willing to make.

So…I’m back in my cups, and couldn’t be happier. Hell, it helped me get this post written, truth be told.

Onward.