Coffee: the beverage once as firmly rooted in the fabric of blue-collar America, as the coffee bushes that produce it are rooted in the hillsides of the temperate climes which grow them. “Cuppajoe” and a doughnut. The coffee-filled thermoses that waited in the millions of lunch boxes of millions of factory, mine, and construction workers. The coffee that kept America’s tuckers truckin’, and students cramming, through the night. Black, steaming, bitter coffee.
No more. Coffee met the Pacific Northwest; coffee experienced an identity crisis.
Coffee’s language changed. “Large, light on the cream,” became “Tall café au lait”.
America’s diners and truck stops were confronted with Starbuck’s, Seattle’s Best, Intelligentsia, and other establishments anxious to cash in on the newest American fixation, designer coffee.
Designer coffee is, to truck stop java, what designer jeans are to the Dickies and Levis of the blue-collar workplace; it is priced to match its carefully cultivated–like the exotically-named coffee beans used to brew it–image.
Even McDonald’s, the last bastion of hot, strong, cheap coffee for hordes of early-morning commuters, seems to have succumbed to the pressure with the introduction of its “Premium Roast, customized to your specifications”, although choices limited to non-dairy creamer, sugar, or artificial sweetener do tarnish the image a bit.
Television has participated in coffee’s extreme makeover. Phoebe, Joey, Chandler, Monica, Rachel, and Ross could barely have functioned without constant visits to “Central Perks”; Niles and Frasier were “Café Nervosa” addicts; and even the Smallville, Kansas, “Talon” sees the gathering of the Midwest’s most beautiful, and disturbed, young superheroes and arch-foes.
Might it all be part of a vast anti-tea conspiracy to change coffee’s image from the sustaining elixir of the lonely long-distance driver, the recovering alcoholic, and the bedrock blue collar workers of America to a status symbol for the young, trendy, and not-quite-pretentious? Doughnuts and toast have been supplanted by croissants and scones, continental pastries at which many an old-time coffee drinker would have cringed.
So the question arises: should coffee successfully complete its transition from simple, hardworking, and affordable to exotic, leisurely, and expensive, what will become of tea?
