I still remember a time when tea was a powerful stimulant. Just twist a few tea leaves into a large cup of boiling water, the light green, but can drink tea and refreshing. Then be asked, so light ok? Enough, I always say.
My parents don’t drink tea. Only aunt and father love tea. Visiting relatives at Spring Festival, I watched him fill a teacup, half filled with already unfurled tea leaves. He smiled and asked me if I wanted to try a drink. I took a careful sip of tea, bitter and astringent, but frowned and swallowed. I don’t understand what’s so good about this. Decades later, I still remember that night when I couldn’t sleep.
Even during the college entrance examination, I did not drink tea or coffee — I did not have such consumption conditions, nor did I have such consumption consciousness.
When I was a college student in Hangzhou, I often went hiking or biking in Jiuxi and Longjing. Once I was led by a knowledgeable student to taste all kinds of tea in farmers’ homes and shops in Jiuxi. Now I completely forget who that student is, a little detail can not remember, only remember longjing light. Even if it is half a cup of tea and half a cup of soup, it stretches out but is a small yellowish green tender tip, smell of tea refreshing, no bitterness in the mouth. That’s more than I can afford as a poor student. Let’s just say I didn’t get into the habit of drinking tea or coffee in college. During the four years of college, I deliberately forgot many things, and now I can’t remember more.
After leaving university, I worked for a game development company. Over the past decade, I’ve seen the industry increasingly embrace a culture of overtime. Somewhere along the way, I started drinking tea and coffee. Game companies often offer free tea bags (Lipton for tea) and instant coffee (Nestle or Maxwell’s for coffee). The tea is always green or black, and the coffee is always three in one plain or super strong. How did I go from drinking only tea, to both tea and coffee, to almost drinking only coffee? There was no awareness of it.
Coffee, of course, is for refreshment. Sometimes for work, sometimes for pleasure. When I was working as a game planner at Netease in Guangzhou, I was addicted to an online game of multi-pet Nurturant turn-based combat created by the studio next door. I invested a lot of money and time in it and ranked first since it was launched. I used to stay up late playing games, voice chat with my gaming friends even later, and wake up in the morning to go to work as usual. I didn’t get enough sleep for months, and maybe that’s when I became addicted to coffee. The company’s tea bar always serves all kinds of tea and coffee at a very cheap price.
I met a colleague in Beijing who went by the name of Maxwell when I was writing articles and was briefly known on a game industry forum. We’ve never met. I mention him because, just then, I could tell whether I preferred Nestle or Maxwell House. In the years before I stopped drinking coffee altogether, I would only drink Maxwell unless I was forced to drink Nescafe because I was completely out of stock. If the company only offers Nestle for free, I’ll buy Maxwell’s myself.
It’s not that maxwell is better, it’s just that you’ve inadvertently been drinking it for a while and getting used to it. It is difficult to passively replace the mouthfeel that has been adapted. I once ran out of coffee and had to take a box of Nescafe cream from the store. After drinking it for seven days, I found nescafe cream was not bad, but later I was not used to the Maxwell original. After discovering the adaptability of this taste, I also took the initiative to take advantage of this feature: during the fat reduction period, I endured only drinking alcohol black, and after a dozen days, I tried wheat flavor or plain flavor and completely didn’t like it. It seems that coffee should be bitter from the start, without any added sugar or milk.
The taste of instant coffee is terrible, but I started with instant coffee, and over the course of more than a decade, I got used to it thoroughly. In the last two years, Ciccio had advised me to buy a coffee maker and give me the best coffee beans after learning that I liked coffee but always drank only instant. I declined. Sorry, that’s one thing, but more importantly, I say, instant is enough. Later, I went to visit Mr. Zhan in the Adventure Garden and drank two cups of excellent freshly brewed coffee with different techniques and flavors without spending my own money. It was really delicious, but I could still totally accept just drinking instant coffee.
I can’t tell good coffee from bad. Just like I can’t tell a good steak from a bad one. My husband loves steak, and he used to take me there in the years before we were married. We haven’t spent much time together in recent years, and I rarely get steak. Occasionally get together, he proposed to eat three or five hundred yuan a steak, I always say, that much waste ah, because I can not eat it with a hundred yuan steak who is more delicious. I always suggest to eat Shunde food, because I can taste its good.
In 2018, Beijing, adventure Garden delicious coffee, not enough time for me to try a few more times to form a taste. But even earlier, in guangzhou in 2017, the game company I joined installed vending machines selling drinks, daily necessities, packed lunches and even freshly ground coffee — supposedly an investment of the owner. I often buy myself a cappuccino freshly made from a vending machine as a reward. On the one hand, I have to return to work after childbirth and I am still in lactation. Every day, one hour each way on the commute, I always lack of sleep. On the other hand, the market of blockchain continues to rise. As a small investor, I have experienced an increase of dozens or hundreds of times. Sipping from a warm disposable paper cup, thick froth mixed with the aroma of milk and coffee, everything was getting better.
On New Year’s Day 2018, I left the game company, but I was still thinking about that warm cappuccino. It’s hard to replicate on the outside. I’ve been ordering lattes or cappuccinos from different places and never found that feeling.
I don’t sleep more or drink less coffee because I’m home from work. I spent a lot of time in front of the computer and still didn’t get enough sleep. People in the community joked that I was in the German time zone. It doesn’t take long to go from two instant to three a day, from plain to extra strong. When I started drinking American, INSTEAD of buying a single ration, I bought a whole bucket of dark coffee powder, scooped out with a spoonful of baby milk powder, poured it into a whole pot, and drank it slowly throughout the day.
After a few months of using it, I realized it was hurting my throat: frequent mouth sores and false fires. I realized my throat preferred water to black coffee, so I started making small cups of strong Americano, which was bitter and hard to taste. The rest of the time I can’t drink water. It’s still the rule of taste adaptation. I got used to the flavorful black coffee water, and suddenly drinking plain water became extremely difficult. Then I began to try to buy fresh milk and bring my own hand-held bubble beater to foam, joining the American way.
Fresh grandma bubble hides the bitter of mellow black American. I returned to the warmth and mellow fragrance of autumn and winter 2017. In order to drink more, I put more water in the glass. If one cup is not enough, have another. By accident, I was drinking three teaspoons of powdered black coffee a day, which I was able to acknowledge because I was constantly experiencing symptoms of caffeine overload. I described these symptoms in detail in the article “Seven Years of Repeatedly Deciding not to Drink Coffee.”
The pharmacological recommendation is to consume no more than 417 milligrams of caffeine per day. Consuming 600 milligrams of caffeine a day can cause anxiety, breathing difficulties and even arrhythmias. People who habitually consume up to 300 milligrams of caffeine a day can experience withdrawal symptoms, including tiredness, depression, irritability, tremors, and headaches, when they suddenly stop.
What is my daily caffeine intake? Each 3-in-1 plain instant coffee contains about 60 milligrams of caffeine. At three plain drinks a day, caffeine is about 180 mg. Each 1.8g bag of alcoholic black coffee contains about 54mg of caffeine, and a spoonful of alcoholic black coffee powder filled with milk powder is about 5g, which is 15g for 3 spoonfuls a day. It is calculated that my daily caffeine has reached 450mg.
I began to understand why my great uncle drank such strong tea. For many years, what started as weak tea grew stronger and stronger day after day. Increased tolerance to bitterness was accompanied by decreased sensitivity to caffeine. I occasionally appreciate my “enough” mindset, but even then, I can make a cumulative, day-to-day change from being highly sensitive to caffeine to being over-caffeinated and dependent on it.
Luckily, I finally stopped drinking coffee.