This is my post for day 11 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what we will love. A life-changing career or hobby could be right around the corner, or right under your nose. As a seventh grader, I sneered at my friends for collecting Pokemon cards. Weeks later I was begging my parents for booster packs.

Sometimes it’s all around you and always has been. Let me tell you about how I met coffee.

I should start by saying that I’m a 99.99th percentile picky eater. (I give that number because I would guess that I’ve been acquainted with roughly 10,000 people, and I’ve only ever met one person who was more picky than me, and he had gotten over it by his early 20s.) Me and food is a topic for another time, but needless to say, trying new foods has essentially never been an enjoyable experience. I’ve always loved the “coffee flavor”, mostly in ice cream. And it smelled amazing. But it was far down the list of things to try.

When I was 20, I got a job at Starbucks. As part of the job, they ask you to try each of the drinks once. This was where I learned that you can basically create a drink version of coffee ice cream. Since then I’ve slurped down quite a number of iced tall decaf breve one-pump white mochas (no whipped cream). But the black coffee did not get added to my list.

Fast forward a decade. While continuing my quest toward higher agency, I decided it was finally time to take more seriously the option of regular stimulants. Caffeine was high on the list, since it is a consumer good and has extremely low side-effects. I took caffeine pills occasionally for a few months, and then at some point I remembered that coffee existed. It seemed like people had a good time with coffee. There was a whole coffee culture. Maybe I could be having a bit more fun with my caffeine?

I had my first deliberate tasting of coffee in February. I didn’t take to it immediately. It’s actually hard to remember how drawn out this part was, and I only know because fortunately I took fairly extensive notes about it. I was already keeping a stimulant journal, and when I started drinking coffee, I started recording some of the other parts of my experience, like how it tasted, and whether I liked it.

It was not until my eleventh coffee that I finished a whole cup. It’s not like I LIKED it, though. It was just… interesting.

I had a good friend who was a BIG coffee nerd. We’re talking “has a tabletop home roasting machine” levels of nerd. And I just so happened to be coworking with him at his house every monday. In between my sampling from random cafes, he introduced me to specialty coffee. That is, single-origin, light roast coffee.

Over the next few months my notes become peppered with increasingly many exclamation marks. But it is quite a while before I start to interpret my experience as “tastes good”. Instead, there is faint praise like “very drinkable”, “First sip is better than yesterday”, and “maybe the most palatable one I’ve had so far”.

By July, I am writing notes about how the whole thing is extremely interesting, even though it really did not map onto what I would call “tastes good”. Writing now, years later, with much longer hindsight, I am not sure what this phase was about. Perhaps what happened is that I was thrown into the deep end of a very high-dimensional sensory world, and just stayed disoriented for a long time. But since then I have become a twice-daily black coffee drinker, and it has added so much color to my life.

One mystery is how a 99.99th percentile picky eater could come to enjoy such a notoriously acquired taste. I now believe that I got quite lucky. The major types of flavors and tasting notes in light roast coffee — acidity, Maillard products, grains, chocolate, caramelization — are all flavors that I already liked. Texture is a big reason I dislike foods, but coffee is totally homogeneous. It’s also worth noting that light roast coffee does not taste bitter to me at all. Dark or even medium roast still does. But lots of my friends say that my coffee tastes bitter, so I may have gotten lucky with my particular gustatory perception, there.

And, let’s be real; the caffeine probably helped.

There’s a lot more I could say about my relationship with coffee. But that’s how we met.