I started drinking coffee in earnest at college. This was partly to help me wake up and partly so I seemed more mature. In hindsight, if I had actually been more mature I would have put my rear end to bed at a reasonable hour and wouldn’t have needed a caffeine jolt. But that’s a different story.chip-jones

   Coffee has evolved quite a bit since my college days. Coffee used to be coffee. You drank it black or with some combination of cream (really milk) and sugar (the natural kind with more than one calorie). Now one just about needs a chemistry degree to order the stuff.

   My original experience with coffee was at my grandmother’s house. She always had a pot going and had her cup with lots of cream and sugar. One day I asked her for some and since she rarely told my siblings and I “No,” I got some. But it really wasn’t coffee — it was warm sugar milk with a dash of actual coffee.

   As I grew into adulthood and drank stronger coffee with less and less milk and sugar, I realized something else about my grandmother’s coffee. It was Horrible — with a big H.

   She was from the generation that survived the Depression. Nothing was wasted, including coffee grounds. I think she cleaned the pot, tossed the old grounds and put in fresh for Sunday dinner. Sunday coffee was OK. The rest of those Sunday grounds provided the base for the next week; small spoonfuls of fresh coffee were added as needed. Also, the half pot left at bedtime was reheated the next morning. By Thursday we’re talking brown battery acid.

   We did some halfhearted whining about the late-week coffee but did nothing about it. There were two things, I learned, you didn’t do around my grandmother. You didn’t screw around and make a bunch of noise when Lawrence Welk was on, and you didn’t throw out a coffee ground with one drop of flavor left. Other than that we could have burned the house down and she’d have thought it was cute.

   Since I am a pretty basic coffee guy, I had to get these fancy coffee drink definitions from my daughters. I found these new concoctions aren’t all that new, just marketed better.

   For instance, at a fancy coffee shop, a “steamer” is warm milk with some sort of flavoring in it. So, when you were a kid and put Strawberry Quik into warm milk, you were actually making a strawberry steamer.

   Latte is a milk, coffee and flavor combination. So, that original cup of “coffee” my grandmother made for me was really a sugar latte.

   Cappucino, I’m told, is a latte with foamed milk on top; sort of like that Strawberry Quik steamer with whipped cream on top.

   Espresso, though I’ve never had one, sounds like a shot of tequila with caffeine instead of alcohol.

   One thing I have learned in this new coffee world is to write all orders down when it is my turn to go to the coffee shop. My order is easy — large and black. Other orders, not so much. This is an actual coffee order I once made for someone else: “A grande mocha latte with a hint of raspberry, half soy milk, half real milk and a half shot of espresso.”

   I forgot the hint of raspberry part. I heard about it.

CHIP JONES is a lifetime LaPortean, the voice of the Slicers on local radio, and a real estate agent. Contact him at

chipjonesmtm@comcast.net.