National Coffee Day

Yes, apparently this exists!  In celebration, a few stores have chosen to give out free coffee today.  Had I known of this before right now, I'd have posted this information earlier, and it might even have been useful to someone.  Now, it's not.  So click here for a useless list of places from which you could have had free coffee, had you and I been paying attention.

Topless Coffee Shop!

Right Here.

The article is 2 1/2 years old, but topless is always relevant.

Hilarious AND Depressing!

During the Civil War, the South endured major economic hardships.  They were constantly outmaneuvered by the economically/industrially superior North.  Their trade was slowed from a boom to a slow trickle by Union blockades in their harbors as well as the increasing loss of use of the Mississippi River, made total by the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi on July 4, 1863 (poetic, no?).  What is more, foreign nations refused to acknowledge them as a nation independent of the U.S. government, and the feeble currency they printed was a joke in the world market, with inadequate backing in the form of precious specie or industrial strength.  Draconian cost-cutting measures were employed to cope with these straits.  One of them was in the form of some very pathetic coffee substitutes, some descriptions of which I have conjured for your reading pleasure and outright disgust.


Here's One!


Disgusting, yet informative.


2nd half of article, for our purposes.


Even the affluent Southern aristocrats, influential politicians and ranking generals had to resort to this vile, distinctly uncaffeinated swill.  All the while, on the other side of the Mason-Dixon, what were the Northerners using for coffee?  Why, coffee, of course!  Shelby Foote once said, "that the North fought [the Civil] War with one hand behind its back."  That is, while the South put everything they had into fighting on their own territory, the Northern civilian population was comfortably removed from these battles (Sharpsburg and Gettysburg excepted) and only needed a part of their resources, while they were elsewhere able to expand and develop.  Aside from the ~300,000 dead (a hefty butcher's bill, admittedly) the North enjoyed some degree of prosperity during the war, including the foundation of M.I.T., the establishment of the state of West Virginia and, of course, the wholesale abolition of slavery.  Coffee was a mere feather in the cap of Northern prosperity

Would you like fries with that?

I think a good cup of coffee should be like a smart-ass remark; bitter and to the point, with a rare suggestion of sweet. So a cardboard tankard full of sugary swill as a coffee fix, in my opinion, is an odd substitute. Personal grievances aside, one of these caffeinated milkshakes (hot or iced) is quite a different animal from a cup of black coffee or espresso with a couple tablespoons of milk and a packet of sugar or Splenda. Drinking one's calories doesn't make them less, well, caloric. In the name of curiosity, and the right to say, "I told you so!", I'd like to take a look at some examples of these gut-busting attempts at coffee.

Pumpkin Spice Crème -- Starbucks Coffee

This drink choice is appropriate (Happy autumn!); the grave accent over the "e" in crème, is not. If "Pumpkin Spice" is written in English and "Cream" is in French, you're not just pretentious, but inconsistent as well. The King's English was working just fine, thank you.

On topic, the nutritional breakdown for a 16 oz. serving is; 400 calories, 14 grams of fat, 52 grams of carbohydrates and 15 grams of protein. To be fair, we must remember that calories from protein cannot be stored as fat, so at 4 calories/gram that means that 60 calories may be subtracted from our figure of 400, resulting in 340 calories that can be stored as fat (this is a generous oversimplification which ignores individual metabolic rates and lipolytic tendencies, but Starbucks is lucky to have caught me in a good mood; ergo, their drinks seem a bit less fattening by my non-professional account. Always consult your doctor before deciding that guzzling saturated fat and high-fructose corn syrup is a good idea).

Godiva Dark Chocolate Raspberry Freddo -- Peet's Coffee and Tea

The name is a mouthful, and so is the beverage. Moving up in the world, this drink takes us to 510 calories (for a medium beverage; the large is 680. I wanted to have a constant size when comparing drinks to eliminate the size variable, but Peet's website doesn't list the weight of their drinks, so this constant ceased to be an option). Once the calorie content of the protein is kindly subtracted, we're left with 482 grams of fatty, sugary calories (again, in a medium, though this name doesn't make sense; if something is to be dubbed medium, there must be a size below it).

The macronutrient breakdown is 17 grams of fat, 86 grams of carbohydrates and 7 grams of protein -- of the 86 grams of carbohydrates, 80 grams are sugar (this would include lactose; the specific types of sugar are of rather mysterious classification, as Peet's isn't quite transparent with their ingredients).  As a gentle reminder, I feel I should state that this amount of sugar is a full pint of ice cream's worth.  These figures include 8 tbsp, or a little over 4 ounces, of whipped cream.

Non sequitur; the website for Peet's Coffee and Tea advertises a drink called Caffè Freddo Extra Bold with the following description; "A more intense coffee experience. Freshly pulled espresso adds a bold coffee taste."  Imagine the novelty -- a coffee drink that tastes like coffee!  This must be pointed out?  The bastardization of this day and age has conditioned us to expect that our "coffee" taste like something other than coffee?  Alfred Peet's legacy is as a modern day Ramses; but for the words, '"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"  Nothing besides remains.'



White Chocolate Mocha -- Seattle's Best Coffee
Again, in the absence of ounces and grams, I had to resort to the "medium" measurement on their website (whatever that is).  To their credit, SBC did our language the courtesy of using the term for something nestled between a small and large.  The kudos ends there; one medium yields 420 calories; 17 from fat, 57 from carbohydrates (at 52 grams of sugar) and 10 grams of protein.
Another aside; Seattle's Best Coffee is now owned by megalith-Starbucks, which was founded in Seattle.  Doesn't the name of the former therefore amount to insubordination, if not outright treason?  Doesn't this mean an exile or a hanging?



Postscript -- From your waistline, with love
This exploration is not intended as a grand indictment against desserts or the chains which I've mentioned (the latter is only incidental -- not my purpose).  These unhealthful concoctions are part of a much bigger problem of obesity rates and poor nutritional practices in this country.  When one wakes up, one has been fasting for the amount of time they've been asleep (hopefully ~8 hours) plus the time between their dinner and bedtime.  If we say that it has been 10 hours since they last ate, then I imagine we can agree it's high time this person had something to eat.  Yet, many people skip breakfast, despite having fasted for this length of time for which they'd never fast while awake.  Assuming this person doesn't skip his or her morning coffee (a fair assumption) his or her body will have been craving calories throughout the night, the morning routine, all the way up to entering the coffee shop.  So wanting a high calorie drink will be a thermodynamic matter of course.  The calorie sources in the drinks we looked over, however, are high-butterfat cream (~36% butterfat or more, compared with ~28% for the cream used in ice cream) and sugar.  Most would never eat high-fat ice cream for breakfast, but some people, evidently, are happy drinking it for breakfast, provided it has 150 mg of caffeine to amplify the buzz, which will turn to a rotten sluggish insulin crash and subsequent craving for more caffeinated sugar in a few hours, depending on individual metabolic rates.
If this all weren't bad enough, nobody thinks of these drinks as a meal, despite the calorie content.  They think of these drinks as just that.  This poses the twin dangers of making people cavalier about drinking them, and causing people to neglect the calories they've taken in through these drinks when making other food and exercise choices.  If people did wind sprints and push-ups for an hour after drinking these caffeinated milkshakes and ate chicken and brown rice for dinner, there would be less concern regarding the consumers and the beverages.  Drinking a Freddo while sitting behind a desk for 8 hours and going home to pizza and beer, however, means atherosclerosis, hypertension or type-2 diabetes are patiently waiting, as it won't be long until their arrival.

First Post!

See title.