There used to be an unusually excellent coffee shop a short walk from my apartment, kind of a hipster hovel with MassArt student last-minute collages on the walls and amazingly shitty stream-of-consciousness photocopy zines sitting in piles near the windowsill. It was far too small for the number of people it attracted, but this made it a pretty awesome place to hang around and eat at.
They did good bagels and breakfast burritos, but holy ducknuts did they brew a good cup of joe. Their pumpkin coffee will haunt me forever. It has destroyed the fragile illusion I once held that Green Mountain coffee was not a steaming cup of horse piss.
Eventually they went out of business and were replaced by a Wallgreens, and like huddles of crack addicts evicted from an abandoned bowling alley jonesing caffeine addicts poured into the Store 24's, Dunkin Donuts and awkward-ass vietnamese coffee houses in a futile death march, an abyssal foreversearch for what we had never appreciated enough and for what our sinner's flaps would never again taste.
As I sip a cup of shitty, bitter Starbucks via instant coffee, I wonder if it's time to just give up on this fucking stuff for good or if there is a secret brew hidden in plain sight I have overlooked in my meandering, ghastly failquest.
Dunkin Donuts is pretty decent coffee but it is wildly inconsistent and really, when I take a step back from it, it is still not very good as a drink. The best I've had since is this stuff that Parker's Maple Barn, a delightful sapping farm/breakfast joint on the NH border, sells in maple-infused baggies.
Beyond that it is all pretty fucking terrible so far.
Is there hope
