Blathr Wayne Lorentz

Todayʼs coffee is Costa Rica Decaf from Mod Cup Coffee in Jersey City.

How did I end up with coffee from New Jersey? I was thinking about hipsters. Remember them? They seem to have mostly disappeared now, but I figured if there were any still around, theyʼd live in Jersey because they got priced out of Brooklyn. Yep, there they are.

Even though this coffee is decaffeinated, it still kicks. This is a manly decaf, from back when men were real men and a shoeleather steak with a cup of black coffee was considered a light lunch. This coffee is so Italian it wants to drive Panzers into the Horn of Africa. This is a coffee that will lead you down a dark back alley and kiss you so hard that you wonʼt notice it lifting your wallet. And you wouldnʼt care if it did. But thatʼs OK, because I like my coffee the way I like my women: Aggressive and untrustworthy.

Todayʼs coffee is Hacienda Esmerelda Bourbon Pointu from Mod Cup Coffee in Jersey City, New Jersey. Why would anyone buy coffee from New Jersey? Thatʼs a tale for another page of the calendar. For today, letʼs just focus on the coffee.

Iʼll start by saying itʼs bad. Not bad in the way that James Brown was bad, or the way that playing hookie from school was bad. I mean bad as in I brewed two cups and threw the rest in the trash. And this is coffee that costs four times what I ordinarily pay for coffee. I didnʼt just want to stop drinking this coffee. I wanted to divorce this coffee, move to a new city, get plastic surgery, and change my name to get away from this coffee.

Mod Cup has a very long web page championing this coffee which starts out by proudly declaring that this is “A coffee so rare and revered that in 2016 even Starbucks could only get one small harvest of it.” Well then, it must be good, right?

No. Iʼm convinced that the reason Starbucks only got that small harvest is because it didnʼt want any more.

Hacienda Esmerelda Bourbon Pointu (Weʼll call it “Ezzy” for short) is described as “Citrus and floral.” when I drank it, I didnʼt get any floral, but I got an awful lot of citrus. Like lemon. Like someone couldnʼt decide if they wanted tea or coffee to drink, so the made both in the same pot at the same time. And then threw in some Halls cough drops because it wasnʼt lemony enough. And then threw in an actual lemon.

What kind of Citgo refinery fumes are wafting through Jersey City that someone thought lemon coffee was a good idea? This coffee reminds me of some of the women I dated in New Jersey: full bodied, sour, and likely to key your car for not noticing their new shoes.