Week 7: Why Does It Taste So Bad When It Smells So *Good*?

Pop the kettle on, will you?

Hello again! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about stoking your curiosity, ignoring clickbait, remembering more of what matters, and, very occasionally, admiring a good carrot.

Tomorrow, I’ll have an interview with someone who has made a career teaching some of the most important skills for a more curious life: how to think and listen better.

But for now, I’d like to talk about a substance that was once so alarming to the general public that the composer Bach attempted to reassure it with the following line:

"If I couldn't three times a day, be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee, in my anguish, I will turn into a shriveled-up roast goat."

As an obsessive coffee-drinker, I think about coffee a lot. Usually in a banal way, like “ooh, I’m almost out, so I should definitely walk 5 miles through the driving rain to get some more because, priorities” and “how long’s it been since my last one? Can my body handle it or is that a really bad idea? And if it’s a really bad idea, shall I do it anyway?”

But recently, I’ve wondered about deeper things. For example, do I like drinking coffee - or do I like having drank coffee?

I certainly seem to like the taste of it, and get a huge sense of satisfaction from my first sip, that rich, adult cocktail of smoky bitterness that perfectly suits the sensual extravaganza of being outdoors. For me, tea feels like a four-walls drink, something comforting that evokes memories of warm socks, electric blankets and dozing off awkwardly in your chair in front of Eastenders.

In contrast, coffee doesn’t feel comforting. It’s not there to make friends with you. You drink coffee to step up, not wind down. Coffee is unsympathetic to your needs and if you don’t regulate your consumption of it, it will hijack your brain and turn it into the equivalent of a full-volume, nonstop loop of Nyan Cat - for hours.

Ah, that delicious, jittery state of having-had-coffee. The buzz of the caffeine, the rightness of how the day feels afterwards, the way its aftertaste can last all morning if I made it strong enough.

And yet I remember a time I really hated the stuff, same way I really hated my very first taste of beer in my early teens.

Why…doesn’t that feel weirder to me? Has my coffee-addicted brain rewired itself so much that when I think I love the taste, I actually love the effect of being psychoactively drugged? And if so, does coffee actually, objectively taste any good, full stop?

Here’s a related mystery about the taste of coffee: a fair few people like it, but in my experience, everyone loves the smell of it. I have met people who deeply hate drinking coffee, who find the stuff brackish and foul, and yet will twitch their nostrils above a freshly-opened bag of ground coffee and say, “ohhhh, that smells fantastic!”

But I thought taste and smell were basically the same thing (which is why you can’t taste anything if you hold your nose)? And just how different is the smell of coffee to the taste of it - and why is that?

Time to stop and investigate all this properly.

I’m starting here (above), with the latest book from Candace, with whom I chatted about stillness a few weeks back. She’s spent years professionally nerding out on this topic - yet I’m not even sure if her taste-buds can be trusted here. Take her first experience of trying coffee, from her gorgeous Longreads piece on the subject:

That makes me wonder: does Candace actually like drinking coffee, or has her brain been drug-programmed in the same way mine might have been? Hell, do any of us actually like the taste of this thing?

I need answers.

But really, I’m hoping to find better questions. After spending my entire adult life pouring gallons of coffee down my gullet, I’ve never taken a long, hard look at it. I could chase this topic in all sorts of directions (“is coffee bad for our health?” is an evergreen newspaper headline) but I’ll restrict myself to looking at the taste vs. the smell of it. That should be more than enough.

Like when I was looking into my late dad’s colour-blindness, I’m hoping there’s a lot here that I don’t yet know I don’t know. That would be…deeply stimulating.

More soon.

Images: Mukul Wadhwa; Max D. Photography; Candace Rardon/Longreads.