Are you aware of caffeine? This month, which is March, has been dubbed Caffeine Awareness Month by the Caffeine Awareness Alliance, and we are bringing awareness to the little known compound.
Now, you’re probably saying, “Sprudge, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but isn’t the Caffeine Awareness Group the one accused of ‘selling a bogus way to satisfy court-ordered community service requirements by doing little more than taking an online quiz’? And didn’t their founder, Marina Kushner, author of a number of books containing some combination of the words coffee, caffeine, addict, and truth, plead guilty to those crimes and was given, ironically enough, 500 hours of community service?” To which we would respond, “Yes and yes, we are well aware. There’s a lot to be aware of.”
Nonetheless, we too believe it’s high time caffeine receives a little awareness. Aware of what? Its mere existence? It’s stimulant effects? That it is so inextricably linked to coffee that its very name is derived from the drink? Yes to all of that and more. And what better way to bring awareness that by highlighting some of the times that we were perhaps a little too aware of caffeine. (Everyone has a caffeine sensitivity if they try hard enough).
Here are our stories. Our stories of caffeine awareness.
Talk About Psychedelic
I once decided it would be a good idea to drink an entire 850g Chemex of Robusta. This is the amount of (Arabica) coffee I drink every morning and so I figured, being the big strong coffee man that I man, what’s a little Robusta between friends? Complicating my judgement even further was the fact that the coffee was really fucking good. An anaerobic fermented Robusta grown in the Krông Năng district of Vietnam’s Đắk Lắk province and roasted by Nguyen Coffee Supply, the coffee was so good in fact that it was the competition coffee for Maya Nguyen (no relation) and the first Robusta to be used in the US Barista Championship.
And so it was with great arrogance that I gulped down the entirety of the delicious Chemex, completely unaware of the journey I was soon to embark upon. This was not one of those I drank too many shots of espresso at Expo and now my stomach hurts sort of overcaffeination. No. Within a matter of minutes, the edges of all things attenuated themselves to a different vibrational frequency. I felt the universal hum. My third eye had opened and was acutely aware of caffeine.
– Zac Cadwalader, Sprudge Managing Editor
Sleepless In Seattle
I was at my first big coffee festival, the 2018 SCA Expo in Seattle. I was just a new content creator at the time, and I wanted experience all the hype of being at an event. I was so excited, but I really didn’t know what to expect, and the event was so, so big, I was honestly unaware of how many ways there were for people to serve you coffee. The La Marzocco booth, the Pacific Barista booth, the macadamia nut milk booth. Pretty soon I was 14 shots deep on day one, and I was absolutely buzzing. Honestly I felt like I was the Spongebob meme, you know the one where he’s in a daze? I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t do drugs, but this was the closest I’ve ever had to an out of body experience. I had to eat a lot of waffles and drink a lot of Topo Chico to come back down.
— Gio Fillari, Sprudge Contributor @_coffeefeed
Loaf Lounge Lament
Recently I was back in my hometown of Chicago. A friend mentioned I’d be near a bakery called Loaf Lounge, which, along with great breads and sandwiches, served a chocolate cake whose recipe had been made famous on the TV show “The Bear.” Though I’m a fan of restaurants, Chicago, and yelling, I unfortunately haven’t gotten around to watching The Bear yet. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have found myself halfway through a slice of their fantastic chocolate cake at 11pm one evening before I identified the distinct, delicious flavor of coffee—from the the 1 1/4 cups of coffee that go into this cake recipe.
— Liz Clayton, Sprudge Associate Editor
Matcha Most Malicious
In 2016, in New York, I drank my first matcha latte. I naively thought matcha had a similar amount/effect of caffeine to other teas—which don’t affect me—and halfway through, I experienced my mistake. My mouth and brain were out of sync, I was shaking uncontrollably, and knew I needed food, stat. Looking up, I saw David Buehrer (from Houston!), who found some noodle soup nearby, and my over-caffeination was thankfully tempered.
— Jenn Chen, Sprudge Editor at Large
Warped By The Third Wave
At the Stumptown Coffee Ace Hotel cafe in Portland, in the 2009-ish area, I was working as a manger—sorry, assistant manager—and the baristas I worked with could visibly see I was losing it. There were two espresso machines and I would have been tasting shots all day. We’re talking probably 10 espressos. You keep trying espressos—your own espressos, other barista’s espressos, trainees espressos—because we were dialing in all day long and making sure they were up to Stumptown standards. Back then we were trained to overfill the portafilters, so high that it looked like “mountains”, and then brush brush brush it all on the floor, which is where the original term “sprudge” comes from. This was before scales, before weighing out shots. Eventually my co-workers at the shop would have to be like, “Robyn, would you like to have a cookie?” They meant I was totally freaked out. They meant “Robyn, you NEED to have a cookie.” It was funny, but I did not see the humor until later… after I had eaten that cookie.
— Robyn Brems, Sprudge Partnership Manager
Milanese Melee
I once drank eight espressos in an hour in the name of journalism. It was 2013. This was within the first year of us doing Sprudge full time, and I was in Milan for an event called DC Campus as part of a Dalla Corte reporting commitment. It wasn’t our first time in Milan (we had gone to HOST in 2012) but on this visit I wanted to go to all the cafes, get incredible service, and take photos of the amazing old baristas. After a wild hour visiting cafes across Milan I felt unspooled because of the truly Italian robusta arabica blends that I consumed. But they were all delicious (with a few exceptions we talk about in the story). It was a great time. I got my steps up, I got the caffeine sweats, and I felt beautiful.
— Zachary Carlsen, Sprudge Co-Founder
Colombian Calamity
The year was 2012. There I was, in the hills an hour outside of Medellin, Colombia, attending an event called Let’s Talk Coffee, hosted by the green coffee importer Sustainable Harvest. One of the interesting activities at the event was an opportunity to attend a coffee cupping hosted by Dr. Sunalini Menon, focusing on her work in the field of Fine Robusta. I had been to many coffee cuppings by then (and Sprudge had hosted some memorable ones), but I’d never cupped robusta before. Today people are talking a lot more about quality robusta but 13 years ago this was a less common discussion, which we found exciting (and still do) and so we dove in with two spoons.
I reviewed the content we produced from this event, and while there’s a lovely video that Zachary produced, there is no accompanying written article. That is because, after cupping my way through two tables worth of robusta, I was overcome with caffeine overconsumption to point of ill health. My heart felt like it was going to explode out of my chest like a cartoon wolf. It wasn’t a panic attack—at least not at first—until I started trying to figure out where the nearest Antioquian hospital might be located in case I had an aneurism. Within a few hours the madness passed, and I was restored to full reportorial vitality by a visit to Sevan’s Grill and an accompanying dram of Ron Zacapa. But this experience made me aware of caffeine in a way I hope to never equal, here in the annals of Caffeine Awareness Month.
—Jordan Michelman, Sprudge Co-Founder
