News outlets really don’t want you to have any fun.
There have been a number of articles to come out recently that have really been giving the business to Third Wave Water, the new mineral capsules that optimize purified water for making coffee. The Independent, Thrillist, Eater, and The Blaze have all lined up to get in on the action, dubbing Third Wave Water “hipster buffoonery,” a sign that “the end must be nigh,” and even the means for how “hipsters manage[d] to ruin coffee.” All these hit pieces are based on the same article (or on an article about that article), a Gear Patrol piece that lacked the hipster polemic, strangely enough. There’s no reason to summarize all of them since they’re all basically the same article, but their general thrust can be accurately surmised by these two sentences from The Blaze:
You hear that, Joe Everyman? [Not to be confused with Joe or Everyman—ed.] Third Wave Water isn’t just a niche product for coffee enthusiasts, a specialized ingredient like those used by chefs. This is a declaration of war upon your very way of life. These damn kids are telling you that what you are doing is wrong. You like your coffee the way you’ve been making it for years now and these snowflakes with their PC culture and their participation trophies are mocking you!
Thank God for these articles. Otherwise I’d have never even known such a product was out there to get all worked up about.
Can we all just agree that different people have different interests? Not everyone needs to indulge in the subtleties of a thing for it to not be considered ridiculous. Maybe you like cooking so you buy a nicer olive oil, maybe you spend a little more on ammo when you go to the shooting range because it enhances your enjoyment, maybe you buy nicer tires because you enjoy driving. Maybe you like food media so you spend your time (which is valuable!) or sometimes even your money (NYT readers) reading content that rises above press release & reblog dreck churned out by miserable corporate food media toadies.
Or maybe you spend a few extra pennies to bring out the nuance in your coffee, for which water is the single most important ingredient. This bra bomb better work, nerdlinger!
And a quick numbers crunch here, just to make sure our outrage levels are commensurate with the crime being perpetrated: every $1 capsule of Third Wave Water creates a gallon of water for coffee. Assuming each cup of coffee is 12 ounces, it costs less than 10 cents per cup. Literally pennies a day. We got out the pitchforks for this?!
Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and it’s perfectly fine to think that getting this into water for coffee is silly; it’s certainly not for everyone. The deep recesses of most hobbies aren’t. But if something isn’t for you, don’t immediately start decrying it as the new way youth culture is destroying America or whatever the beef is; none of the articles were entirely clear on that part. And for websites and content mills purporting to champion flavor culture, or whatever, reblogging this kind of stuff with a sneer makes you roughly as relevant as the normcore foodies.
Or, if you are simply unable to just leave well enough alone and rest comfortably in the knowledge that while you may not get it, someone somewhere is deriving a small amount of joy in this topsy-turvy world, and you truly believe that using “hipster” as a pejorative in 2017 drives the viral load of your click-thru mindshare, you are more than welcome to fuck right the fuck off. That’s another option I’d advise you to explore vigorously.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
