The people who say they need 3 cups of black coffee to start their day are just addicts with a high tolerance that experience mild withdrawal symptoms each morning.
If you feel like that, it’s your body crying for you to take a break.
If you like an occasional cup of coffee or energy drink to get through something, then that’s fine. But if you ever feel like one isn’t working like it used to, you should take a break from caffeine to reset your tolerance, not up the dosage like an addict.
James Hoffman has a great video about this with scientific analysis to prove it. Basically the people that claim they’re “coffee addicts” are often drinking something that isn’t caffeinated like one might expect. A good pour over has close to 80mg of caffeine in it, but a weaker Starbucks/gas station/K-cup/instant coffee has only 25-45~mg of caffeine per cup. You effectively need 3 cups a day to equate what you can get from 1 perfectly good quality cup of coffee. Even a Starbucks “double shot” is like drinking 7/8ths of a proper pour over. I have a lot of friends that are “coffee addicts” and drink 2-3 Starbucks a day.
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James Hoffman really is the endgame of coffee nerds. I love his stuff.
He does the thing I enjoy seeing most. It’s not just enough to drink coffee. We have to know about it from top-to-bottom. How to pull from it everything we can. His science the shit out of it is one of my favorite things. If you like his sort of “honed” approach to something and you like details like him I’d recommend AmmoNYC for car detailing. He’s like the James Hoffman of car cleaning. It’s not just enough to do something, but to tear it down and figure out how to do the process better with science and perfect it.
I’ve had a few of Ammo’s kids pop up in my recommendations, they’ve been great too.
And yeah, that’s the main reason I love coffee as much as I do. There’s so much to learn about it, so many ways you can tweak things. It’s fun.
Great recommendation - checking out his content now! I’ve been meaning to start detailing my car better
Careful of the car detailing path. It starts with things like learning to not swirl your paint and occasionally decontaminating it. Suddenly you have a $1500 steam extractor and $800 polishers. I’m not sure if drugs are better, but sometimes I feel like they’d be cheaper. The high I get from cleaning my cars, or cleaning others cars though is totally worth it. My biggest hurdle was just getting a polisher and putting polish to paint. I was scared as hell about messing it up, but sometimes you gotta stumble to run.