I’m curious about the widespread affection our society has for a regular no-fuss cup of joe. With apologies and a warm heart for those who adore the stuff, I’ve started to ask why, exactly, people like bad coffee so much.

Because fuck your pretentious clover-blessed Costa Rican peach fuzz, bitch. Here, try this on:

Innocently, I explained that I could make her an americano or a Clover (a kind of automated reverse French press, prepared by the cup and now owned by Starbucks). I added that the espresso we were pulling that day was from a small farm in Costa Rica, and that the best offering on Clover was the Kenyan, which tasted like fuzzy peaches.

1) You know what coffee made in a Clover tastes like? Coffee. You know what it costs like? A microbrew.

2) You know what Costa Rican coffee tastes like? Battery acid. You know what? I'll bet you could make that in your precious Clover, too.

3) You know what's bullshit? This is bullshit. You know what else is bullshit? This is.

You know what "bad coffee" is code for? Pretense-free coffee. See, I grind $10lb beans that are fresh and I pour boiling water over a #2 filter into a thermos and I call it "coffee." You? You call that shit a "pour-over" and you charge me $5.50 and you have a fucking Vimeo clip of it. Just in case you missed it, you just charged me a half a pound of coffee to make me a cup of coffee the same way I make it at home.

...and then you're going to expect a tip.

So no. I don't want a fucking "Americano." And no. I don't need you to justify your fucking $11,000 coffee machine. Because here's the secret:

If your beans are any good, you fucking with it just makes the coffee worse.

THAT is why Starbuck's bought Clover. They didn't want you to get used to the idea that a machine can make better coffee than a person, and by coming up with an $11,000 coffee maker, Clover opened up the artisanal bullshit tap on automation and that leads to a bunch of automated Kuerig-powered Redboxes sitting at the corner, not Starbuck's.

So for those of you who know that all your Torani and all your whipped milk and all your $46 buy-one-here Chemex bullshit with its leather thong simply masks the fact that your beans are stale, kindly fuck off and stop pretending that coffee made without pretense, without excessive banging about on the Gaggia and without dripping fucking teddy bears into my foam is a sin.

It's a drip, not an Americano. It's a large, not a venti. And if it's any goddamn good, you can microwave it that afternoon because if coffee really were that fucking sensitive it sure as hell wouldn't have caught on in the middle ages.