Time Capsule #17: instant coffee

You could get a cup of coffee on Main Street for what? 10 cents? a nickel?

The Hop snack bar served bilge-water coffee in paper cups for something like that.

I think I must have had a cup of milky coffee and a sprinkled-sugar donut for breakfast through most of junior year.

Fifty+ years of espresso, cone-drip, and any number of flash-in-the-pan brewer gizmos like Nespresso later, that old thin brown beverage seems hard to call "coffee." Who could have imagined then Starbucks' $9.4 billion empire, espresso machines in every convenience store, and bikini barista drive-thru shops on the county road?

Since we were college students, there was often the need for a caffeine jolt in the middle of the night when everything was closed down. It would be 2 in the morning and even DCR was off the air, the 10-page paper was due at 9, and you were only on page 3.

Make a cup of Nescafé. Or two.

Gulp it down and back to the typewriter for spilling a frantic logorrhea to the 5000-word end, no time or focus enough to try making sense.

Once, in a moment of mixed haste, folly, and deadline despair, Pete Bradley and I tried saving time by chewing up tablespoon-fulls of Nescafé granules. As you can well imagine, it wasn't a good idea.

It's a wonder us instant coffee freaks didn't burn those antique dorms down with our little immersible 1-cup water heater coils.

Get four or five of those things plugged in at the same time to the old knob-and-tube wiring, and the amp draw was probably close to sufficient for melting the cotton asphalt insulation. And all those stereos were plugged in, too.

Instant coffee wasn't new. Allied and German soldiers both warmed up and kept their eyes open with Nestlé's instant coffee made in Switzerland. After the war, Nescafé was marketed hard in the US, but my parents stuck with the old-fashioned metal percolator rig and the big brands like Folgers and Maxwell House.

Nescafé had a thicker feel in your mouth than the generic watery coffee of the late 60s, almost like espresso. There was something subliminally European about it.

Even more stimulating were amphetamines the girls at women's colleges had. Those were bolts of stay-wake lightning. Funny, around final exams, there were always procrastinators who were looking to lose a little weight.

Canned Heat warned in the first track of Side 2 of the "Boogie With Canned Heat" album. Here's "Amphetamine Annie:"

This is a song with a message
I want you to heed my warnin'
I wanna tell you all a story
About this chick I know
They call her Amphetamine Annie

She's always shovelin' snow
I sat her down and told her
I told her crystal clear
"I don't mind you gettin' high
But there's one thing you should fear
Your mind might think it's flyin', baby
On those little pills
But you ought to know it's dyin, 'cause"
Speed kills

Unlike poor speedin' Annie, I survived, --but just barely.

All that Nescafé and suppressed appetite gave me a heart murmur loud enough for the docs at the Manchester Selective Service physical exam center to rule me 4-F.

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