A New Realm of Coffee: Exploring the Many Possibilities of Coffee
Coffee was once my greatest love! In elementary school I drank canned coffee, in junior high and high school I drank instant coffee, and in college and after entering the workforce I began to explore machine-brewed and pour-over coffee. At the height of my obsession, I would have a cup when I woke up and another before bed; even when buying snacks, if I came across anything coffee-flavored, I had no power to resist. Coffee candy, coffee egg rolls, coffee bread and cake, coffee ice cream... I loved them all! And coffee itself, needless to say, whether black coffee, fancy coffee, Vietnamese condensed-milk coffee, Hong Kong-style coffee with milk tea, Turkish coffee, Italian coffee, American coffee... I even once fantasized about opening a coffee shop! So even when buying books I never forgot the theme of coffee.
A Coffee Life That Began with Instant
In high school money was limited, so instant coffee was the first choice, and I tried to sample every flavor then on the shelves. Actually, it was only after I got into pour-over coffee that I understood that instant coffee holds the same rank in the coffee world as instant noodles do in the noodle family. Back then, before the first class every morning, I would use the hand-thrown bowl my brother made to brew a full bowl of instant black coffee, then sip it slowly during class. I considered myself a person of deep taste and charming, elegant manners, never suspecting that one day my math teacher would finally be unable to hold back and ask me: "Classmate, is your health very poor? How come I see you drinking Chinese herbal medicine soup every day!" That question, which made the whole class roar with laughter, left a heartbroken and indelible impression on me.
To be honest, I am a very slow person. I only knew that if something tasted terrible, I should not drink it again - for example, I never touch instant coffee now - but I never knew what the definition of delicious was. I simply wanted to smell the coffee aroma, taste the coffee flavor, and get a lift of alertness at the same time. And so, along the way, I shed convenience-store coffee and canned coffee and arrived at the choice between going to a coffee shop or grinding and brewing it myself. Of course, the rest space and sofas of a coffee shop have endlessly alluring added value, but unfortunately my pockets are always empty at times, and reality led me to choose brewing coffee myself. Besides being much cheaper, I gradually discovered that self-brewed coffee almost always wins out in both quality and freedom of flavor; the key point is enjoying that almost religious brewing process. Alas, my current regret is that I have not yet roasted coffee myself, and of course, from planting coffee beans to harvesting them is one of my future life goals, one among many!
Drinking and drinking, I never noticed what effect coffee had on me. I only thought that my life needed it, that without it I could not face the start of a day, and that lacking it I could not at all wake up sober to greet the night of that day; even in sleep, making dreams depended on it! Side effects? Besides urinating a lot, I suppose the only one was thinking that I still had not drunk enough coffee.
Why Is Coffee Grown with Shumei Natural Farming Different?
Then one day I bought a bag of Brazilian coffee beans grown with Shumei Natural Farming, and immediately ground them and brewed a pour-over to drink. Well, in terms of taste compared with ordinary chemically farmed coffee... I still could not really tell, only that it drank very refreshingly; beyond that I felt nothing special at the time. The funny thing was that after I drink ordinary coffee, the caffeine can keep me energized for 3 to 5 hours before I feel tired, but this bag of coffee had no effect at all, as if the caffeine had been extracted out. I still wanted to sleep. I tried drinking another cup. What I brewed was indeed coffee, right? It tasted like coffee and smelled like coffee, so why did it alone lack the stimulating effect? This left me utterly baffled.
I spent that day in a daze, and because I could not get energized I simply went to bed early. A few days passed like this, and my energy seemed to become a little better than usual. Strange - since this coffee could not rouse me, was it then because I had slept enough that my energy improved? So could it be that I did not need coffee to refresh myself, and only needed to go to bed earlier? This question now seems ridiculous and childish, but at the time, given the extent of my coffee drinking, I could be said to have long been addicted to caffeine!
This then explains why I needed to replenish coffee frequently, and why I clearly felt anxiety in my state of mind and a narrowing of my thinking perspective, easily falling into emotional dead ends and then bursting into anger or turning to depression. Especially every day at dusk, my feeling of fatigue was like a dam releasing a flood, almost bursting through the embankment to drown me. I could only choose to sleep a while first or drink another cup to face the beginning of my night, then after drinking and getting energized, stay up freely, and the next day repeat the same method, using coffee over and over to accompany me through every day awake.
I began to stop drinking coffee as an experiment, and tried to look for information on the side effects of drinking coffee. Sure enough, I found that caffeine can cause palpitations, sleep disturbances, headaches... and other symptoms. This solved one of my questions: it turned out I had fallen into the vicious cycle of coffee addiction. If I did not drink it, I wanted to sleep; after drinking it for a while, I was even more tired than if I had not drunk coffee, and my mood was also terribly bad. How strange - this cycle really was hard to notice and hard to escape! I probably started drinking too young, and the caffeine damaged my brain, and I have been stupid ever since. But my second question remained unanswered, namely why after drinking Shumei Natural Farming coffee I did not feel the aftereffects of chemically farmed coffee?
I guess the key to this question may lie in the naturalness of the growing process. Chemical cultivation inevitably involves chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and under such different treatment, the quality of the caffeine changes accordingly! For such a thing, I could find no information and no one could answer, and as with drinking water, one knows cold and warmth for oneself; one still has to taste it personally to understand. Fortunately, as far as I know, Taiwan, China already has 2 farms using Shumei Natural Farming, requiring no pesticides and no fertilizers, cultivating the good farmers whose natural coffee has the flavor it should have! Really, if you have not drunk it, you will not know what I am talking about. Please try:
Taitung Yunjing Coffee
Alishan Da Shou Ji Zou Coffee Beans
