I've kicked caffeine.......again.
My quick story:
My first foray into steady coffee drinking started in 1990 when working as a waiter and gulping the stuff during the morning shifts to chase hangovers (I was 20 at the time) and always with cream. I was co-owner of a small coffeehouse a few years later for a few years and hooked a tube from our Rancilio 3 group semi-auto to my veins with all the espresso drinks I could drink. For home consumption, I roasted and ground my own beans and had a Rancilio PID'd Silvia and a Macap M4 stepless grinder both of which I sold a few years back to use the money for a new hobby..........razors. Since then, it's been the french press. 8-9 measures of a 2 Tablespoon measuring spoon/16-18 tsp of grounds used per day. I quit for a few years some time back but a nice double cap on a vacation got me sliding back into it.
Why did I quit again? Sure caffeine isn't an opiate or nicoteine but I always have the following problems with it:
- The skull wrenching headaches if I didn't regulate my caffeine intake. I would generally drink more on the weekends since I didn't drink crap office coffee and then have troubles on Mondays or when I'd travel for business involving all day car travel and waking up at 4 am, I'd sometimes have to down a lot of coffee and have a rebound headache the next day or two.
- Coffee never made me jittery. I've always been able to drink most any volume of coffee right before bed and sleep just fine. In fact...
- Aside from a "lift" that would last about 30 minutes, coffee would make me MORE tired not less. This would lead to a continuous battle since the remedy my brain seemed to suggest was to drink more coffee!
So, I guess at this point, I'm completely clean.:)
Chris L
