Stare deeply into the inky black depths of your coffee cup. What do you see? Do you see aa tool to get you through your day? Do you see a wonderful cup of the combined efforts from hundreds of farmers roasters and craftsmen along the way. By looking into this cup of joy can you tell how much it cost?

If you are like me you see both but you need the former, and enjoy the latter that much more because of it. I need coffee to function, and thanks in large part to my kids this is no longer a joke. Late nights, fitful sleep. Its all there as part and parcel of being a caffeine dreamin dad.

Coffee as a tool gets me up in the morning, powers me through meetings and peels my eyes back to enjoy the wonders of late night TV.

But on the flip side, coffee as a hobby makes me, and pushes me to drink the best. I want to know what a good sumatran coffee feels like, smells and tastes like. I want my pallette to be refined enough to pick out the nuances of a medium roasted yiggacheffe, and all its tasty goodness.

I feel that I have positioned myself in such a fashion that I can enjoy the hobby coffee when funds and circumstances allow, but work with the tool coffee to sip as I work.

Still bad coffee is bad coffee, and I find myself deep in the midst of a paradox. I don’t want to be someone who turns his nose up at an offered coffee just because it came out of a can, and wasn’t hand picked by virgins in papua new guinea… because hell this is a Thursday you know. Thursdays are always espresso.

Coffee is about experience. My family and your family drink coffee, be it, black, sweetened, overly creamed and from an ancient pot. They drink it at parties, over dinner or just because. If you come to my house you will get good coffee, but if I go to your house all I need is good company.

In short I don’t want to be a coffee snob, but I still want to enjoy the snobby goodness of a well prepared ristretto when the situation calls for it. What say you good coffee people of the internet? Do you turn your nose up at an offered cup, or do you drink the scene in? I find myself constantly struggling with this.