Ashe Mountain Times

One of the things that I find increasingly peculiar as I get older is how selective my memory can be.

For instance, I can remember exactly where I was and who I was with when I experienced my first serious kiss. But when did I start drinking coffee? I cannot narrow that one down to even a year. Was I 14 when java became part of my morning routine? Or was it more like 22?

I drink coffee just about every single morning, and I can't tell you when and where I first got hooked on the stuff. That's just sad. Somewhere, there's a monthly meeting held by the leaders of the Conniving Coffee Cartel where they gloat and giggle while someone reads aloud the confessions of caffeine addicts such as myself.

Before I became a coffee drinker, I was an enthusiastic proponent of starting the day with a healthy beverage. Oh, there was orange juice, apple juice and the occasional "instant" breakfast made by stirring something not quite chocolate-y into a glass of milk.

Sometimes my morning beverage of choice would simply be the milk leftover from a bowl of cereal. In those days I was quite the connoisseur of this type of beverage and can still remember which brands of cereal made the best leftover milk to drink. Coco Puffs, delicious. Fruity Pebbles, strange color yet drinkable. Cap'n Crunch, avoid at all costs.

All of these morning beverages were kicked to the curb once I became a coffee drinker. Sure, I'll have the occasional thimble full of orange juice or grapefruit juice, for the sake of appearances. But those are just palate cleansers to prepare my mouth for the next big swig of coffee.
 
I'm not, however, one of these coffee drinkers who feels compelled to spend inordinate amounts of time inside coffee houses. Sure, I'll occasionally stop by one of the coffee houses in the High Country to pick up a morning Joe on my way to work. But apparently I'm just not hip enough to bring a laptop to a coffee house and stay there for hours at a time.

Personally, I don't think I could get too much serious work done in a coffee house. There's too much noisy bean-grinding, smoothie-blending and foam-creating going on. If you close your eyes in a typical coffee house, you could easily imagine yourself inside a combination high school shop class and dentist's office ... not the best place for my writing muse to get its quill a-working.

Whenever I do go into a full-scale coffee shop, I always end up in line behind one or two hipsters ordering beverages so complicated that the barista has to have a Ph.D. in chemistry just to pull it off. Seriously, if your favorite hot beverage has more ingredients in it than a sweet potato casserole, you may be taking the whole caffeine-ingestion process a little too seriously.

Me, I like to keep it simple. I like my coffee to taste like coffee ... and a little cream ... and a little sugar. I know, I know. There are plenty of "make mine black" readers out there calling me Little Lord Fauntleroy for the cream and sugar thing. That's cool. At least I'm not masking that hearty coffee flavor with something like peppermint, cinnamon or pumpkin pie.

These days, I am more likely to purchase a cup of Joe from a convenience store than from a coffee shop. But it wasn't always that way...

Back when I lived in downtown Boone, I was a regular at beansTalk, a coffee house on King Street near Appalachian State. I became friends with the owner, Greg Swedberg, and several of his employees. In addition to serving some of the best coffee around, beansTalk was a gathering place for writers, artists, musicians and other creative types looking for kindred spirits.

Greg sold beansTalk about the same time I moved from downtown Boone. And in the intervening years I've only entered the business a handful of times. I interviewed Wil Bryan when he reopened beansTalk in 2007, and his excitement about making it a hub of the downtown community was palpable. Bryan's beansTalk was the third incarnation of the iconic coffee shop, and for now it looks like it might be the last.

Like many others in Boone, I was saddened to learn of beansTalk's closing last weekend. I hope that another intrepid entrepreneur, such as Wil or Greg, will reopen the shop, but I also understand that it is tough to succeed in the coffee house business. You're selling a product that goes for a couple of dollars, and you have to compete with chain coffee shops and fast food restaurants. And I know for a fact that when the economy is down and people have less expendable coin in their pocket, those stops for gourmet coffee are some of the first expenditures to be jettisoned.

So, farewell for now, good old beansTalk. Downtown Boone will miss your coffee and conversation.