Car Camper

Can You Love Bad Coffee?

I have a passion for great coffee and tea. I have not really mentioned tea here yet, but I intend to down the road. Great tea was out of the question while I was living in my car, as it’s rarely served anywhere in cafes and there are so very very few tea shops. I will leave more on tea for another post, though.

Today, I made a cup of coffee for myself using canned evaporated mill. I sweetened it with my usual product, DiabetiSweet which is, in my opinion, the best artificial sweetener in the world. DiabetiSweet does not contain aspartame, saccharin, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol, maltodextrin, or dextrose. DiabetiSweet is sweetened with Acesulfame-K, a high intensity non-nutritive sweetener. It also contains Isomalt, a heat-stable bulking agent that adds volume to cakes, breads, and other recipes. Again, DiabetiSweet does not contain aspartame, saccharin, sucrose, fructose, sorbitol, maltodextrin, or dextrose.

It measures like sugar, and unlike all the other non-sugar sweeteners I’ve tried, it works perfectly in hot as well as cold uses, both in beverages such as coffee or tea and in baked goods. According to Wikipedea: Acesulfame potassium is a calorie-free artificial sweetener, also known as Acesulfame K or Ace K (K being the symbol for potassium), and marketed under the trade names Sunett and Sweet One. In the European Union, it is known under the E number (additive code) E950.^[1] It was discovered accidentally in 1967 by German chemist Karl Clauss at Hoechst AG (now Nutrinova).

Now, this is not a post about artificial sweeteners, though I might do one later. However, I’ve been out of DiabetiSweet for a long time. I just got a case in and now, I ran ou

t of both half and half and milk. BAH. So, I made my morning coffee today with a combination of DiabetiSweet and Evaporated Milk. (Not sweetened condensed, just evaporated.) Yes, I drink my coffee light and sweet. Actually, I go back and forth depending on my taste at the tine between black and light and sweet. Drinking my coffee with evaporated milk this morning triggered major taste memories for me!

For almost all of the 80s and part of the 70s, I lived aboard a catamaran (two hulled sailing boat) in the Caribbean, moving from island to island as the mood and season moved me. On most of these islands and, indeed on my boat which had no refrigerator, coffee was usually sweetened with canned condensed milk. It’s a favorite all over the Caribbean and Central and South America.

I am now completely hooked on drinking my coffee this way, Down in the Caribbean, I usually drank the local bean which ranged from fantastic in some islands such as Puerto Rico and Jamaica to the truly miserable in I won’t name where. Mostly it was all mixed with condensed milk if you wanted it anything but black. As with office workers who come to prefer coffee lightened with Powdered Coffee Lightner, I and many others have developed a taste for coffee made specifically with sweetened condensed milk! This extends to the point, in fact, that I even miss the out and out sour coffees that where served in the area, even occasionally the horrid instant coffees! I love great, properly and recently roasted Arabica coffee. how is this possible?

What are your secret coffee loves? And other secret likes  in general?