Put The Cream In First Before You Pour The Coffee
CAFFEINE CHEAT CODE
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I am not here to tell you how to make coffee. (I already did this.) I am not here to tell you what coffee you should be drinking. I am not here to tell you that you should be drinking more or less coffee. I'm not even here to tell you that you should or shouldn't be drinking your coffee with milk or cream.

Hot. Cold. Cream. No Cream. Freshly ground. Freeze-dried. These are all matters of personal preference, which I respect. But if you do add milk or cream, there is one thing that I firmly believe will objectively improve your coffee-drinking experience.

Pour the cream in before you pour the coffee.

I think I was 10 or maybe 11 when I had to rake the leaves for the first time on account of my family moving into a house with an actual lawn and actual trees we actually had to maintain ourselves instead of the condo association hiring a landscaping company to do all of that stuff.

Since I was 10 or maybe 11 and didn't really know much of anything, much less how to rake leaves (because, as I mentioned earlier, I had never done that before), within a few seconds of handing me the rake my dad told me I was doing it all wrong.

"Let the rake do the work for you," he told me. That didn't make much sense. How could a rake, a thing with no moving parts, work for me? I mean, c'mon, it's a big stick with a piece of plastic attached to the end. And so I just kinda stared at it like an idiot, wondering how I might unlock The Secrets Of The Rake.

That's when my dad removed the rake from my hands and then demonstrated how if you hold the rake the right way you can use leverage to make the raking action easier. Instead of pulling with both arms like a moron, one arm can pull and the other can push and the rake does the work for you, see, it's easy.

Putting the cream in before the coffee is letting the rake do the work for you. As you are all seasoned coffee drinkers, you know that normally you pour the coffee and then pour a little cream in and then stir it up, and if you feel like you need some more you can pour some more and so on.

But if you pour the cream in first and then add the coffee, everything stirs itself. You don't have to get a spoon dirty or find a place to throw out a stirrer. Brew your coffee. Find a mug. Pour a little cream into the mug. Pour coffee into the mug. Hey, look at that, your coffee is already stirred and ready to drink.

It's such an elegant solution to combining cream and coffee that when I go out to buy a coffee and see people using a stirrer for like maybe two seconds and then throwing it out at the cream station it just seems so backwards. I mean, if you go to some fancy coffee places they give you whole freaking spoons for the sole purpose of stirring beverages. C'mon, that seems just a little excessive when you could just pour in the cream before the coffee and save yourself the additional labor of stirring your beverage and also the additional labor of the staff having to collect the dirty spoons, wash them and then restock them. It's so outrageous that I feel we're five years away from people saying things like, "Hey, do you remember when everyone used to use coffee stirrers? That was pretty weird right?"

I will admit that this radical technique of coffee preparation does introduce the possibility that you might add too much cream. You might argue that the whole point of putting the cream in after the coffee is so you can accurately gauge how much cream your coffee needs. I will concede that overdoing it on the cream is a definite possibility that perhaps has happened to yours truly on a number of occasions. Still, I would counter that with practice you'll be able to land on the right amount of cream even without the coffee there to guide you, and any instances of adding too much or too little cream — because to err is human, right? — will be easily eclipsed by how much time and effort you're saving in the long run.

Maybe this is something that everyone already does but just never talks about because it's so obvious. When I was learning how to drive, my mom challenged me to see how long I could keep cruise control on by looking at the traffic ahead of me and using safe, predictable passing maneuvers around the slower cars. A few years later I posted this little personal revelation of mine, turning cruise control into a fun game, on an internet forum, and, of course, because it was an internet forum, some person responded, "Yeah we all do that you idiot c'mon what do you think you're special or something?"

Anyway: If you're going to do one thing this year, pour the cream in before you pour the coffee. It won't change your life, but it'll make things a little easier and I think we all could benefit from finding ways to make the dull grind of existence go slightly smoother.

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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