Apathy Sketchpad

Water is not great at dissolving coffee. Whenever I have coffee, the coffee appears to come out of solution and into suspension as the drink progresses, and then it sinks, so that the last mouthful is too strong. Maybe some people like it this way. Me, I don’t. I end up with a bitter aftertaste. I then want a quick mouthful of cola or juice or water or something to take this away. Even if I have really good coffee that dissolves really well, I still don’t much care for the aftertaste.

Now it seems to me that there is an awful lot of coffee sold these days in increasingly many ways. You can have it with cholocate, which I understand is called a ‘mocha’, and that’s great. Or you can have it squeezed into a single shot and call it an ‘espresso’. Or you can prefix almost any combination of syllables to ‘-ppucino’ and end up with some other variant of the stuff (except ‘al-’, when you end up with an actor, although I’ve little doubt that somewhere in America you can buy a coffee called an ‘alpucino’). But I’ve never seen a coffee that has a little something with it to take away the aftertaste. It’d have to be a liquid, because solids just don’t cut it, so the little biscuits are out. And what use is cream on top of the coffee? Surely it should be underneath it? I suppose I could use a straw and drink from the bottom, but that would seem strange.

I’d have thought someone in the huge and competitive coffee industry would have cracked this problem by now. I assume that since I don’t tend to drink much of the stuff, I’ve just missed it.

So could someone tell me what it is, please?