I know I am going to ruffle a lot of feathers with this, but I will go ahead and say it.

Coffee should not taste like a candy bar. Coffee was created by God to be like a 90-year-old widower.

Lonely and bitter.

I went back to the kitchen at our church this morning to get myself a cup of coffee before the service started.

I found the coffee and the sugar, but had to search for creamer that wasn’t powdered. Pretty sure the main ingredient in that stuff is sawdust.

So, I opened the refrigerator and there they were. The church’s collection of frou-frou coffee creamers.

There was a caramel macchiato, a chocolate-covered peanut butter, and a Snickers bar. No regular creamer. You know, the kind that comes from a real cow instead of a lab somewhere.

It used to be that you could drink coffee two ways. Black and with milk. Not even cream. Just a jug of lukewarm, plain 2% milk that’s been sitting out on the counter all day

I’m not sure when flavored creamers came into being. Maybe it was when Starbucks spread across the country, offering customers gourmet liquid treats like cold brew funnel cake white chocolate passion fruit macchiato. With oat milk.

Don’t even get me started on oat milk. Of almond milk or whatever nut scientists have squeezed the juice from and mixed with a bunch of crap to make it look sorta’, kinda’ like milk.

I hate to break it to you folks, but you can’t milk an almond. Yeah, it looks sorta’ like milk. It’s white and liquid, but that is where the similarities end.

Just because it ‘looks like’ milk doesn’t make it milk.

Gasoline and green tea look the same when you pour them in a Flintstone’s jelly jar glass but one is nasty and the other one is even nastier. You decide which.

It’s hard to find just plain, good ole American coffee these days. The way God intended it to be.

You can get it at Waffle House. Hopefully served by a woman wearing a hair net named Madge.

That’s when you know you’re getting the good stuff. When it’s poured into a four-pound ceramic mug by a woman named Madge. Ask her for some Twinkie-flavored oat milk, and you can be sure she spits in your eggs.

Or you can get real coffee at one of those old convenience stores that still have that glass pot sitting on a burner all day. Black for regular. Red for decaf.

Now that’ll put hair on your knuckles.

Coffee wasn’t created to be tasty. It was supposed to be the fuel that fired American industry and military might.

You think coal miners drink Lavender Honey Frappuccino’s? No- they want something that looks and tastes like a liquefied version of that stuff they’re digging out of the ground.

You think the soldiers in WW2 drank that sissy Starbucks swill? Heck no.

I can imagine what it would have been like after the Battle of the Bulge if American GI’s sat around a campfire, drinking Frappuccino’s?

I wonder what that conversation would have been like.

“Hey, Sarge! Pass me a cup of Joe.”

“Okay, Private. Would you like that with Frosted Ginger Cookie Dough or Twix Peppermint Patty?”

It would be at this point that the troops packed up their rifles and just went home. Any country that drinks Frosted Gingerbread Cookie Dough creamer ain’t worth defending.

And real red-blooded American men don’t drink or eat anything that says Pumpkin Spice on the label. That’s an insult to our grandmothers who grew her own pumpkins and baked them into a pie like the Good Lord intended.

Real men drink coffee in only two ways. Black or with a little shot of milk. From a cow, not a nut.

Back in the church’s kitchen, I stirred a couple of packets of sugar into my coffee and took a big, long swallow from my styrofoam cup.

It tasted like something made by boiling old tires in creek water. It was terrible.

Just the way God intended.