I don’t know about you, but my solution to most bad days is picking up a cup of coffee at a local cafe or brewing my own at home. Whether it’s a flavored iced latte or a hot coffee with creamer, the caffeinated beverage will always put a smile on my face—or, at the very least, act as a hug in a mug when I’m down in the dumps.

Many people share this similar experience, reaching for a caffeinated pick-me-up before work or after a long day. Coffee seems to be a natural mood-booster for many people. I, for one, always feel better with a coffee in hand—and it’s not just because I fit the over-caffeinated writer trope. Coffee really does boost both our energy and our mood.

Have you ever wondered why? Like most things, science has an answer: Recent research in Nature Scientific Reports found that caffeine drinkers report a better mood within the first 2.5 hours of the day after a cup of coffee or tea. I mean, hey, it beats the hot glass of lemon water that many people swear by.

Does Coffee Actually Boost Your Mood?

While we already know caffeine tends to increase our energy and focus, many don’t realize it can also improve our mood.

“Caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors, which can increase dopamine activity in key brain regions—an effect that studies have linked to improved mood and greater alertness,” Professor Anu Realo of the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology and one of the study’s researchers said in a press release. 

According to the researchers, however, these positive effects might actually reflect reduced withdrawal symptoms. For example, an avid coffee drinker might feel irritable or lethargic when going long periods without caffeine. Once they taste that first sip of coffee, however, they’re back to feeling energetic and positive.

“Even people with moderate caffeine consumption can experience mild withdrawal symptoms that disappear with the first cup of coffee or tea in the morning,” Professor Realo stated in the press release.

But hey, if coffee is my worst vice, I’m totally okay with that. You can pry my iced latte from my cold, dead hands.

The Case of the Anxious Coffee Drinker

Many people assume that individuals with anxiety should steer clear of coffee and other caffeinated beverages, but according to the research, this isn’t always the case. Mood improved steadily across the board.

“We were somewhat surprised to find no differences between individuals with varying levels of caffeine consumption or differing degrees of depressive symptoms, anxiety, or sleep problems,” Justin Hachenberger from Bielefeld University and first author of the study said in the press release. “The links between caffeine intake and positive or negative emotions were fairly consistent across all groups.”

Now, I could’ve told you this myself, as someone who drinks upwards of four cups of coffee per day and is also arguably one of the most anxious people on this planet. But without fail, coffee always puts me in a better mood. 

Now, when my boyfriend tells me to “mix in some water,” I have science to back up my case.

The post Why Your Morning Coffee Puts You in a Better Mood, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

Before I quit caffeine, I looked at decaf coffee the way I looked at nonalcoholic beer. What the hell is the point? (For the record, I’ve since quit drinking, too, so the joke’s on me twice.)

A small new study from University College Cork has given me a slightly better answer. Researchers took 31 people who normally drank three to five cups of coffee a day and made them quit for two weeks. After that, half went back to caffeinated coffee, and the other half drank decaf, without knowing what they’d been given.

Once coffee was reintroduced, people in both groups reported lower stress and impulsivity. The caffeinated group also saw improvements in anxiety and attention. But the decaf drinkers did something the caffeinated group didn’t: They improved on two memory tests involving words and locations.

Scientists Found a Surprising Benefit of Decaf Coffee

Researchers think your gut could have something to do with it. Coffee contains more than a thousand compounds, and caffeine is only one of them. Coffee also contains polyphenols, plant compounds that gut bacteria happily eat. When researchers analyzed stool samples, the microbiome changed during the two weeks without coffee and changed again after coffee came back, regardless of whether it contained caffeine.

“But I guess the most surprising thing was that when we put coffee back, we also got really exciting effects by putting decaffeinated coffee back,” neuroscientist John Cryan, who led the work, said in a video about the study. He also pointed out that this was a small experiment. Thirty-one coffee drinkers is nowhere near enough people to rewrite everything we know about coffee, but it does make decaf harder to dismiss as sad brown water.

I have a personal reason for being interested in all of this. About a year ago, genetic testing showed that my body doesn’t process caffeine well. Around 95% of the caffeine you drink is metabolized by a liver enzyme produced by the CYP1A2 gene, and some people break it down much slower than others. I am one of those lucky people. Coffee on an empty stomach was stressing my body out. 

I thought I’d miss the caffeine. What I actually missed was the ritual: making coffee, drinking it hot, having that first cup in the morning. Decaf still gave me all of that.

And if this study holds up, there could be much more to coffee than the caffeine anyway.

The post Scientists Just Found a Surprising Health Benefit of Decaf Coffee appeared first on VICE.

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A few weeks ago, I met an acquaintance for coffee at a Cuban café attached to a downtown hostel, where people with backpacks of varying dimensions passed steadily through the lobby. He worked at a nearby university and had messaged me on LinkedIn saying he wanted to tell me about the campus and talk about teaching some night classes. Knowing academia and the speed at which it tends to move, I interpreted “talk about teaching” as something closer to perhaps someday, pending several committees and a minor geological event.

I ordered a large black iced coffee in a clear plastic cup with a black straw. After sitting for a few minutes, he asked if we wanted to turn this into a walking meeting. 

Somewhere between being handed a peel-and-stick visitor badge by a friendly security guard and being introduced to the dean with, “This is Ashlie, who I told you about,” I realized our casual coffee had become considerably more interview-shaped than I had anticipated.

I, meanwhile, was carrying a sweating plastic cup.

Thankfully, I had taken an extra napkin from the café. After being shuttled in less than half an hour between aggressive air conditioning, a muggy Chicago street and the temperate library, the cup had begun producing condensation at an alarming rate. I swaddled it in paper and successfully completed my introductions with a non-moist handshake.

All this to say, I understand why the question of whether iced coffee is unprofessional has taken over my feeds for the last several days.

By the time I reached the argument on Sunday — while scanning my phone on the train, heading, truly, to get another iced coffee — the original TikTok from a corporate recruiter warning that bringing one to an interview looked overly casual had migrated to LinkedIn. There, the discussion shifted from seven-part heroes’ journeys centered on skipping little luxuries like Starbucks to drink-based dominance theory. One piece of advice I encountered warned against accepting any beverage during an interview because doing so made you “the beta.”

I scoffed.

Soon, however, I started mentally moving my own cup through different rooms. Coffee-shop meeting: obviously fine. Conference table: Less so? Hot coffee: more professional somehow? Dunkin’, in one of its decidedly undemure pink-and-orange vessels? A tasteful local cup, perhaps communicating discernment and neighborhood loyalty?

Admittedly, my professional history makes me a poor control group. I have spent most of my career in newsrooms and restaurants; one restaurant poured me an iced coffee before we sat at the bar to discuss a front-of-house job.

Still, I eventually found the fear. My brain furnished the room immediately: C-suite office. Pristine mahogany desk. No coaster. One sweating plastic cup inching toward permanent damage.

The more I thought about the coffee, the less the coffee seemed to be the point. Professional life is crowded with micro-signals — clothes, cups, phones, tone, timing, posture — ordinary things that remain perfectly neutral until someone decides they are evidence of character.

Maybe this is why I have long treated “Ask a Manager” as both advice column and anthropological expedition behind the cubicle wall, where completely ordinary behaviors can become freighted with professional meaning. In one personally beloved 2015 post, readers confessed to cheerfully disappearing for two-hour lunches because the company had advertised Spanish classes, heading off to yoga in the middle of the afternoon because, well, yoga was offered, showing up to a board meeting in jeans and a hoodie, and maintaining what amounted to a full-service beauty counter in a cubicle, complete with makeup brushes and a plugged-in hair straightener.

Some of these people were not flagrantly blowing off work. They were trying, quite earnestly, to understand it. You said the company values work-life balance; I am therefore going to yoga. There is something almost touching about the literalism.

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The problem with unwritten rules, of course, is that some people have already been taught them.

A friend of mine once received paternal advice to retire his collection of personality socks until he had secured a job at a law firm. These were not, I should stress, shocking socks. They were J.Crew socks: tiny lobsters, reindeer, tasteful little acts of rebellion occurring mostly below the trouser cuff.

This is the maddening bargain at the center of so much professional advice: show personality, but not too much. Be memorable, but not for the wrong thing. Be yourself, but preferably the version of yourself who already knows how much of yourself this particular room permits.

“You don’t want to give them a reason to say no,” his father told him, “especially a dumb one.”

That wisdom becomes less funny the farther you stand from whatever a workplace has already decided looks like belonging. If you fall outside the traditional corporate default — by class, race, gender, disability, accent, education or simple familiarity with white-collar culture — more of those supposedly intuitive rules may have to be learned in real time.

And then there are people with enough status to become their own code. I once had a news director who, in the midst of marital issues, carried a guitar from cubicle to cubicle like the world’s saddest bard. Some found it charming, some unbearable, but in the end everyone shrugged: Well, he’s the boss.

Then the pandemic arrived and made the whole system stranger.

For a brief period, Americans thought very hard about what was behind their heads. A bookshelf became a statement. So did a plant. Room Rater built an audience scoring Zoom backgrounds for lighting, depth, art and visible cords; books themselves became set dressing.

This now feels faintly incredible. We were all amateur production designers of our own domestic lives.

And yet something did change. A dog wandering through frame became normal. So did a kitchen. A child interrupting a meeting became, depending on the meeting, either completely understandable or still mortifying. The rules did not disappear; they became even more dependent on that maddening instruction: read the room.

Which may be why we keep turning tiny behaviors into evidence of enormous generational shifts. Take the “Gen Z stare,” that supposedly blank look younger service workers give customers expecting a burst of social acknowledgment. I’m less concerned with whether a cashier performs delight at my arrival than with the more substantive question of whether younger workers had fewer chances to practice things like communication, adaptability and conflict resolution during a digital-first, pandemic-disrupted adolescence. Employers have reported concerns in precisely those areas, though those skills can also be taught and practiced.

There are rituals of professionalism whose disappearance I will survive. I do not require the personality socks to remain hidden. I do not need a service worker to beam. I do not believe hot coffee carries an innate moral seriousness unavailable to iced.

What I do think we owe one another is basic situational awareness.

There is an old Yiddish joke: the schlemiel spills the soup; the schlimazel is the person it lands on. My professional philosophy may amount to little more than avoiding becoming the iced-coffee schlemiel.

There is also an evergreen iced-coffee joke online: the person who arrives late blaming the train, fresh coffee still in hand. That, frankly, bothers me more than almost anything else raised in these etiquette debates. The coffee isn’t the problem. The suspiciously fresh coffee accompanying your late arrival might be.

Don’t put the sweating cup on somebody’s papers. Don’t make your convenience someone else’s inconvenience.

Bring the iced coffee. Just don’t be late because of it.

 

The post Is iced coffee really unprofessional at a job interview? appeared first on Salon.com.

As a part of Snack Shop series, Annie Arriaga investigates the latest and greatest viral snack shops in New York City to see if the hype is real, if the snacks are yummy, and if the spot is underrated, overrated, or perfectly rated.

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You’ve heard of a bar crawl, but what about a coffee crawl? One of the many beautiful things about New York City is that there are coffee shops on every corner, each one with its own specific vibe, specialty drink, and ambiance. When I heard Audrey Finnochario was coming from Rhode Island to shoot with us, I proposed we go on a coffee crawl through some of Manhattan’s most internet-popular coffee creations (with the Nitro Bar queen herself) to make the most of her visit to the Big Apple.

Read More >>

The word viral is overused (I’m guilty), but when it comes to the internet-iconic Rhode Island coffee shop The Nitro Bar, there’s no better way to describe the phenomenon. The Nitro Bar has three locations across the tiny state of Rhode Island, and all of them have an ever-growing line out the door at all times. Their TikTok and Instagram rack up crazy impression numbers, which has food businesses everywhere copying their marketing tactics. The genius behind it all: Audrey Finocchiaro, the co-owner and co-founder of the successful shop(s), which started as a humble little cart serving cold brew.

The videos and social media content that perform so well pretty much all showcase a Nitro Bar drink being made, with a specialty coffee syrup or some sort of flavored twist. Right now, their summer syrups include strawberry and caramelized banana (yum), while some off-season favorites include orange chocolate, black raspberry, and cherry vanilla. Customers wait in long lines year-round for anything and everything Nitro Bar— including me. When I lived in Boston a few years ago, I would hop on the commuter rail train to Providence and get their chocolate wafer iced latte and spend a rainy day sipping and snacking with friends. I’ve been a follower of Audrey and the Nitro Bar’s work for a while now, and was so happy to get her into the Food52 office.

Read More >>

As a part of Snack Shop series, Annie Arriaga investigates the latest and greatest viral snack shops in New York City to see if the hype is real, if the snacks are yummy, and if the spot is underrated, overrated, or perfectly rated.

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If you’re a matcha girlie like me, you’ve had more bad matcha than good matcha in New York City. Coffee shops often make the mistake of treating matcha like they treat coffee, but it’s much more complicated than that. Preparing matcha, in its most traditional form, is a special and sacred ritual done with mindfulness and intention. The quality of water used and the specific whisking technique varies depending on if it's meant to be made into a latte or drunk straight up.

Read More >>

For those days when you’re needing an extra skip in your step, try this Mocha Chia Pudding! It’s a rich, creamy, chocolaty, energizing, fiber-packed breakfast or snack.

It’s also easy to make with just 1 bowl, 7 ingredients, and 5 minutes hands-on prep time required! We think it’ll become a new grab-and-go, meal prep-friendly staple in your kitchen. Get your coffee brewing, let’s make chia pudding!

Creamy Mocha Chia Pudding from Minimalist Baker →

Two of my favorite flavors come together right here, in this Coffee Caramel Panna Cotta, which offers up the rich flavor of caramel with a few strong shots of espresso. I seem to have good caramel karma and when I baked professionally, the executive pastry chef at one restaurant told me that I was the one she wanted to make the caramel desserts since I had a knack for getting caramel just right.

While I was flattered, in reality, caramel isn’t that hard to make. Like riding a bike, or when you wake up one morning and they upgrade the software on your phone for whatever reason, there’s a learning curve. (However, I still haven’t figured out how to use my photo editing software. Someone recommended a book that’s a whopping 533 pages long, but honestly, can’t they just make these things more intuitive?)

Unlike unintuitive tech, once you get the hang of making caramel, you know the pitfalls and issues that can arise, and you’ll feel like a pro when you take a taste of the finished caramel dessert and realize – whether a chef tells you so or not – that you’ve done a good job. You are a good person, and I know you can do it, too!

Here I use a dry caramel with no liquid added; it’s just sugar. The picture above may look scary, as in “What do I do wrong?” But dry caramel is pretty foolproof. I’ve given tips on making caramel here, but the basic action starts with spreading the sugar in a wide pan or deep saucepan (use a good-quality one for best results as thin pots and pans don’t heat evenly), heating it until it starts to liquify, then stirring it gently as you go, until it’s completely liquified.

Once it’s liquified, keep gently stirring it, and start watching carefully as things will now move quickly and you want to pay close attention to what’s going on in the pan. Don’t let anything distract you as a few seconds can make all the difference. Make sure the warm cream ready to go.

The caramel quickly goes from what it looks like above, to what it looks like below. When the caramel is bubbly, amber-colored (the color of an old penny), and smells just slightly smoky – as in, if you let it go a few more seconds, it’ll burn – turn off the heat and immediately add the warm cream to stop the cooking.

You want to get it to just the right color, aroma, and flavor where it’s cooked enough so it’s in the middle ground between being not sugary sweet, but not burned either. (I recently did a caramel video tutorial on Instagram that you might find interesting where I explain and demonstrate it in detail.)

Once the caramel is done, and the cream has been added, it’s hard not to want to pour the caramel below in a bowl and spoon the whole thing up. Right?

I made this Coffee Caramel Panna Cotta recipe a few times the past week, playing around with different amounts of espresso and caramel. The caramel made with 3/4 cup (150g) sugar is more caramel-forward and made the coffee flavor a little less-prominent in the finished panna cotta. So I gave you a range to choose from in the recipe.

Panna cotta is different than its custardy counterparts as it’s made with gelatin rather than eggs. There’s no water bath or constant checking in the oven to check for doneness. Although the name in Italian means “cooked cream,” the dessert has a relatively light profile since whole milk is used, rather than all cream. Here I use just enough cream to ‘stop’ the caramel (whole milk can curdle in caramel) then I add whole milk later, although lowfat will work, too. I’m not against lowfat milk. Nor am I against decaf if you want to use that.

When I had to give up coffee for a while, I turned to an instant roasted grain-based substitute, which can fill in for coffee in baking, too. Just make it as strong as espresso. Most natural food stores and well-stocked supermarkets carry different brands of them. If anyone gives you a hard time for not drinking coffee, which happened to me when I had to give it up, many espresso bars in Italy offer caffè d’orzo made with roasted barley. And anyone who wants to argue with Italians about anything coffee-related, let me tell you, it will not end in your favor.

Once you’ve mastered caramel, chocolate curls are always fun to try, which you can make by either scraping a chef’s knife down a bar of milk or dark chocolate. If using dark, use one that’s not too cold or the curls will shatter. Pastry chefs will sometimes rub a chocolate bar briskly up and down with their (clean and dry) hands to warm it up a bit before trying to make curls.

Place the block longwise at the edge of the counter you’re standing at and, holding the bar in place against you with your waist, holding the handle and the top of the blade, scrape curls toward you with the knife at a near 90º angle, angling the blade just a bit away from you as you drag it down. You don’t have to press down very hard and after few tries, you’ll find the angle and pressure that works best for you. Of course, be careful dragging the knife toward you and make sure the blade is facing away from you. You can also use a sharp swivel-bladed vegetable peeler and make shorter curls by running it down the long side of a chocolate bar. Once again, milk chocolate is softer and easier to use than dark if you want more cohesive curls. But there’s no shame in shards, either.

As mentioned, I made a few batches of this Coffee Caramel Panna Cotta before settling on the proportions here. I know some of you may have questions about using gelatin and gelatin substitutes, which I answered here. In Europe, sheet gelatin is more prevalent but sheets vary in size and in strength, ranging between five different strengths. The best approximation here would be to use two sheets of gelatin: a general rule is 3 sheets of gelatin equals one 1/4 ounce (7g) envelope gelatin. To use sheets here, soften them in a bowl of cold water for a few minutes then wring them out and add them to the warm (not boiling hot) caramel mixture after you’ve added the cream.