Break room coffee is the driving force behind progress. Without it, office work would grind (no pun intended) to a halt. The trouble is the coffee you usually get is provided in bulk by the lowest bidder. It usually sucks.
Caffeine is a harsh addiction though. You need the coffee, but you can’t stand the flavor of the free stuff… If you don’t want to go broke buying gourmet coffee from the pushers around the campus then the only thing you can do is modify the mud to make it drinkable.
Creamer and sugar are like gateway drugs to serious coffee modifiers. There’s only so much you can do before you’re ready to experiment with the harder stuff. One of the best, and easiest, ways to make break room mud palatable is to put a package or two of instant cocoa into the cup. It sweetens it, makes it a little thicker, and takes the harsh edge off of the roasted beans.
After a while, even that pales. You start experimenting. Drop a Hershey’s Kiss into a cup? Sure, why not… It’s not bad. Kinda slimy at the bottom, but still pretty tasty. Chocolate and coffee work well together. Holiday candy cane? Eh. The peppermint oil makes a little scum at the top of the cup and the rest tastes as bitter as before. Hard butterscotch lozenge? Disgusting. It barely dissolves and it leaves this sticky residue at the bottom of the cup that you need a chisel to remove.
Yesterday I dropped an Atomic Fireball into a nice hot cup of triple strong generic caffeine-bean soup. It was… strange.
First off, the candy sank to the bottom of the cup with a faint ‘clink.’ Then it started breaking up. Little pops and clicks could be heard, sort of like what you get from a nice cold ice cube in a glass of water on a hot summer day. When that had finally settled down I gave the cup an experimental swirl to mix the flavor in. The contents of the cup underwent some kind of eerie alchemical change. What had been a pool of bitter smelling stygian black liquid suddenly acquired a faint bloody red tinge and a waft of cinnamon. I waited until it had cooled enough to drink and tried a few sips.
The sweetness of the candy was completely hidden under the bitter coffee flavor, and the hot cinnamon was present more as a smell than a taste. It was better than raw coffee, but only barely. Down at the dregs of the cup were tiny pink fragments from the fireball’s outer shell. The core of the candy was still present, a pale misshapen white nodule the size of a pencil eraser.
Maybe if it had dissolved fully it would have made the coffee tasty… Still, it was worth it for the strange sounds it made.