I can’t even remember my first cup of coffee. I must have started drinking it in college, to be like the big kids, but it did not make much of an impression on me. My love affair with coffee didn’t really start until I did my junior year abroad in Germany. Of all the countries in Europe I’ve visited, Germany, in my opinion, has the best coffee, a brand called Jakob’s. It actually tastes the way that coffee smells, if that makes any sense. I’ll never forget sitting in a little coffeehouse with marble floors in the Schnoor in Bremen, eating an apple tart topped with real whipped cream, drinking a coffee, and reading the Herald-Tribune and thinking that it was absolute bliss. When I got back to the States, in those pre-Starbucks days, I was very disappointed by the lack of coffeehouse culture and by the dearth of good coffee. It was back to Maxwell House for me for many years, until I moved to Tunisia.

There were fancy coffeehouses in Tunisia, where you could get a very good European-style cappuccino for a 700 millimes, a significant percentage of my daily budget. There were also more workaday places that served espresso shots, “caffé Americano” (black coffee), and my favorite, direkt. The inexplicably-named direkt is a bit like a latte, but with a thicker consistency, served in a small clear water glass. The price was cheap, 200 millimes, so you could drink direkt and smoke shisha all afternoon without breaking the bank. These kinds of cafés were men-only places (by tradition, not by law), but I was never asked to leave or even unduly harassed. My favorite shisha café by far was the Café des Nattes at the top of the hill in Sidi Bou Said, a coastal village outside of Tunis. Some established volunteers took me here my third night in-country, and I thought I had fallen into Arabian Nights.

At home in Tunisia, I experimented with a caffetiere, but usually I just made Turkish coffee in a big metal pan, kind of like a dog dish, on the top of my gas ring. Turkish coffee is very powdery, and I would just mix it with the water, boil it up, pour it into a cup, and wait for the sediment to settle. The pan did not have a handle, and I sustained a very bad burn on my foot once due to sloshing during transfer. In those days I drank my coffee out of a cheap footed pottery cup that I had bought from a roadside stand. It was the perfect size and was painted half yellow, half green. The paint was probably lead-based. My spoon was aluminum. I know it was aluminum because it looked like it was made with aluminum foil crunched together into spoon shape. Lead paint…aluminum utensils…every day for three years…there are five IQ points I’ll never get back.

When I got back to the US, I was pleased to find that my compatriots had discovered coffee. Starbuckses were everywhere, and you could actually buy something other than Maxwell House in the grocery store. I discovered a great brand of coffee almost the minute I moved to Chicago: Stewarts, in a tartan can, which was sold at the little convenience store in my high-rise. I drank that happily until I moved to Boston, where they don’t have it. After some trial and error I found another brand, Martinson’s, that I liked almost as much. I was a satisfied customer each and every morning until a few months ago, when the local stores began experiencing shortages. First it disappeared from Peapod. Then it vanished, intermittently, from the shelves at the bricks-and-mortar store. As I sit here, I haven’t been able to find it for weeks.

So here I am, Desperately Seeking Coffee. I have no fewer than five brands in my fridge right now, but none of them is cutting it. Husband likes the Dunkin Donuts coffee. For me, it’s okay, but it’s not really coffee. It’s sort of enjoyable in a Miller Lite, Cheez-Whiz kind of way, but at some point in the day I’m going to need a real coffee.

Any brand suggestions from fellow North Shorers?