The Worst Cup of Coffee Ever

I'm sitting here drinking some of the shittiest, nastiest tasting coffee I've ever had. It came from the break room downstairs. And that got me thinking about what the nastiest coffee I've ever tasted was.

It was called Radio Coffee, and it was disgusting.

I used to work for a guy named Bill Moffett who was a radio announcer and station manager back in the '70s and '80s (the old 97 Rock was his station) before opening his own production studio. It was while I worked there that I began drinking coffee, but I had to take care when I got a cup. Mid-afternoon was a good time because the morning coffee had run out by then. What was wrong with the morning coffee? I'm glad you asked.

You see, Bill liked his coffee as strong as possible, so in the morning, whatever coffee was left over from the day before was poured directly back into the reservoir and run through a new set of coffee grounds, which created coffee with the consistency something like maple syrup. And that was called Radio Coffee because the AM deejays needed heavy doses of caffeine to wake them up in the morning to be so perky and entertaining.

And he drank his black, right out of the pot because, as he explained to me, when you were on the air you didn't have time to mix all kinds of stuff in it - you just had time to pour some in the cup and get back to the board to cue up the next record.

And while my cup of coffee this morning is nothing like Radio Coffee, it does taste something like the vinyl seat of a '77 Mustang.

I wish I knew why.