By Scott Kalb, Community Voices

When talking with fellow Minnesotans around breakfast time, I often get the uneasy feeling that the term “great cup of coffee” is going to make its way undeservedly into the conversation. As in my wife’s Grandma Johnson saying, “I’m glad you liked the dry toast. Would you like a great cup of coffee?”

Scott Kalb

Half of my in-laws – bless their souls – are 100 percent Norwegian. Living up to the Norwegian culinary stereotype, they flavor their mashed potatoes with hard water and complain about the strength of herbal tea. They are big and they are tough, but get into a feud with their family and an army of Johnsons can be dispatched with a pinch of pepper; so you can imagine what their coffee is like.

Not that any other ethnicity in Minnesota is known for its collection of dangerous, knife-wielding spices stored in the pantry, but one would think that with all of the innovations made by Juan Valdez and Mr. Coffee, we’d at least know how to make a cup strong enough to furrow Earl Grey’s brow. Instead, most Minnesotans wouldn’t recognize a good cup of coffee if it was painted orange and hurling a Volkswagen at them – something a good cup of coffee should be able to accomplish with ease.

There is some hope for us. In the last 20years, coffee shops have been springing up everywhere. Unfortunately, when Minnesotans do happen upon such a shop, they often bypass the coffee completely and order drinks with names that most of us can’t pronounce correctly like latte and espresso, which are to coffee what E85 is to people who drive Hummers.

This fear of coffee may not be a bad thing. According to researchers in some small European country better known for wooden clogs than medical research, coffee is bad. I mean, really bad. If coffee was a person it would be one of those long-haired, leather-wearing, Marlboro smoking guys who puts Q-Tips way too far into his ears. Coffee is so bad, they say, because it contains a chemical which, after drinking coffee for 80 years has the potential to give you heart disease which the Q-Tip people are quick to point out, is even worse than putting a Q-Tip too far into your ear. The research states, ”Dr. Jeane Pool of Nijmegan Hospital found diterpenes raise homocysteine levels…”, and that was the English portion. The report goes on to say something about caffeine and shortened attention spans, but I didn’t have the patience to finish it.

Other research says that coffee stimulates epileptic seizures in certain invertebrates (a.k.a. worms) which instead of changing my behavior, makes me feel sorry for worms. I think any animal that gets a seizure while research is being done on it by doctors, deserves better doctors.

I will allow that I know more about coffee than most people, but not because I want to, rather because of my career as a software developer. Most computer science curricula require introductory coursework in caffeinated beverages. Since many go on to more advanced studies, the software industry has people who know way too much about coffee and not enough about other stimulants, like Angelina Jolie. While software developers may talk more about coffee than they do about members of the opposite sex, in their defense, at least they talk about things they know.

After 15 years of working with coffee snobs and eight years of marriage and Johnson Thanksgivings, I’ve learned that lutefisk can be hidden in mashed potatoes, that mashed potatoes can taste like a skinned, boiled and mashed potato and that the hard work of Juan Valdez and the Dunn Brothers goes largely unnoticed.

(Scott Kalb is one of 10 people in the Savage community who write for Community Voices. This column features a different writer each week and is one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.)