7-Eleven Coffee

I admit it: once upon a time I worked at 7-Eleven.

This was back in college and I’m not ashamed to say that I needed the money. In fact, at one point I was going to graduate school and still working at 7-Eleven. It was far from a hard job, since a classmate was the manager of the store he could get me whatever hours I wanted, and I had all the free Red Bull I could drink (which, as you might have guessed if you’ve read my blog, is a lot).

One thing that I thought was interesting about working at 7-Eleven was the coffee (yes, this is actually a post about coffee despite the rocky start). We would make “fresh” coffee every 20-30 minutes and were pretty good about sticking to that; I in particular took pride in not letting our coffee get too stale (even if I was somewhere less than stellar in other aspects of my job).

I didn’t like the fact that the coffee was so chemically flavored; blueberry coffee? Maple coffee? Cinnamon toast coffee? Whenever I would work mornings (and I’m talking 4am) I would see police officers and other early risers stopping by to get their breakfast, usually a cold doughnut from the display and a cup of some flavored coffee. I guess that if you do work those kinds of hours and don’t have time to get a real breakfast something that reminds you of breakfast would be pretty darned comforting.

In any case, the coffee was surprisingly good and unbelievably cheap when compared to even a Dunkin Donuts. And you know what else? If you show up to a 7-Eleven and want a cup of coffee, just tell them you think the coffee is stale and they will immediately make up a whole carafe to order, just for you, and you only have to pay for whatever size cup you buy. You can easily end up getting fresher coffee than at a Starbucks or a Dunkin Donuts, where they will probably tell you that the coffee was made very recently.

Just stay away from the corn syrup based flavorings, those things will kill you. Good old cream and sugar is good enough for me.