The Great Coffee Experiment

Over the last few months I have found my work to be a bit slower. Track and Field is done for the summer, I’m working at a new gym that provides more balance, and we’re finding ourselves in a natural transition time. ​

My sleep has been getting better. I’ve been adding volume back into my workouts. Elisabeth and I have the time to make more involved meals with ingredients from the garden. We’re feeling pretty good right now. 


Life moves in these waves. Sometimes we’re very busy, other times we have time for rest. Ebbs and flows provide balance in life. I think many of us get into trouble when we don’t recognize these changes or respect them.

I’ve been recognizing that I am in this phase of rest and recovery. It’s providing a nice reset. With that I decided it’s time to make some change.

It’s time to reduce the coffee intake!

Anyone who has ever tried to quit coffee (or anything else for that matter) knows that it is difficult. I knew that I could not quit coffee cold turkey. I’m far too reliant on it. In order to avoid a failed attempt. I decided to set up a system. 

This system is planned out, easily executed, and designed to slowly ween myself off of coffee. The multi-week plan is as follows.


Step 1- Use up all of the gift cards.
Luckily for me in Portland, we have a fantastic number of coffee shops. Each unique and tasty. I determined that I needed to cut that temptation out of plan. So Step 1..maybe it should be called Step 0… Drink all of the gift card worth of coffee. We had some great coffee and enjoyed it. 


Step 2- Reduce the water.
Every morning I was in the habit of making out small coffee maker full of coffee. 5 cups of water and an heaping amount of grounds gave me a consistent 2.5 mugs of coffee at 4:30 every morning. My first step in altering the prepared coffee was to simply reduce the volume to 2 mugs. I did this by only using 4 cups of water with no change to the coffee. This continued for 1 week.


Step 3- Standardize the coffee proportion.
This step was very important. I first needed to standardize how much coffee I was using each morning. Before I would just heap it into the filter. Instead, what I chose to do was use 1 “scoop” per 1 cup of water. I think my scoops were about a tablespoon but I don’t know. It was actually a cookie scoop. I continued this for about 1 week.


Step 4- Reduce the coffee.
Next, I choose to maintain the water volume in hopes to play a trick on my body. I would drink the same amount of volume each morning except with now 3 scoops of coffee instead of 4. This was about a week.


Step 5- Reduce the water, again.
From there I matched the water to the coffee. 3 scoops of coffee and 3 cups of water. This got me down to a large mug or 1.5 regular mugs of coffee. I continued this for about two weeks. 


Step 6- Reduce the coffee again
From there I moved down to 2.5 scoops of coffee 3 cups of water. Again keeping the volume of liquid in my mug, but decreasing the amount of caffeine (in theory). This lasted only a couple of days because I really tasted the difference in coffee flavor. So quickly moved to a 1:1 ratio coffee and water. 


Step 7- Reduce them both
Now I had worked down to 2 scoops of coffee and 2 cups of water. At this point in the experiment the coffee wasn’t tasting as strong as it used to due to the amount of grounds in the filter. Water was just moving through too quickly. Regardless, I persisted. I stayed here for around 2 weeks.
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Step 8- Introduce the Moka Pot.  
This may have been the hardest step- moving from 2 cups (1 mug) of coffee to 1 espresso. I chose to make the jump because the flavor of the previous stage was no longer enticing me. It didn’t have the great coffee taste. It was too weak tasting. With the Moka Pot I’m only having 1 scoop (probably 1 tablespoon) of coffee and an espresso amount of water. This gives me the flavor of a strong coffee while keeping the caffeine intake low (hopefully). 


The first couple weeks of this were slow. I wanted afternoon coffees more than ever, but I resisted. Soon enough it became enough.


Step 9- Eliminate coffee on the weekends
This next step happened spontaneously while we were camping. Elisabeth only made one coffee. She thought it would have been enough for both of us, which it would have, but she put oat milk in it. Now, I don't like anything in my coffee so I decided I would rather skip it than have that bad taste in my mouth. I survived too. I had a small headache and I was slightly more tired mid-morning, but I was okay. After that I decided to continue to avoid coffee on the weekends. So far so good.

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I'm currently hanging at Step 9. I don't know if I need to eliminate coffee all together, but I've accomplished my goal of being significantly less reliant on coffee. At a later time, I'll write more about how this is both positively and negatively affecting my health.