Fred Aiken Writing

I figured that the types of drinks and beverages I’ve consumed would best explain my relationship to brands over the course of my life.

I grew up in the south. My dad worked at the local newspaper, and my mom worked for Coca-Cola for the first 10 years of my life, and then AT&T for the rest of my life. They both worked in tech. I honestly could not tell you what they did specifically in their jobs, as neither my parents talked about their careers, mostly because it seemed like they did not like their work and wanted to not think about it when they came home. But needless to say, because of my mom’s job at Coca-Cola, there was always cans of Coke in the fridge. I grew up drinking more carbonated drinks than I did water or juice.

When I went off to college, I felt like I needed to change my default beverage of choice from Coca-Cola to something more modern. Something new. Also, I remember in the 7th grade when the economy went into a recession and my mom lost her job at Coca-Cola and it felt like our family’s financial situation wasn’t as stable as I thought it was; I kind of blamed Coca-Cola for that loss of stability. Though later in life, I would learn that my mom kept decades worth of Coca-Cola stock, some of which she had inherited from her father because he also worked at Coke back in the 1950’s as a delivery driver, and she claimed, though I don’t know how true this was, that she made more in Coke dividends than she ever made while on their payroll. I don’t think that’s as much of a brag of hers as it is a sad statement of what, or who, the company prioritizes in their compensation structure.

But either way, I abandoned Coca-Cola as the primary beverage of choice when I got to college, and instead opted for energy drinks. At the time, I thought I needed the boost of energy from the caffeine and sugar content due to my studies, social life, and all the things one normally does in their late teens and early twenties and away from home for the first time.

It also happened to be the late 2000’s, so energy drink companies and brands were really ramping up on their marketing towards my generation; with Red Bull sending little cars around college campuses and scantily dressed women that handed out free cans of its product, and then Monster Energy sponsoring the X Games and probably most of Fred Durst’s career. It was difficult at the time to not be confronted at every corner I turned by some advertisement touting the benefits and extremeness of energy drinks.

It also didn’t help that at that age I did not really care about my health all that much. My diet consisted of Monster Energy drinks and Camel cigarettes. I only ate one meal a day, usually late at night, and it was more than likely it was processed food with either high sodium, high sugar, high carbohydrate content, or sometimes all of them combined. Every morning, I woke miserable with a headache, discolored phlegm, and my bones ached with every movement I made. I assumed it was because of my smoking, though I wouldn’t quit that habit until I was in my midtwenties.

Monster Energy drinks got me through the rest of college. Most of the time, I consumed the big black-and-green can to wake me up and stay up at night. Other times, I would combine the energy drink with alcohol, mostly vodka, though there were a couple of times I would experiment with brown liquors that I’d rather not recall.

It was after college that I finally drank my first cup of coffee, though I’m not entirely sure I could legally call it coffee. It was a Frappuccino from Starbucks. I suppose it technically had coffee from the instant coffee mixture they used to create the blended coffee dessert. But just in the same way that energy drinks kept me energized, Frappuccino’s had enough sugar in them to kill a mongoose on an amphetamines binge.

It was also around this time that I would learn from a college friend that both Monster Energy and Starbucks were either partially or heavily financed by Coca-Cola, and I figured there was probably no way I could ever fully escape the preferred drink brand of my childhood.

When I joined the workforce, I at least had the good sense not to drink Frappuccino’s as my primary coffee each morning. Instead, I drank Kroger branded coffee that I made in drip machine pot. The most I could say about that coffee was that it was only palatable so long as I added plenty of creamer and sugar. I couldn’t tell exactly how much sugar I added to my morning cup of coffee, but I’m fairly certain it might have rivaled what Starbucks did to their Frappuccino’s.

It seemed like the brand of drinks I would be destined to partake in was determined on my relationship with sugar and caffeine. Either the drink did or did not have one or the other or both, and at any given point in time would determine how I felt about that particular brand of beverage.

I had a number of jobs in my twenties that influenced the types of drinks I would drink on a regular basis. For a while, I was a bartender, and so I became partial to Wild Turkey bourbon. Then I took a job as a content editor for a small news website, and went back to drinking Monster Energy. But the job that truly changed the way I look at and consume beverages was that of a barista.

The first cup of coffee that changed my relationship with the beverages I consume was a Colombian pink bourbon varietal that was anaerobically processed for 72hrs in a barrel filled with mangos. The coffee tasted sweet, fruity, with a hint of pralines, but there wasn’t anything added to the cup. It was black coffee. But not the sort of black coffee I had ever experienced.

The green coffee buyer of the company I worked for had a personal relationship with the producer of the coffee. He went down to their farm every harvest season and would cup through countless varietals and microlots to determine what coffee our company would import of theirs. The entire experience felt vastly more personal. It wasn’t an amalgam of different ingredients parsed from a variety of corners of the globe and processed together into a carbonated sludge of sugar water to be consumed in an impersonal and roundabout way.

I came to understand through the job as a barista that the coffee I drank had a story. I came to understand that everything I consumed, in one shape or form, had a story as well. Brands were often part of that story. Who and what was controlling that narrative depended on any number of variables at work in a system that continuously strives to pressure everyone that comes across its brand to consume more and more of whatever it is.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I still drink lots of coffee. It’s par for the course of my current role as a production roaster. But apart from coffee, probably 98% of what I drink is now straight water. At night, in order to wind down, I usually drink an herbal tea. I still interact with brands, though. Sometimes those brands are specific coffee producers or cooperatives or importers, and sometimes those brands are the ones in grocery stores. I find myself hard-pressed to ever say that I have a favorite of any one particular coffee, tea, or bottle of water that I consume, but that’s mostly because I feel as if my tastes have been changing throughout the years, and will more than likely continue to change. But I also know that these brands, even when their logo doesn’t change from one year to the next, I also have come to understand that their product usually does.