works of wanderlust

Ironic enough that I’m writing this at a Starbucks, but here I am, sipping a mint tea, and realizing that my days as a coffee drinker might be behind me.

I gave up tea for the month of November and while we travelled in Japan. It was not because we went to Japan, mind you. Japan was a helpful distraction from my coffee break, but it was not the reason.

I don’t generally write much about my health—well, besides all the posts about running and injury, huh—but for the last couple years I have been dealing with a chronic cough that I couldn’t quite pin down the cause. I’ve seen doctors and specialists. I’ve had respiratory tests. I’ve been vetted for asthma. I’ve taken medicine for my nose, throat, and immune system, but none of it did much besides exacerbate secondary symptoms. Then, going the dreaded “own research” route, I started testing some other rando theories and what I seem to be narrowing in on is that I might have gastroesophageal reflux. I’m not a doctor, so look it up yourself, but the long-short of it is that I seem to be able to control the cough by controlling my diet. I can get rid of like ninety-five percent of my symptoms by avoiding foods that trigger an upset stomach (and which weirdly, subsequently lead to a sore throat and a raspy cough.)

You can probably guess where a post about coffee is headed, right?

One of my big triggers seems to be coffee. Between the acidity and caffeine a cup of coffee tends to lead to a morning of cough-cough, hack-hack.  I mean, it’s all a little more complex and subtle, which is why it’s been tough to notice the link. But there was enough of a link that led me to think mid-last year that maybe I had a coffee allergy or that I wasn’t storing my beans properly or that my coffee machine needed a thorough cleaning. Alas, it really seems to be a gut and digestion issue.

So in early November I quit coffee cold turkey and had all the symptoms in the week or so before we left on our trip. And then despite the wacky coffee culture in Japan I stuck to tea and juices while we were there. (Don’t feel bad though, all the other food made up for it.) And almost all my symptoms went away. Rice and fish and tea every day and my stomach was like, dude, this is the answer. I almost thought that was that, and I wasn’t going to do coffee anymore.

Then we got back from Japan and the package the my wife had generously bought me had arrived in the mail and was sitting there on the counter: a coffee advent calendar. One Canadian roast per day for the first twenty-five days in December. And it was November 30. 

“We can give it away or something.” She said. Rather, I decided it was a good little test. I would go back on coffee for most of the month, limit my intake, try 25 very different roasts and… observe.

It became clear within a few days that coffee was a major trigger. Some roasts were mostly fine leaving me wondering if I was imagining it all, but some would have me coughing within minutes of drinking them. It got to the point that by 9am we’d be joking that obviously “that coffee was not a winner.”

Now, you could argue that what this proves is that I could probably find a delicate low-acid roast that I could drink from here on out—and you’d be right. I could totally cope.

But.

But there are other factors. Mostly, as it turns out, when I stopped drinking coffee there were all sorts of other positive impacts on my digestive system. It wasn’t just the coughing that the coffee was causing. My whole gut health seemed to do a U-turn in the space of November. And maybe it was the fish and the rice and not eating so much fried foods, but it got me thinking that I might have a few seriously messed up ideas about what I’ve been putting in my body, even with the best intentions.

Couple that with the sad fact that the price of coffee seems to have gone up like 300% in the last year, I started thinking that maybe 2026 might be a year of going coffee-free.

So here I am—as I opened with—in a Starbucks drinking a mint tea and mostly past all the withdrawal symptoms of breaking from the coffee habit. And yet mentally, my brain has entered the rationalization phase of trying to use logical loopholes to justify breaking my coffee-free streak—which is kinda why I decided to start writing about it. Going public, as limited as my audience has always been, somehow always adds a layer of public accountability (ahem, maybe it’s just performance, tho) for reaching these tough to conquer crazy goals I take on.  

I haven’t had a coffee in 2026 and for better and worse we’ll try to keep it that way—and of course write about it, too.