Cajun Culture: Coffee Milk

I found out something interesting. It seems that Coffee Milk is the official beverage of Rhode Island, but that isn’t the kind of coffee milk I’m talking about today.

You can ask almost any person raised in south Louisiana and they know what coffee milk is. Coffee is a pretty big deal down here. Not in the Starbucks, Seattle kind of way either. Oh, sure there are some people here who will only drink gourmet coffee, but most households here only carry (and recognize) one brand of coffee: Community Coffee Dark Roast.

Community Coffee is a Louisiana brand coffee that serves 11 states in the south. They opened in 1919 and from there, they’ve become one of the biggest family owned coffee company in the U.S. Probably from their Louisiana customers alone.

I’m telling you…Nearly every business you go into, every home, every restaurant, has Community Coffee. It’s that big.

It’s so big, that parents get their kids started early developing an addiction to it. Yes, you heard me right: Parents give this to their children. Well, they did when I was little. You sort of went from formula to milk to coffee milk to coffee…it was great.

Coffee drinking is a favorite pastime for most people. You put the pot on, sit around the kitchen table and b.s. for hours. Naturally, if there are children in the vicinity, they want to be part of the adult conversation. The easiest way to get rid of them is to give them a cup of milk and a dash of coffee. Coffee milk.

When I was young, my dad used to stop at his mom’s house every morning on the way to work for a cup of coffee. Not because my mom didn’t have coffee at home, but because it was a tradition for them. He’d bring me along since he used to bring me to daycare and I’d sit at the table with my grandparents and dad drinking my coffee milk, saying “c’est bon” with every slurp of my drink.

I’m sure there are some people out there shuddering at the thought of a bunch of kids hyped up on coffee being let loose in the school yards, but I’m telling you…it was a great thing. Drinking coffee milk while your parents and relatives drank their regular coffee was like a sense of well…community. You belonged.  You were drinking coffee! Sort of. But it always had to be Community Coffee. And I didn’t realize how much I rely on this stuff until this morning. We’d run out of coffee and horror of horrors, the only thing we had was some decaf someone had given us. *shudder* What’s the point of decaf coffee anyway? It isn’t like it tastes just like regular coffee and it serves no purpose! *sigh*

I’m thinking about smuggling some in my bags when I go to New York. That stuff in the hotel last year in Orlando was okay, but it wasn’t as good as my Community Coffee, which I dearly missed when I was gone. So, anyone who wants a cup of good south Louisiana coffee, y’all head on to my room, okay?