"Black as night, sweet as sin” is how black coffee is aptly described in author Neil Gaiman’s 2005 novel Anansi Boys. Currently, Indonesian specialty coffee seems to be in high demand with more people integrating coffee shops and single origin beans into their lives.

According to the Industry Ministry in 2013, single origin coffee consumption in Indonesia increases by 7.5 percent each year.

This is a good trend, because we are actually a great coffee producer: the same ministry revealed that in 2013, Indonesia ranked third on the world’s list of biggest coffee producers after Brazil and Vietnam, with a production capacity of approximately 748,000 tons of coffee annually.

Once I went to Anomali in Setiabudi, Jakarta and saw a blackboard outlining the different flavors of coffee beans according to their geographical location. No wonder so many coffee connoisseurs, myself included, are hooked: we love to explore these different flavors, which are the unique outcome of the combination of soil type, temperature and many other factors.

A coffee expert named Pak Hadi, a pensioner from a prominent banking company in Indonesia, once taught me about some key flavor differences. Based on my own experience, I discovered that beans from the western part of Indonesia, say from Aceh or Gayo, have a stronger acidic aftertaste while ones grown and produced in the eastern part of the country, in places like Flores, are sweeter.

For more information on the flavor differences, I suggest you visit tanameracoffee.com and look at their product descriptions.

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For me, as well as most of my colleagues who work in the creative field — journalism or marketing communications — coffee came first as a necessity, before it gradually became a lifestyle. So it has never been about vanity or gayagayaan.

I was not such a heavy drinker before I joined The Jakarta Post. It was around 2015 when my workload began to increase — requiring me to wake up early, write and translate many texts and come home a little late. I observed my former editor, who seemed to get a big boost from black coffee — he drank eight cups a day and worked from 8 a.m. to midnight everyday — to help him produce so many great stories with interesting headlines.

Coffee is an acquired taste; at first I felt like I had swallowed a cup full of antibiotics. Soon I learned to appreciate the rich flavor subtleties. I could spend 30 minutes just drinking a single cup in order to really take delight in the tantalizing taste of its warm body.

Soon I followed in my former editor’s footsteps and have now become a heavy drinker myself: five cups a day during hectic days. I love the boost it gives me, along with the reporting, translation and writing assignments I work on.

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There is no drug I have ever taken that could compete with the endorphin rush of getting a story done, or just making a good-quality translation. I enjoy being hyperactive and suffer from “withdrawal symptoms” during slow days when heavy deadlines have already been met.

My friends in the media seem to enjoy the hectic work as well. What is more satisfying than starting something from scratch, doing the interviews and field reports, typing those reports on Microsoft Word, sending it to the editor to be edited, then for layout and finally seeing the product, a newspaper or a supplement magazine, that we can physically hold in our hands?

I once asked a senior writer, Seno Gumira Ajidarma, who is known for his tremendous productivity, whether he gets tired sometimes of engaging endlessly in reading, thinking and writing.

He told me the question was as useless as asking a farmer whether he got tired from cultivating the land. For him, thinking and writing have become as natural as breathing; he sees writing as going beyond profession.

Unfortunately though, some people seem to get into journalism or creative writing for these extraneous ornaments. Writer Ayu Utami once said during a forum in Jurnal Perempuan that nowadays, people like to write more than they read, because they want to gain attention from their writing.

I also saw how some people have gone into journalism and the literary world thinking these fields will make them famous. It’s great to want to become famous but you have to do the hard work as well.

As Seno, or my hardcore colleagues, can attest to: it takes a hell of a lot of hard work in order to produce good writing. You need to read voraciously and spend hours upon hours refining your skills, even if that means sacrificing your sleeping hours or personal life.

If you are somebody who burns to be a creative writer and intellectual, you will naturally do that without anyone pointing a gun at your head.

Dedication and hard work determine who will stand the test of time. My two friends have become successful. Nowadays, the works of these classmates, who supposedly want to be great writers, are unheard of.

While my two friends continue to work hard and push their skills to the limit; the sky is their limit. For me and my colleagues also, we continue to be “wicked,” jumping from one challenge to another, widening our scope of knowledge by continuously exploring new fields. But I digress.

To get back to the subject, thank goodness for Indonesian specialty coffee, whose wonderful taste fuels our reckless activities as we go along.

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