Does your coffee choice dictate how good you are at your job?

We have invited a new member of our team at work to our morning ritual. We go to one of a couple of favourite cafes near our office. The coffee is very good. But this new person orders their latte really hot.

I know the right thing to do is just laugh it off as the rest of our group has done, but I can’t. I won’t say what work we do, but it involves judgement and discernment. I keep thinking that if this person is making such bad decisions about coffee, what other bad decisions are they capable of?

Is this just my own coffee snobbery gone mad?

This could very well be a case of your self-confessed coffee elitism going from a harmless little pretension to something a little more over-the-top. I think you could, as you’ve suggested, start laughing along or just put this out of your mind completely, and you’d most likely end up looking back at it as a good decision.

But I’m not going to tell you your instincts are unequivocally wrong.

A penchant for scorching-hot coffee should send alarm bells ringing. Credit: Justin McManus

Yes, on the face of it, coffee preferences would appear to have nothing to do with how well someone can do their job. There is, as the saying goes, no accounting for taste, so is there much point dwelling on it at all?

Well, when you think about it, a lot of what we place importance on – in job interviews, for example – are both highly subjective and don’t directly relate to performing tasks that make up a role. As you probably know from your job, a lot of our conclusions are based on gut reactions rather than thorough, perfectly rational analysis.

“What do you like to do outside of work?” wouldn’t be considered a wildly unorthodox interview question, but you could easily answer it without saying a word about the mechanics or strategy that goes into a specific job. And yet, that answer could still be really valuable to the interviewers. Because it could allow them to make inferences – perhaps about your approach to tasks, or about your personality, or about how you might fit in an organisation’s culture, or any number of other things.

Inside and outside work, we make these kinds of inferences every day, extrapolating on a single statement, inclination or idiosyncrasy and making a broader judgement about someone’s character. It doesn’t always serve us well, but sometimes traits or penchants that may seem trivial or inconsequential in isolation can, when combined with others, become a useful (albeit low-fidelity) portrait of a person.

So let’s get back to your question. Let’s say you do decide to trust your gut and interrogate your feelings about this person’s coffee-drinking proclivities. Here’s the first question I’d suggest that you ask yourself as you go down this route: Is this just a one-off eccentricity or is it one of many hints that your new colleague’s taste is questionable?

If it’s the former, you might want to put it in your memory bank, but I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it. If it’s the latter, maybe move on to another question: how hot is this coffee?

If this co-worker is requesting coffee moderately warmer than the barista usually makes it, what you’re really talking about is a difference of opinion, a leaning. I’m not sure if this is a great launching pad for broader criticism. If, however, they’re demanding lattes that are scorching hot – uncomfortable to hold in a doubled-up paper cup – that’s odd.

At that heat, certain proteins begin to denature, and the flavour is almost certainly going to be negatively affected, even after it cools back down. As coffee expert James Hoffmann once put it, “If your milk spends time above 68 degrees Celsius you will break it, essentially”. Beyond 75, your colleague might as well ask the barista to add some vinegar and begin the cheese-making process.

In summary, I think biting your tongue and keeping your coffee snobbery in check is the best way to go here. But if the coffee you’re talking about is hot enough to melt tungsten and is one of several shockingly unfortified hills this person appears eager to die on, maybe your concerns are worth exploring further.

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