Pilots love coffee. This is a universal law as much as the law of gravity. Sure, there is the occasional odd-ball who claims, “I don’t drink coffee,” but those are the same people, that the moment they step off the jet, go hurling into the stratosphere. That’s what you get when you don’t obey universal laws.
Most pilots, like old elephants looking for water, have a memory map in their brain of all the coffee places inside and outside of security. If one place has a huge line, they can reference a quick hierarchy of the next on the list. No pilot who might need a caffeine pick-me-up would ever want to be without it before take-off. That would be as dangerous as leaving without fuel in the fuel tanks. Sure, he could drink the airplane coffee, but that is a last-ditch emergency procedure that should be avoided at all costs.
On a recent trip through my hub, SFO, I had a three-hour sit time between flights, and I was dragging from an early morning. I could have done the non-drug fueled solution and taken a nap in the crew room, but I prefer the short-temper, anxiety, and hyper-focus of over-caffeination. I had already had three cups of hot coffee that morning, and the monkey on my back was jonesing for something particular: nitro cold brew coffee.
I have been aware of nitro cold brew for about five years, which means it’s probably been around for 20 years. Now all the cool coffee kids are probably drinking space coffee that is pour-over filtered through the troposphere or something, but to me, nitro is still the best way to drink cold coffee. If you are somehow less cool than me and you don’t know, nitro cold brew is basically cold brew coffee the infuse with nitrogen and pour it out of a beer tap. It makes the thick, delicious brew creamy and dense, like drinking a Guinness beer. Since I gave up drinking a couple of years ago, it’s one of the few joys I have left.
A lot of the big airports have caught on to serving up the nitro. Denver. Portland. Okay I don’t know if a lot. But Denver and Portland have. I think LAX as well. Here is a head-scratcher: SFO, on the cusp of Silicone Valley, Start-up central, Edge of the Tech universe and all things hip and new, is a desert for nitro cold brew. I know this, because this trip I was on, I went to every finger of Terminal 3 and the international terminal and the multiple Peets and other coffee shops did not have it! They just had old-fashioned, cave-man cold brew. Which after you have had nitro cold brew tastes like watery, icy abominable snowman’s piss (in my tired over-caffeinated state this was my mental response when I would ask the barista if they had nitro and the would reply, “Sorry, we just have regular cold brew.”)
I didn’t think any place in all of terminal 3 had it until I stopped and scrutinized the one place that I had written off as “ridiculous.” Café X. What is Café X? It’s a tiny little self-contained box, about the size of a ticket booth at an old-timey movie theater or carnival. Inside the box is a robot claw that makes you coffee. There are no people. Just the robot. Making you coffee. Sounds silly right? A gimmick? Why would you pay a robot to make your coffee, when a person can add that, uh, personal touch? Up to this point I wouldn’t. I had walked by Café X at least a hundred times since it’s been running and shaken my head at the silly saps who paid good money to watch the robot arm dance to music and make their coffee, which I was most certain was sub-par. Now, in my time of desperation, I noticed that Café X actually had the one thing that the other coffee shops in SFO didn’t have (besides a dancing robot), they had nitro cold brew on tap. So, I broke down and gave it a try.
The transaction was entirely cashless and streamlined. You punch into a screen what you want, exactly how you want it. I don’t know how well it would work if you are one of those people that has a lot of particulars about your coffee which only a human could possibly interpret at current levels of A.I. development. (I can imagine someone trying to specify, “I want a double non-soy, soy latte with almond milk and one and three quarters of sugar-free vanilla, slowly roasted over a gas-flame…” making the robot explode). In my case though, it was easy and fast. And dare I say, fun? As the robot arm danced around and made my order, it seemed happy and joyful to make my drink. A large upgrade from most over-worked baristas that have been trudging though an 8-hour shift. I felt like a little kid at Disneyland, in Tomorrow World watching the real future.
As the little robot window opened and presented my coffee, I even fell for the trick that I smirked at so many travelers for: The robot arm waved to me, and I waved back. There was an audience behind me watching the show of the robot, which I had often been a part of, and they laughed. Becoming self-aware, I blushed and gut-reacted in shame by throwing my coffee at everyone and yelled, “Quit laughing at me!” Not really, I didn’t want to waste the hard-found nitro cold brew. I took a sip and I was pleasantly surprised. It was as a good as I could have hoped for. I turned around and gave a smile and a nod to everyone as if to say, “It’s good!” People smiled and nodded back as if they were at the World’s Fair and they were amazed at what the future holds.
I am definitely not a futurist and tend to dread technology. I couldn’t help but think as a I walked away that if a robot could make a good cup of coffee, what else could that robot do? A sinking feeling in my stomach made me realize that they could probably fly planes because I can’t always make a good cup of coffee (I am too lazy to measure it out, so I eyeball it all the time). Maybe not now or in the immediate future but also not that far off a robot could do my job. Then it made me sad because I thought, “Who is my new robot coffee-making friend going to make coffee for if there are no more pilots walking around airports?” Then I had the sudden realization that maybe my robot pilot friend could use his tip money to take flying lessons and maybe someday he wouldn’t be stuck in that little Zoltron booth but flying people around. Maybe we could trade war stories of early morning flying and needing to drink coffee to stay awake. We could drink coffee together on the same side of the Zoltron booth together. That made me happy and I smiled as my coffee-seeking adventure had come full-circle. Then I got a little worried as I wondered, “Wait, what kind of drugs did that robot put in here?”
