A badge that workaholics wear upon their sleeves, like a proud scout toting a navigation award. A method for feigning a false individuality – insert a fifteen-syllable order, invariably featuring the words “iced”, “syrup”, “oat milk”) – and sophistication of taste. A means by which to obtain one of the UK’s only legal psychoactive kicks, following the Draconian implementation of the Psychoactive Substances Act.

I am a great lover of coffee. A morning is always lifted by a cup of black-gold, and an afternoon is not complete without the accompanying crash.

Admittedly, in popping my coffee-loving-cherry, I was a proverbial late bloomer. Tea was so much kinder, gentler, in contrast to the heavy-metal roar of the black stuff. Memory does not serve me well, but I imagine I teetered for a period, taking coffee with sugar and a lashing of milk.

Like excuses, coffee comes in many shapes and sizes. Sugar-loaded, syrup-soaked behemoths (Dunkin Donuts now sells one featuring 46 teaspoons of sucre); Pret’s characterless, coffee-tinted hot milk; and espressos drawn from beans that were roasted in the ice-caves of Uluru. Owing to the miracle that is their shared base compound, each summons worldly pleasures.

All are, however, pale imitations of the real thing – mere shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The Platonic ideal of coffee, is that which is dirty, black, gritty, thick and bitter.

The stuff of truckers, tortured writers, world-wearied detectives, and the rather scary gentleman riding atop the Polar Express.

Only once on the Appalachian Trail, equipped with the world’s greatest camping stove (an MSR Pocket Rocket 2) and a titanium pot, did I understand the pull of a proper cup of Joe.

Whilst out on the Trail, there are no De’Longhi nor Nespresso machines, nor electricity with which to power them. I heard rumours of some intrepid coffee snobs connoisseurs carrying French presses with them, but by far the norm was Folgers Instant.

Boil a pot of water, add three or four sachets, and pass it round between your accomplices. There exists no greater method for thawing a morning as well as your eyebrows. When on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, in February with the temperature at -12°C, I know few greater acts of kindness than being offered a communal pot of steaming magic. A sublime ritual, a transcendent beverage.

People love to trash instant coffee. Perhaps posturing towards sophistication, or perhaps genuinely finding the cheap stuff unpalatable. Regardless, I cannot help but feel that they are missing out on one of life’s most simple joys.

Shitty black coffee is unrefined oil. Pure energy and industry, iridescent and utilitarian.

For in those moments when civilization’s comforts fall away – when we’re perched on mountainsides or huddled in dawn’s bitter chill – it’s not the artisanal roasts or precision-ground beans we yearn for. What we yearn for is the honest comfort of a cup that makes no promises, except to warm our hands and wake our souls.