I need you to hear me out before you dismiss this as crazy.

I’m a data guy. I track everything. My sleep, my workouts, my coffee consumption, my mood, my productivity. Everything has a timestamp and a metric. I don’t believe in vibes. I don’t believe in gut feelings. I believe in what I can measure.

So when I tell you that I drank a cup of coffee last Tuesday that tasted exactly like 1987, understand that I’m not saying this lightly.

I’m 40 years old. Born in 1985. I have zero conscious memories of 1987. I was two years old, possibly eating dirt and knocking over things as toddlers do. I did not develop taste memory preferences in 1987 because my brain wasn’t formed yet.

And yet.

Last Tuesday, October 21st at 7:43 AM (I checked my Galaxy Watch timestamp), I made my standard morning coffee. Same beans I’ve been buying from the same roaster for two years. Same grind. Same water temperature (195 degrees, as always). Same 12-minute commute brewing in my car.

But when I took that first sip, I stopped.

Because I was tasting my childhood.

No. That’s not right. I was tasting something from before my childhood. Something ancient. Something that didn’t belong in my mouth in 2025.

The flavor profile was metallic. Burnt. Almost chemical. Like coffee that had been sitting in a glass pot for eight hours at a diner counter. Like coffee from a gas station in 1987. Like coffee that had experienced the 1980s directly.

The Impossible Investigation

I did what anyone rational would do: I immediately tested everything.

I pulled over at a Starbucks and bought a new coffee. Normal. Good. 2025 coffee.

I went back to my bag and smelled my thermos. Still that weird, metallic, 1987 smell.

I drove to the roaster I buy from (Oak Barrel Coffee on Maple Street) and asked if their machines were malfunctioning. The owner, Dave, said his coffee was fine. He let me taste from their display pot. Perfect. 2025 taste.

So the problem was either my beans or my equipment.

I went home and examined the bag of beans. Opened April 15, 2023. Over two years old. I’ve been using this same bag for two years without noticing anything wrong, but that didn’t make sense now.

Wait. April 15, 2023. Let me think about this.

I opened those beans two years ago. I bought them in April. That means I had bought them in late March or early April 2023.

March 2023 was when I switched to my current roaster.

March 2023 was also when my father called me out of the blue after three years of minimal contact. He wanted to reconnect. He asked me to come visit him. He said he had something important to tell me.

I never went. We had a complicated relationship. I told him I was busy.

Two weeks later, he died. Heart attack. Unexpected.

I never got to hear what he wanted to tell me.

The 1987 Connection

My father was born in 1965. That would make him 22 years old in 1987.

1987 was the year he moved to this city. The year he got his first real job. The year he met my mother.

The year his life began, essentially.

My mother told me years later that in 1987, my father was obsessed with coffee. He would go to this tiny cafe every morning before work. It was his ritual. It was how he centered himself.

The cafe is no longer open. Closed sometime in the 1990s.

But the roaster I currently use? Oak Barrel Coffee? It’s in the exact same building where that old cafe used to be. Different business name, but same location. Same vintage brick building. Same counter.

Dave, the owner, told me he had no idea about the previous tenant. He’d owned Oak Barrel for seven years.

I asked him if he bought any equipment from the previous businesses. He said he got some of the roasting equipment from an estate sale in 2018. The equipment was old. From the 1980s maybe.

The Impossible Explanation

I’ve been drinking coffee from beans roasted in machines that might have been in that cafe in 1987. Machines that might have roasted coffee for my father when he was 22 years old and starting his life.

I’ve been drinking my father’s coffee.

And my body recognized it.

My tongue recognized something my brain has never known.

I have no scientific explanation for this. Flavor memory shouldn’t work backwards through time. Coffee machines don’t transfer essence of era through their mechanical components. This is ridiculous.

But I tested the beans again last Wednesday. Same metallic, burnt, 1987 taste.

I haven’t opened a new bag yet. I’m not ready to lose whatever this is.

Why I’m Telling You This

Because I think there are things we experience that exist outside the realm of what we can measure.

Because my father never got to tell me what he needed to tell me.

Because somehow, through a cup of coffee, he did.

Because I spent 40 years believing only in data and metrics, and I think maybe I’ve been missing the actual texture of being alive.

I don’t have an explanation. I don’t have proof. I just have a cup of coffee that tastes like a year I never experienced, made possible by machines that might remember 1987 better than any of us do.

And maybe that’s enough.