You see, I don’t want to love you, soya kahvesi. My heart can’t take it. Maybe if we never begin the affair in the first place, I won’t suffer later. If I fall for you, soy coffee, then maybe you, too, will leave me. I know it’s not very brave, but I am still so tender and wounded from the loss of coffee beer. I know what you will say: that coffee beer was doomed from the start. And while I know that what you speak is true, I can’t help but remember the times we shared with a great fondness. For what coffee beer and I had was real.

It was just about one year ago today that coffee beer found me. I was at a music festival sponsored by the brand that monopolizes the beer game in this country. The weather was fine that day. The music soothed me. The stage was set for something magical to occur.
During a music break, I wandered away for a stroll and I spied two scantily-clad beer maidens offering up free samples of a new product. It was called Efes Brown and it was coffee-flavored beer. My heart skipped a beat as the maiden held forth a small plastic cup of the concoction. For three years I had been bemoaning the sad state of affairs regarding beer here in Turkey. I had become so disheartened, in fact, that I had forsaken beer altogether. As I held the sample in my hand, I said a little prayer. I did not have much faith that God would be listening, but I drank it with all the hope I could muster all the same.

After I had clearly exhausted my free sample limit, I began to queue up for the costly version. I did not intend to get hammered that day. As I said before, I had given up on beer completely and figured I would drink water all day. But Efes Brown seduced me and I am not ashamed to say that I submitted entirely.

I waited patiently for it to begin showing up in bars. But it never did. I waited for the ad campaigns, but they were brief and ineffective. As luck would have it, the local small grocery store began stocking about a dozen bottles of it a week. I made a ritual of going in and clearing the shelves of it. I was going to love that beer and no one was going to stop me.

The love affair continued unabated for most of the year. Until one day, I frantically searched the shelves, not finding a single bottle of it. This went on the week after, and the week after and so on. How could they discontinue stocking a product that religiously disappeared? It finally dawned on me: it wasn’t Ak Pınar’s fault. The bastards stopped making it. Turks weren’t buying it. And apparently, there weren’t enough beer-crazed expats like me doing their part to consume it. And without so much as a note, coffee beer was gone. And I wept.

Oh, I had been down this road before. Before coffee beer, there was the Knorr soup. Knorr makes these utterly tasty ready-made gourmet soups in a Tetrabag for lazy types like me. Turks don’t buy them, of course. Their mothers make soup, after all; all sorts of soups. Why would they buy soup in a bag?
They have pedestrian varieties like cream of mushroom and vegetable. But where they really shine are their world varieties. They have an Italian tomato soup with marscapone cheese that makes me weak in the knees. But the soup I really fell for was one that tasted like mulligatawny. For the uninitiated, mulligatawny is a seductive Indian soup with a curried coconut milk base and damn if that’s not what this soup tasted like. As was the case with coffee beer, I did my best to rid the shelves completely of each bag whenever I went to the store. This was becoming a costly way to do my shopping, but what choice did I have?

You can imagine by now how that story ended: the soup left me and I was crest-fallen.

We go to a grocery store that has the best selection of international foods that can be had here in Turkey. I am lucky enough to be dating an adventurous Turk. He loves my cooking and never asks me to make anything his mom makes. After all, she is very much alive and lives just fifteen minutes away, so she is up to the task.
So, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, you name it, he says, “Bring it!”, “Health to your hands!”, etc.

Last night, we went out to pick up a few things and while in the coffee and tea aisle, my eyes fell upon a strange sight: a small jar of something called soy kahvesi. Of course, I have heard of soybean coffee. I was once a vegan, after all. But seeing something this healthy in Turkey, the land of Turkish coffee, none the less, was unthinkable. Had it been imported from German, it might have made sense. I think we have a lot of foreigners living in this area because this store seems to stock even more European products than average. But this is a Turkish company that we are talking about! It’s madness, I tell you. So I grabbed a jar and looked forward to trying it this morning.

I can now safely report that all of this angst has been for naught. Let soy coffee disappear. It will be all the same to me. Perhaps I have to work to get the mixture right, but after four heaping teaspoons, it still tasted like hot water with river silt and, in fact, the sludge at the bottom of my mug resembled exactly that.

But it’s no matter of importance. I may have dodged a bullet with soy coffee, but I know that there will be others. Yes, other exotic products that will lull me unsuspectingly into a tangled love affair, only to leave me when the addiction was just starting to feel right.

Such is life in Turkey.