Double fumed over double double

Peter Brouwer
Jan 26, 2005

There's a big chain of donut shops in Canada called Tim Hortons that's giving Starbucks a good run for its money. I don't really know much about it, but I recently read that you can order a "double double" there. Yow! Did that ever bring back memories.

"Double double? What's that!?!" Most people react like this the first time they hear the term. Someone told me once that a famous New York writer ordered his coffee that way and the term stuck to mean "coffee, double cream, double sugar". But in this day and age of self serve coffee bars and Starbucks, some people may still be scratching their head: Who's business but my own is it how much cream and sugar I put in my coffee? Believe me, it used to be everybody's business.

I spent some of the best years of my life in New York in the early 80's. Thinking back, it's amazing how life revolved around deli coffee. The first errand of the day was for coffee, a bagel and a newspaper from the corner deli. Many New Yorkers would pick up a coffee at the deli on their way to work. And while at work, there was always somebody taking orders and making a deli coffee run.

From the outside, deli coffee always looked the same. To this day, it is still served in the classic blue and white Greek themed "Anthora" paper cup that says "We are happy to serve you." Service was the name of the game: the server blended sugar and cream into the coffee, so you had to make your order right. Back then there were only those three ingredients, but a cryptic language emerged that exactly described the possible combinations.
The basic words are obvious, black, sugar, cream. Plain old coffee with cream and sugar was "a regular". If you wanted extra sugar or cream, you’d double it. So "a double sugar" was a regular with extra sugar. There were cool variations. "White" meant cream, "sweet" meant sugar. You could also say "light" instead of white. But that had nothing to do with saving calories.

I don't know how this actually worked, but there must have been some blending rules among deli owners, because a double sweet tasted the same, regardless where you got it. Now, I must digress here, because Greek families ran most deli’s back then, and they may have used a secret Greek blending system. More significantly, this is how the Anthora paper cup became entrenched in New York coffee cup culture. Back in 1964, some bright-eyed paper cup maker decided he might be able to sell more cups by offering Greek deli owners a cup that reminded them of home. A decade later, every deli used them, and even today some 15 million Anthora's are thrown away each month.

But let's get back to the office coffee run: Where I worked, every desk had an Anthora on it. The real addicts had trashcans overflowing with them. It didn’t matter how cold your coffee became, you'd keep drinking it until it was gone. Which is why I could never understand the "double double". Double cream, double sugar might be drinkable hot, and surely, it covers up that burnt over-extracted taste drip coffee can have, but after it's cooled down??? Yech! I wasn’t the only one that felt this way, you could find many cooled down double double's serving double duty as ashtrays... Double yech... don't take a sip from that one!

Sadly, the days were numbered for the double double. Self-serve coffee bars became standard fare, and if you wanted cream in your coffee you could put it in yourself. What a concept! I remember how liberating that was. I had friends who actually stocked their pantries with little sugar and cream containers stolen from self serve coffee bars. But if that didn’t kill the double double, the Starbucks revolution certainly did. By then “light” was spelled “lite” and it meant hold the cream, but add milk, or even worse, low-fat milk!

Recently, I was in New York for the first time in years – today no one orders a double double – and who would even buy drip coffee from a corner deli anyway? So imagine my surprise when I saw this story about Canadian slang. Thanks to Tim Hortons, “double double” has made it to the Dictionary of Canadian Slang. Huh!? Since when is double double Canadian slang?!? I’m fumed, as any good word hound would be.

Alas, I haven’t the facts. Who was that famous writer who coined the term? Was it Truman Capote? Or did the term come from somewhere else? If anyone can help me set the record right… send me your “double double” story… and we’ll set those Canadians straight!

About the author
Peter Brouwer is a Canadian writer living in San Francisco, he is a recovering coffee addict. You can email him here.