Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast featuring the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Eddie read his column aloud.

She doesn’t care how cold it is. On our back porch in Morehead City is where she wants her coffee, so I pull the old-school electric blanket from the closet and haul it outside. Early sunlight glistens on the dewy yard. The cold concrete sends a chill through my bare feet. I plug in the blanket and spread it out over the porch sofa so the heat will warm the cushions.

I am so thoughtful.

Julie settles in and wraps herself up like a burrito. When I hand her a cup of coffee, the steam fogs her eyeglasses. She wrinkles her nose as she wipes the lenses clean with the corner of her pajamas. Honey Bee jumps up and worms her way into her favorite position.

“Well, now I can’t do anything today,” Julie says, smiling. “I have coffee in my hand and a dog in my lap. You might have to wake me up when it gets dark.”

It won’t be dark for another 10 hours.

• • •

There’s something about a warm cup of coffee that turns the cozy dial all the way up to HIGH. It’s a visceral reaction, and it doesn’t matter where I am. At the beach, that first cup of coffee, with the sun streaming across the porch, sets the tone for the day. In the mountains, around a campfire in the trees, a mug of java chases away the morning chill. My favorite Christmas present recently? An espresso machine, which makes a midafternoon jolt of the good stuff an even more pleasant experience.

North Carolina is tailor-made for memorable cups of coffee. In our Black Mountain Airbnb, on a getaway weekend with Markie and her fiancé, Ryan, Julie and I are up early and first. I fill an insulated bottle with hot coffee for a quick walk before the rest of the crew stirs, and the rising steam looks like tiny wisps of the fog lying low in the mountains.

The next weekend, in our boat and headed toward Shark Island off Cape Lookout as the sun cracks the horizon, twin travel mugs rattle in the cup holders as we break through the inlet chop. If there’s a better place to down a cup of coffee than outside the Atlantic breakers, I haven’t yet found it.

And we don’t always take our coffee black as mud and hot enough to burn your mouth. One of our favorite coffee experiences is to order espresso martinis at The Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill after a football or basketball game. There are real coffee beans floating on top, so that counts, right?

As you can see, Julie and I are serious coffee drinkers. Not in the sense that we’re coffee snobs, or even aficionados. We don’t insist on “blooming” the grounds with a pre-infusion of water. Heck, we don’t even grind our own beans. But if we don’t have coffee almost immediately upon waking up — Did you hit the button? I thought you were hitting the button? — then somebody is in a fix. And that’s when it gets serious.

I just walked around the house and counted all the various coffee-making devices I could find. There were 11 different mechanisms, from drip coffee makers upstairs and down, to French presses, pour-overs, the aforementioned espresso machine, and a variety of backcountry percolators.

• • •

No matter where we go in North Carolina, it seems as if coffee lingers around the edges. At our home in Raleigh, I can smell the coffee roasting at Cup A Joe, a few blocks away on Hillsborough Street. In Morehead City, I frequent what is likely the coolest coffee shop in the country, Reed’s Coffee + Art + Framing, in a 1930 building that once housed the public library.

When we travel, we have the coffee conundrum figured out before we put so much as a sock in a suitcase. Will there be coffee in the hotel room? Should I take the camp stove and French press? Many is the time I’ve heated water in a hotel bathroom, camp stove roaring like a rocket at the ready, fingers crossed that the fire alarm won’t go off. Having to walk down to the lobby to fetch a cup of joe is the worst.

Even that nickname for coffee has ties to North Carolina, although they might be a tad tenuous. There’s an old myth suggesting that the “joe” in “cup of joe” is none other than the North Carolina newspaperman Josephus Daniels. In 1914, Daniels was serving as Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson. He was a teetotaler and banned alcohol on all U.S. Navy property, including ships.

In years prior, sailors had been fond of a wee snort of rum or other spirits while off duty, while officers were accustomed to wine at dinner. General Order No. 99 from the abstemious North Carolinian was unwelcome news. The story goes that a cup of coffee was soon called “a cup of joe” as a derisive nickname for the nonalcoholic drink.

• • •

I certainly understand why shedding a ship of spirits might make a sailor grumpy, but I have nothing but warm, fuzzy feelings when it comes to coffee. On the porch at The Lodge at Chetola Resort in Blowing Rock, a light fog rising from the lake, a hot cup of coffee is like a pat on the back from Mother Nature herself. In a glamping tent in the Blue Ridge, on a morning when the temperature dove into the 20s, Julie and I drank coffee under the covers like little kids giggling in a makeshift fort.

My favorite coffee nook is no nook at all: It’s the tailgate of my pickup truck. I line up the camp stove and French press, and if I’m feeling fancy, I might even let the grounds bloom before I finish the brewing.

As serious as I am about all this, you might wonder how I take my coffee. Please understand that I remember when coffee came out of an Eight O’Clock Coffee bag, which you’d buy at the A&P, and anything fancier meant you were getting above your raisin’. So today I take what might be called a John Wayne approach: I want a spoon to stand up straight in my Mississippi mud. I want my coffee to float a pistol. Here’s how I order coffee: I walk up to the counter and say, “A cup of coffee, please.”

I am frequently met with a stare of incomprehension and a beat of hesitation as the barista waits for the rest of my description. But I ain’t budging.

No cinnamon?

No.

Steamed milk?

No.

Room for cream? Pumpkin spice? Artisanal marshmallow?

No, no, and no. Just give it to me straight. I like coffee in my coffee.

Related: Check out these local coffee shops steeped in history.