Beer at 10am

High metabolism from training and a day job with back to back meetings or long coding sessions require creative hydration and fuel solutions.  It's well known that good programmers' productivity is based on caffeine, calories, and beer.  Energy drinks can give you the first, but beer is hard to add.  Here is my ultimate recipe.

Invented at VMware circa 2009.  Made available to the public for tasting purposes only.

Ingredients:

coffee - French roast works well, darker or decaf if you don't need much caffeine;

soda - cane sugar soda (mango flavored is my favorite), or sugar free if you don't need carbs; the carbonation mix makes a delicious beer-like foam topping

Benefits:

Caffeine - improves attention and memory performance

Sugar -  warm glucose fueling your brain

Beer-likeness:

    - Indelible smirk on your face - creativity and confidence booster

    - Face of your manager - priceless!

I love it at 10am meetings with people who don't know my antics: 

"He is already drinking beer!  He's got to be a principal engineer."  or "Is he quitting?"

Great for meetings that may last too long or when you need creative solutions.  

Good for coding when you don't want to lose context.

Instructions: Pour two fingers of coffee in a tall glass.  Pour soda confidently from  high above the glass.  Stop when the foam is an inch away from the top.  Otherwise quickly slurp the overflowing foam.

Certainly doesn't taste like beer, but I've had many fooled I am having one.  It should be no warmer than British beer with proper ratio of hot coffee and cold soda.  Carbonation is used up to make the great tasting foam topping, no burping.  Cane Sugar instead of HFCS as in Mountain Dew is much better for you.  And you can customize for your needs of caffeine and calories.   No alcohol - better than Dutch courage.  

Yes, I actually drink this.  About a dozen curious ones have tried it when I make some in the kitchenette. Having no daring imitators in meetings has kept its cachet.