Is this the ultimate coffee mistake?

Apparently my request for sweetener showed that I wasn't a coffee purist. Photo / Getty

Opinion

Apparently the way I drink my coffee is not cool.

It's not pure and clearly I am denigrating the sacred name of coffee. And it's not that I'm ordering some obscure and pretentious concoction of half skinny almond milk decaf double strength macchiato with matcha syrup.

Rather I am that woman who dares to ask for sweetener with her skinny cappuccino.

Sweetener, not arsenic or cyanide or even caramel syrup. You'd think that my request would be a pretty easy one to meet - it's not like I am ordering an unknown condiment sourced only in the depths of azure ponds in southern Bulgaria. I just want some artificial sweetener.

But more and more often I hear "sorry we don't have sweetener" - not as in "we've just run out of the stuff and are waiting for Johnny to come back from the local convenience store with emergency supplies" but more like "ooh that white powder, how dare you even suggest a place like ours would cater to your pedestrian tastes?"

And then they grudgingly bring me a pot of organic rapadura sugar which is the pure juice extracted from the sugar cane with a press and then evaporated over low heat, while being stirred with paddles and ogled at by unicorns. Or something. But it's non-refined sugar and all I really wanted was sweetener.

When this first started to happen to me I did what any savvy woman of the digital world would do, I consulted Facebook and asked why I am being scorned for wanting sweetener. The range of replies was swift and sometimes brutal.

I was told I was killing myself by eating sweetener because it is so harmful. I know that the internet is full of people with medical qualifications born only from dreams so I checked for the umpteenth time with Food Standards Australia.

They told me that the safety of aspartame (intense sweetener used to replace sugar in foods and drinks) has been the subject of comprehensive reviews by FSANZ, the Food and Agricultural Organisation/World Health Organisation Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). Phew.

That's more of a mouthful than the coffee I'm after.

It's also a lot of widely respected and acknowledged organisations declaring that scientific evidence supports the safety of aspartame for use as a sweetener in food.

Other people told me that even if I didn't die from the sweetener, cafes were just trying to protect my health by not letting me eat "artificial" foods.

Given that I had once been denied sweetener after my husband had ordered waffles and fried chicken with maple syrup and my son had ordered a milkshake that would have made the Surgeon General baulk, I figured this probably wasn't it.

Cost was also offered as a consideration. Although I saw the prices they charged for a slice of toast - trust me they could afford sweetener, and rapadura sugar.

As the thread continued to grow it became clear that almost everybody had an issue with me ordering sweetener. I was becoming like some kind of pariah that worships at the foot of aspartame.

So I called around to some of the places where they had refused me my artificial joy to get the real low down.

Apparently my request for sweetener showed that I wasn't a coffee purist.

"Good coffee does not need sweetening" I was reminded over and over again. I was told that the only reason people add dairy or sweetener to their coffee is to mask the bitter flavours of stale or poor quality coffee beans or poor extraction.

I was told that baristas who use quality beans and pay attention to the grinding and brewing process make coffee that shouldn't be bitter in the first place. And for some reason that means they will give me rapadura sugar but they won't give me sweetener.

Go figure.

Maybe it boils down to coffee snobbery with an added dash of pretentious.