COFFEE

When it comes to caffeine, I have to say at the outset, I’m a grumpy purist. I try my best to steer clear of all those cloying flavored coffees--Hazelnut Butterscotch Creme, Chocolate Raspberry Fling, Coconut Macadamia Fantasy. Yuck. Nor am I particularly fond of over-the-top espresso-based creations such as Mochaccino Mint and Kaluha Au Lait that just seem like someone’s rococo attempt to cover up for inferior beans (or worse yet, a dirty, calcified coffee-maker!). Usually I have to ask: What’s the point?

A good bean, roasted to its perfection and brewed carefully, should be quite enough.

I’ve tried to keep this in check. And so when I’m out and my dining companion waxes glorious about the establishment’s coffee and then the steaming specimen finally arrives smelling more like a Glade Plug In, I keep quiet. But I realize it’s my own fault. I should know better.

My search was for a coffee drink that truly enhances the experience of the brew without cloaking it and turning it into something unrecognizable. You know, like how you look after you get a department store make-over.

But these notes come from the woman who once was, er . . . detained . . . at an airport with two bricks of whole beans wrapped in foil tucked among the unmentionables. Think Brad Davis in the Billy Hayes role in “Midnight Express.” Substitute the San Francisco International Airport for a landing field in Turkey.

“I froze them to keep them fresh,” was my attempt at explanation.

Needless to say, I’m happy Peets has finally opened down here.

This scenario, I suppose, would suggest that I go to great lengths to nab a consistent, damn good cuppa Joe. And I guess that’s true. I still bring beans back from one of my favorite places for cappuccino and beans, Caffe Trieste in San Francisco. For the most part I prefer simple sophistication to a lot of frou-frou. So hands down my favorite places to fall by for a filtered cup of pure, unadulterated Black Gold are Peets Coffee and Tea in Pasadena (particularly Major Dickason’s blend and the yearly anniversary offering) and King’s Road Cafe on Beverly Boulevard (which brews up next-door neighbor City Roasters’ beans--its house caffeine kick, the rich, smooth and complex Cafe Blend).

Best consistent cappuccino--hands down--would be City Roasters. Whatever the barista does while steaming the nonfat milk, the foam is so rich and peaked and smooth that it doesn’t separate into that all-too-familiar grayish sludge that “double-tall-skinny” obsessives have grown to live with.

In the last few years I’ve been trying to break with tradition. Grow. Get a little more fanciful. Venture out and away from my ascetic preoccupations. That started in Seattle. I had a caramel cappuccino at a little place called B & O Coffee (just like the Monopoly Railroad concern) that was made with the best sundae-style hot caramel shot through it like marble. The closest I have come to that creation at home is at the increasingly ubiquitous Starbucks chain. Its Caramel Macchiato is prepared with a couple of shots of espresso, vanilla syrup, steamed milk, capped off with a tiny head of foam and a lacy layer of liquid caramel.

There was a White Chocolate Latte I had at a little kiosk stuck away in a corner of campus at UC Davis that I’ve never been able to replicate but am still trying. What made it work was it tasted the way coffee and chocolate should taste together--a hit of intense bean; a smoothing complement of a cocoa.

That’s when you realize it’s the simple marriages that are usually the best. Mochas. Vanilla lattes. There isn’t a lot to clutter that masks the taste. The new Stonewall Gourmet Coffee Co. in West Hollywood does one of the best turns on a vanilla latte (and if you are more of a foam rather than steamed milk person, Stonewall will do a cappuccino version without a blink) in whole milk, low-fat or nonfat variety (and since you’ve saved sooo many calories getting a “skinny” you can afford to have the whipped cream with the sprinkles on the top).

Stir Crazy, a eccentric little coffeehouse-cum-Yogi Bear-style cabin on Melrose near La Brea, offers a couple of genuinely refreshing (both taste and thirst-wise) iced coffee drinks for our truly endless summer. Yogi Bear’s cappuccino shake and cappuccino coolers come in a vanilla, mocha and coffee version.

The Pasqua chain does a nice nonfat or low-fat model of its iced mega-late afternoon lift Chillini--in varying flavors.

Truth be told, I’ve yet to have the mocha of my dreams. One that approximates the same sensation as biting into a dark, rich, intense piece of chocolate and then taking a hit of piping hot espresso doppio. I’ve had some interesting worthy-of-note brews though. The Mocha Granita at Urth’s in West Hollywood. And Equator in Pasadena’s Old Town makes an array of elegant coffee drinks (as as well as some quirky signatures like Ginsing Coffee) that take care of that dessert urge with Cinnabar, an espresso-based drink made with steamed milk, cinnamon, vanilla syrup and topped off with whipped cream, and a Black Forest Mocha, which has echoes of a heaping slice of German chocolate cake.

So what has this little foray taught me? Well, despite the fact that, like rapper Heavy D., I am more of the “ . . . black coffee, no sugar, no cream” school, I’ve come to learn that there are truly ways to have your coffee--and eat your cake too.