Caffeine, questionable life choices, and the pursuit of a decent first draft—Dahun Café in Cebu might just be the answer.
Drinking coffee is a tightrope walk. One wrong step, and you’re either nodding off mid-sentence or vibrating at a frequency that could shatter glass. It’s a fragile blend. Drink too little coffee, and you’re sluggish. Drink too much and you’re agitated. Somewhere in between, if you’re lucky, is clarity.
Balzac knew this. In the 1830s, he wrote an appendix for an “enhanced” edition of La Physiologie du Goût by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a treatise concerned with the great stimulants of modern life—coffee, wine, and tobacco.1 Of course, Brillat-Savarin, for all his wisdom was incomplete. Balzac had experience, and more importantly, he had a dependency. Coffee, he wrote, was a “great power” in his life. He described its effects as something bordering on the supernatural, a force that both invigorates and incinerates. He was unsentimental about it. Coffee, he noted, made boring people even more boring. And while it kept Parisian grocery stores open until midnight, it didn’t necessarily make Parisian writers any smarter. He had a point.
Writing and coffee are inseparable in the popular imagination. It’s a pairing as certain as misery and deadlines. The logic is simple: coffee fuels thought, thought fuels words, and words, ideally, form coherent sentences. Except the reality is far less utopian. There’s nothing poetic about staring at a blinking cursor for hours, waiting for inspiration that refuses to arrive.
Balzac had an entire philosophy on the matter. He believed coffee set the blood in motion, stimulated the muscles, and prolonged intellectual effort. He spoke of coffee’s ability to extend the creative impulse beyond its natural expiration. It’s a noble theory. And I used to believe in it until the night I drank five cups of espresso to finish a writing assignment, only to end up pacing my apartment at 3 a.m., convinced my heart would explode.
Balzac would have understood. He knew coffee was both savior and tyrant, muse and tormentor.
Can the Right Coffee Make You a Better Writer?
I don’t need coffee to function. I’m not one of those people who claim their body physically refuses to operate without caffeine as if a single espresso shot holds their entire nervous system together. But I like it. Having a cup before sitting down to write has become a ritual. It’s a Pavlovian trick I’ve played on myself. The sound of the kettle, the mug in my hands, and the slightly bitter taste tell my brain it’s time to focus.
Let’s see what science has to say about coffee and writing.
On Creativity
Caffeine sharpens focus and enhances problem-solving but does little for creativity.2 Researcher Darya Zabelina found that while caffeine improves “convergent thinking”—finding a single correct answer—it doesn’t boost “divergent thinking,” the free-flowing idea generation essential to creativity. In the study, 80 participants took either a 200mg caffeine pill or a placebo and then completed cognitive tests. While caffeine improved problem-solving and mood, it did not affect creative thinking.
On Brain Health
Too much coffee—six cups or more a day—may do more than jangle your nerves; it could shrink brain volume and raise dementia risk by 53%.3 While caffeine sharpens focus and battles writer’s block, drowning in it might blur the very clarity you need to craft sentences that make sense.
But there’s good news for people who like their coffee sweet. Researchers recently used functional MRI scans to confirm that a mix of caffeine and glucose makes your brain more efficient.4 When you combine the two, your parietal and prefrontal cortices—regions responsible for working memory and attention—operate with less effort while maintaining the same performance. This is good news for writers, who rely on working memory to hold an entire sentence in their heads before committing it to paper.
On Concentration
Caffeine fine-tunes focus—when kept in check. A small dose sharpens attention, helping the mind filter distractions.5 Writers know the drill: a cup of coffee clears the brain fog and tames unruly thoughts, making it easier to sift through ideas and refine prose. But excess caffeine, like an overcomplicated draft, can backfire—leading to jittery thoughts and diminishing returns.
The sweet spot for me is when I’ve had enough to push past procrastination but not too much that “in my head I’m undergoing heart surgery.”6
So, can the right coffee make you a better writer? Maybe. At the very least, it can make you a more awake one. It can give you the momentum to start typing and the focus to stay with a sentence until it makes sense.
Where to Find Coffee in Cebu to Fuel Your Creative Mojo
There are coffee shops that exist to serve coffee, and then there are coffee shops that understand why you left your apartment in the first place. Dahun Café belongs to the latter. Tucked away in Brgy. Kasambagan and Brgy. Zapatera, it’s a place where the chairs don’t threaten your spine, the air doesn’t smell like someone’s reheated lunch, and the music isn’t a relentless loop of acoustic covers that should have stayed in 2012.
It helps that Dahun Café comes from the same people behind Kahoy Café, a place that figured out early on that greenery and caffeine are an unbeatable duo. Their expansion into the city means you no longer have to travel to Consolacion to enjoy the same thoughtful design—one that values natural light, quiet corners, and the radical concept of seating that allows both solitude and sociability, depending on what you need.
My Go-To Order(s)
Some cafés make you wonder if you actually like coffee or if you’ve just been tolerating it for years out of habit. Dahun Café does not have this problem. Their Spanish Latte is the kind of drink that makes you reconsider past allegiances—smooth, just sweet enough, and without the cloying artificiality that turns lesser versions into dessert disguised as caffeine. Then there’s the Dahun Coffee, a signature blend that tastes like someone actually cared about the beans before they ended up in your cup. The flavors are balanced, rich without being aggressive, and best enjoyed in a moment of reflection—preferably while staring at something green and pretending you have your life together.
The Ambiance
A coffee shop’s real value isn’t just in the drinks but in the space it provides. Dahun Café understands that people enter its doors not just for caffeine but for peace—an increasingly rare commodity in a world where someone is always on a video call at full volume. Here, you get what so many places fail to deliver: the lack of excessive noise. There’s greenery, which does wonders for your mood even if you don’t identify as a plant person. The tables are arranged with enough thought that you won’t accidentally eavesdrop on someone’s breakup.
Dahun Café is the kind of place that makes you want to linger. It respects the sanctity of a good coffee experience—no gimmicks, no forced rustic aesthetics, just a well-crafted drink in a space that doesn’t make you want to flee after fifteen minutes. Whether you’re there to work, read, or simply escape the many small absurdities of daily life, it’s a place that gets it. And in a city full of options that miss the point, that’s worth something.
Supporting Local Farmers, Supporting Your Caffeine Habit
It’s easy to turn ethically sourced coffee into a marketing pitch—throw in a burlap sack, a sepia-toned photo of a farmer, and a few well-placed buzzwords, and you have a brand story fit for an Instagram caption. Dahun Café skips the performance. They source their beans from local suppliers, meaning your morning pick-me-up also contributes to an ecosystem where farmers are paid for their labor. It’s a rare win-win situation: you get a good cup of coffee, and someone in the local coffee industry gets to keep doing what they do best.
Read Next: Abaca Baking Company in Crossroads: Why I Love It
If Dahun Coffee Doesn’t Help, Your Genes Could Be Betraying You
Your body has a built-in caffeine processing system, and like everything else in life, it is unfair. If you’re lucky, you can down an espresso at midnight and sleep like a saint. If not, a cappuccino at 5:00 P.M. leaves you staring at the ceiling at 3 A.M., brooding on past mistakes.
For some, a single cup sparks productivity; for others, it’s just palpitations and free-floating dread. Blame ADORA2A, the gene that dictates whether caffeine sharpens your focus or sends you spiraling into despair. If your morning brew makes you feel like you’ve had an out-of-body experience rather than a boost of energy, you can thank your DNA for the ride.
But caffeine does not just keep you awake; it meddles with your brain’s reward system in ways both delightful and vaguely sinister. The DRD2 gene controls how much dopamine you wring from each sip, which explains why some people savor their latte in bliss while others down triple espressos and vibrate with impending doom.
This genetic roulette means some people are natural-born coffee addicts, while others could quit anytime—if they wanted to.7 Whether your DNA has blessed or cursed you, the next time someone smugly says, “Oh, I don’t need coffee to wake up,” just nod and remind yourself that it’s not a personality trait, it’s a genetic accident.
Parting Thoughts
A great cup of coffee won’t write your first draft for you. It won’t fix your terrible metaphors. But it will make the process less punishing. Maybe that’s all we really need: something to hold, a reason to pause, and the illusion, however fleeting, that this next sentence will be the one that gets it right. You’ll find that kind of coffee at Dahun.
Sources:
- Balzac, H. de. (n.d.). The pleasures and pains of coffee. Michigan Quarterly Review. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0035.002:01 ↩︎
- Zabelina, D. L., & Silvia, P. J. (2020). Percolating ideas: The effects of caffeine on creative thinking and problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 79, 102899. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102899 ↩︎
- Pham, K., Mulugeta, A., Zhou, A., O’Brien, J. T., Llewellyn, D. J., & Hyppönen, E. (2021). High coffee consumption, brain volume and risk of dementia and stroke. Nutritional Neuroscience, 24(11), 925-934. https://doi.org/10.1080/1028415X.2021.1945858 ↩︎
- Serra Grabulosa, J. M., Adan, A., Falcón, C., & Bargalló, N. (2010). Glucose and caffeine effects on sustained attention: An exploratory fMRI study. Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental, 25(7-8), 543–552. https://doi.org/10.1002/hup.1150 ↩︎
- Ruiz-Oliveira, J., Silva, P. F., & Luchiari, A. C. (2019). Coffee time: Low caffeine dose promotes attention and focus in zebrafish. Learning & Behavior, 47(3), 227–233. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-018-0369-3 ↩︎
- Sexton, A. (1971). Transformations. Houghton Mifflin. ↩︎
- Low, J. J. L., Tan, B. J. W., Yi, L. X., & et al. (2024). Genetic susceptibility to caffeine intake and metabolism: A systematic review. Journal of Translational Medicine, 22, 961. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-024-05737-z ↩︎
