Do you actually need it? During retreats try to go without it if you are a coffee or tea drinker. Everyone of you knows it's not the best stuff. Caffeine is a stimulant, you know. Maybe you have read about it, you have heard about it, that you get a "buzz" sometimes if you drink too much. One of our friends almost burned down his caravan. He drank six cups of coffee in one afternoon and he hallucinated while turning on the stove! The flame started and he thought he was burning down his caravan, it was totally out of control. So it's an upper, it's a mind bender so to speak. To a large degree, it can confuse the mind. For most people, it doesn't do a great deal of harm but it's a buzz, it's looking for energy outside of ourselves.
We know that the center here provides it but that's the center, that's not us in charge. At Wat Kow Tahm, we don't provide coffee. If you can go without it, if you can prove to yourself that you don't really need it, if you can bring up more energy from within, then you are a winner. It's just another type of outward thing.
Whether it actually is interfering with the practice, I'm not going to say yes or no, but it is still a dependency on outward things. Everything that you are dependent on outwardly, examine it. Do you really need to be dependent on this, do you need to be dependent on that.
Whether it's coffee or tea, whether it involves excesses of alcohol or drugs. Whatever it is, whatever you are depending on at a material level - can you examine it? Can you take a look at it and say, " Is it really what I need?"