Hello and greetings from lovely Greenwood, which is quickly elevating itself on my list of places I could see myself living in Seattle. To be more precise, I’m at Herkimer Coffee sipping some tasty brew and enjoying the shelter from what has become a rather rainy Friday.

Some might find it funny that I choose to spend my day off in a coffee shop, but I have always found it refreshing to get away from the pressure of work-mode and simply enjoy the surroundings. It is certainly grand when customers walk in and I don’t have to spring into action. It takes a pretty tremendous amount of energy to interface with people for six or eight hours while simultaneously working to stay one step ahead of the closing chore list and the pile of dishes and the coffee mess and …

I’ve strayed off point. What I started out to say was that as I sit here writing and observing, I have been noticing a few little things that people tend to do when in coffee shops that I would like to publicly speak out against. Nothing major, just a few pointers for all you good folk about how to not piss off your barista:

1) “Caramel Macchiato” is a registered trademark (or something like that) of the Starbucks corporation. (Also, it is a bastardization of everything that hold to be true and good about coffee culture in America, but we’ll get to that later.) Walking into any coffee shop besides Starbucks and ordering a Caramel Macchiato would be like walking into your neighborhood burger joint and ordering a Big Mac. You wouldn’t. So why would you? If you want something sweet and caramely, try a caramel latte. They are really good and you won’t sound like a total noob. (Side note: a grande Caramel Macchiato with whole milk contains 270 calories (recently down from 310) and would take a 170 lb human about half an hour to burn off jogging at a pace of 12 min/mile.)

2) “Drip” is a type of brewed coffee. Ordering a “cup of drip” is horrendously annoying to me. To use another analogy, I would not go into a bakery and ask for a “plate of bake.” It is called coffee people, and if you have never had the experience of tasting the house coffee vs. the french press or the vac-pot or the espresso (the Americano is not, by any means, a sissy drink), I highly recommend expanding your horizons.

3) Bold is bullshit. This one, again, comes from our friends at the jolly green giant we have all come to love to hate. Muhammad Ali and Steve Jobs and Salman Rushdie are bold. Coffee cannot be bold (well, it can be bold, but not in the way that we are told to think – in a far more weird and esoteric sense like wine, yes … but nobody will like you if you describe a wine as being “audacious” or “brawny”). Coffee can be light or dark or medium or city or espresso. These are roast levels which are carefully monitored to bring the particular coffee to a level that will allow it to taste its best. Rather than participating in the linear concept of light/dark/bold/weak/strong, consider focusing instead on where the coffee you are drinking is from, how it was made and why it tastes the way it does. Coffee shops exist to train people in the specific knowledge required to make a really tasty product and to provide a medium in which the general consumer public can enjoy that product (that “coffee shop” feeling you probably associate with your favorite cafe, or that you at least refer to begrudgingly as you walk past the hordes of yuppies gathered with their heads buried in the Mac computers).

If you are going to coffee shops whose employees’ skills are equal to what you flaunt in your kitchen ever morning before braving the big bad world and whose product is the same as what you can buy at your local grocery store, stop. Find somewhere that serves single origin coffees, preferably roasts their own beans and has really frickin hip baristas (preferably with large glasses and ridiculous facial hair) because these guys, despite looking like they stumbled out of the local thrift store dressing room, probably spend more time thinking about how to make really good coffee in any given day than you would really be comfortable knowing. It is their job and their lifeblood and, if they are anything like me (which they are not because I can’t grow ridiculous facial hair … but still), they are going to get really excited because they get to share something that they are really into with you. You never know, you may one day find yourself sitting in a Seattle coffee shop on a rainy Seattle day off thinking about how you can encourage people to let you make really, really good coffee for them.