Coffee talk

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans support an $11 billion coffee industry by drinking more than 300 million cups of java each day from coffee joints alone. In the U.S. coffee totals 9 percent of all nonalcoholic beverages consumed, right behind carbonated soft drinks (28 percent), bottled water (11 percent) and milk (11 percent).

It used to be that you’d order coffee one of two ways: black or with cream and/or sugar (or just one or the other). Anything else raised an eyebrow with questions about your character shortly following. You couldn’t even be pardoned by the excuse that you’d acquired your irritating coffee order habit somewhere in Europe when you were going through that ‘finding yourself ’ phase after college—you just didn’t do it! These days, ordering a cup o’ Joe can be as complicated as a Ph.D. dissertation on molecular resistance responses of Coffea arabica L. to fungi.

According to Joe Caruso, former manager and barista at a local coffee house, “There are literally thousands of ways to order your coffee … it’s all about the modifiers.” For example, a soy latte with half of a Splenda and 3 pumps of vanilla has three modifiers: the soy milk instead of cow’s milk and the additions of one-half of a Splenda packet and the three pumps of flavored syrup. Caruso says that about 75 percent of all orders have two or fewer modifiers and 23 percent have three to six modifiers. The remaining two percent of orders have more than six modifiers and usually take the same amount of time to make as the next five people combined. The most modified drink is the latte and Caruso said he’s personally taken orders with as many as 12 modifiers.

If you fall into the six-modifiers-or-more category, please be kind and tip your barista with a bottle of aspirin when placing your order. In addition, please complete your transaction posthaste and move quickly toward the lounge area—not to the pickup counter—you’ll only be coffee-blocking the 35 other caffeine addicts that were unfortunate enough to find themselves queued up behind you.

The coffee beverage you choose to order and how you go about ordering it can lead baristas, fellow customers and others (like your co-workers) to think of you in a certain light.