Tips for getting the best from your café and barista

Baristas work bloody hard. It's a skilled job as you'd find out if you had to juggle making hundreds of drinks a day, all day, every day. Pulling an excellent espresso shot alone takes time and practice to learn,. Add in a wide variety of drinks based on espresso and you'll see there's a lot to balance and think about, not to mention the hideous and innumerable matcha concoctions that are suddenly popular. it's a ruddy battlefield, is the average cafe. They may have several drinks on the go at a time, each of which has its own workflow. Disturb that workflow and one or more drinks may be below standard. you'll almost certainly spoil your drink and possibly, others' too.

i have witnessed all these things and more, and while I'm not in the business, I have spent enough time observing and talking to baristas to know what irks them, upsets the workflow of the cafe and disturbs the vibe. the TL;DR of

I am a lifelong skeptic, nay, cynic, when it comes to Eastern medicine and healing practices.  I plead my upbringing; I was birthed and raised by a pair of rigidly positivist western science practitioners.  Neither was a 'traditional' science doer; my father was a science journalist, and my mother was a psychiatrist (and yes, before you ask, that's the one with the M.D.).  I spent the vast majority of my life to date comfortable with the set of options that Western, U.S.-culture-centric offered me.

i spent a good part of yesterday going through my old daylogs, for two reasons. Partly I wanted a list summarising them all (I used to have such a list on my homenode, but it got killed off due to my using unapproved Unicode characters, which destroyed evrything typed after them =[). The other thing is that I've wanted to