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

It is one of the lines of the beatitudes that gets repeated so much we forget what it means.

Matthew 5:6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Wow, that sounds serious. We can just imagine what it feels like to strive for righteousness, to be that clean, pure, self-contained person, maybe sitting in their toga and insisting that everyone just try to do better, with a serene patience.

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 =[). The other thing is that I've wanted to document my coming to America, and my