Blended Coffee Drinks San Francisco That Don’t Taste Like a Melted Candy Bar With Caffeine Anxiety
My friend Claudia has a complicated relationship with blended coffee drinks and she’ll tell you about it at length if you give her the opening. She grew up drinking them at chain coffee places through high school and college and for a long time she thought that sugar rush experience was just what blended coffee…
Read MoreNitro Cold Brew San Francisco That Makes You Stop and Actually Look at Your Coffee Before You Drink It
I want to tell you about the first time my friend Leo had nitro cold brew because his reaction was genuinely funny and also perfectly captures what the drink does to people who haven’t had it before. He walked into Barista Coffee and Brunch on a Tuesday afternoon because he needed caffeine and someone at…
Read MorePour Over Coffee San Francisco That’s Worth the Extra Two Minutes of Your Life
My friend Stephanie is a software engineer who spent four years working in Tokyo before moving back to San Francisco. In Tokyo she developed a specific relationship with pour over coffee that she describes as one of the few genuinely life changing things that happened to her there. Not the career stuff, not the travel,…
Read MoreDrip Coffee San Francisco That Doesn’t Taste Like It’s Been Sitting There Since Tuesday
My friend Carl is not a complicated coffee person. He doesn’t order macchiatos or think about extraction ratios or have opinions about single origin beans from specific Ethiopian regions. He drinks drip coffee. Has for thirty years. Two cups in the morning, sometimes a third if the day requires it, black, no sugar, no milk,…
Read MoreMacchiato San Francisco That Knows What It Is and Doesn’t Try to Be Something Else
My friend Nora spent three weeks in Italy three years ago and came back a different person in exactly one specific way. She discovered the macchiato. Not the American version, not the thing that’s basically a small latte with a different name, the actual traditional espresso macchiato which is a shot of espresso with just…
Read MoreMocha San Francisco That Actually Tastes Like Coffee and Chocolate Instead of Just Sweet Brown Liquid
My friend Diane is a dessert person. Not in a casual way, in a serious committed way where she has opinions about chocolate that most people reserve for things that matter more in life. She grew up in Belgium, which she mentions approximately once per conversation, and she has a specific relationship with chocolate that…
Read MoreAmericano San Francisco That Hits the Way It’s Supposed to Without Hitting Too Hard
My friend Gil orders Americanos everywhere he goes and he has for about twelve years. He switched from drip coffee to Americanos after a trip to Portugal where he had one that changed his understanding of what the drink could be and he’s been chasing that experience in San Francisco ever since with mixed results.…
Read MoreCold Brew San Francisco That’s Actually Been Made With Some Patience
My friend Owen is not a complicated person when it comes to most things but he has one area where he gets very specific and that area is cold brew. He’s been drinking it since before it was everywhere, back when you had to actually know where to look in San Francisco to find a…
Read MoreIced Coffee San Francisco That Doesn’t Taste Like Watered Down Regret
My friend Alexis moved to San Francisco from Miami two years ago and the first summer she was here she made a mistake a lot of people make. She assumed that because San Francisco is in California it would be warm enough to justify iced coffee basically year round. She was partially right about the…
Read MoreLatte San Francisco That Doesn’t Taste Like Warm Milk With a Coffee Rumor In It
My friend Priya has a rule. She will not order a latte somewhere new without asking what coffee they use. Not because she’s being difficult, she just got burned too many times. She’d order a latte, it would come out looking beautiful, nice little leaf pattern on top, good color, and then she’d take a…
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