Matt Preston: Is there a problem brewing between baristas and customised coffee lovers?

Baristas may just have found their revenge over picky coffee customers, writes Matt Preston – and it’s not the $7 price tag.

“Can I have a strong skinny cap, extra hot, in a glass, with full-cream milk? Oh, actually can you put it in this KeepCup instead, but only fill it halfway up, and could you also throw away the old tea bag in there too, please?”

What the actual …?

I’m standing at a coffee stand in an Aussie airport, and the staff member behind the counter is nodding with a look of dull resignation that says they have accepted that those good old days when coffee orders were simply a cappuccino, a latte or a long black are long gone.

Those good old days when coffee orders were simply a cappuccino, a latte or a long black are long gone.

That’s a challenge, because for many of us, the speed of delivery is key when it comes to our coffee, especially in the morning when we may also be at our least patient.

And if you are the barista having to check dockets for a swag of variations, rather than just pumping out lattes and cappuccinos by the dozen, it’s bound to slow things down.

The cynic would say that our booming cafe culture brought this current level of coffee complexity on itself when it started to offer different roasts, a dizzying choice of non-milks and wanted to talk about the provenance of the beans with its customers.

Matt Preston says the result of the brewing barista problem is that coffee is getting pricey.

Then there are new variations of those old favourites — from the piccolo, the three-quarter latte and the double ristretto to the ‘magic’, as well as a whole suite of other ways to extract flavour from ground beans — from the French press and the filter to pour-overs, drip coffee, the moka pot and cold brew.

Admittedly this might all be, at least in part, due to the massive growth of cafe-quality home coffee machines, which mean that basic coffees are quick, easy and cheap to make at home … so why not be a little picky when you’re paying way more to order out?

On the upside, all this complexity does allow cafes to charge more for coffee, whether to offset the soaring cost of ingredients and resources hitting them on all sides, or to simply help counter all those add-ons and milk switch-ins.

The result is that coffee is getting pricey. In the last month, other people’s coffee orders I’ve been picking up seem to be pushing close to $7 a cup.

Of course, back at the airport, when the coffees arrive they are, by turns, too full and not hot enough – and that skinny cap in a KeepCup still has the old tea bag bobbing about in it.

Maybe that’s the passive-aggressive way cafe staff deal with these excessive demands?

We are in too much of a hurry to complain or take them back for replacement … which begs the question: with coffee orders, as in relationships, are our excessive demands just bound to lead to disappointment?

Originally published as Matt Preston: Is there a problem brewing between baristas and customised coffee lovers?