acrid said:
on the starf#ck's topic, [...] they just push buttons, that's like saying the someone the works are Wendy's is a chef....
I totally agree. I stopped into a Starbucks for the first time two weeks ago (I was passing by, and my passenger said that she'd pay, otherwise I wouldn't've). I was under the impression that Starbucks had automatic grinding, dosing, and tamping, and that the person behind the counter still had to put the portafilter into the espresso machine. Not so; everything is automated. To get a shot, all the employee does is push a button on a big silver box.
When I went to Starbucks, I asked for an eight-ounce dry cappucino, a straight-forward drink (to me at least). The PBTC (person behind the counter) didn't want to let me have an 'eight-ounce' drink. She wanted me to call it a 'short'. I had to insist, literally four or five times, that I didn't care what the Starbucks-ese name for it was, I just wanted an eight-ounce dry cappucino.
I walked around to a position where I could watch her make the drink, since I'm a barista myself and was curious. For those of you not in the know, if you foam milk (like for a cappucino), and you do it properly, you'll end up with roughly twice the volume of milk you started with. So for an eight-ounce drink, you don't need very much milk. The PBTC must have put about twenty ounces of milk in the pitcher (way, way, way too much milk. That's just a waste). The way she foamed it was the way that every real barista is taught not to do it. Ideally, you get the milk swirling in a vortex in the pitcher, which keeps the bubbles down, and the result is a nice, glossy 'microfoam'. The Starbucks employee didn't swirl the milk in the pitcher at all, which not only leads to an unequal heat distribution in the cup, it creates huge 'soap bubbles' of milk, which is exactly what you don't want in a cappucino.
She then pushed a button on the machine and some espresso poured out (very quickly, I might add: a perfect shot takes ~27 seconds to pull, about half that for a ristretto and twice that for a lungo. The Starbucks espresso took about three seconds) into a shot glass. Why she didn't put it right into the cup, I don't know. She poured it into the cup, glopped some milk foam onto it, and then committed the most egregious error of the night, which proved beyond a doubt that she was no barista: she stirred the cappucino before pouring in some of the steamed milk. I asked for a dry cappucino, which means 'lots of milk foam, very little steamed (liquid) milk. Stirring milk foam turns it back into a liquid. If you stir a cappucino, you turn it into a latte. In retrospect, I should have made her make me another one, but it was late and I just wanted to go home.
After the PBTC had finished making my 'cappucino', I decided to ask her a few questions about the machine. I asked if the machine adjusted itself for humidity, or if it had to be adjusted manually by a human being. "We check it every hour", she replied. I told her that that didn't answer my question, and repeated it. Again, "We check it every hour" was her reply. "Will that machine make a ristretto shot?" I asked. "A what?". That did it for me. She clearly knew nowhere near enough to be considered a barista.
Wow, that turned into a long post.
assgas: 
