"Just step back from the cup with your hands clearly...

A delicious macchiato is wonderful. I have reverted to lazy bones and add microwaved low fat milk to some nice brewed coffee, which nice coffee keeps changing based on my sense of frugality or devil may care. That's when I do it at home.

There are a lot of environmentally gently procured coffee beans available around here. And now Peet's is available at Safeway. The bags keep getting smaller...

At work, I run down to Has Beans, a funky coffee place where musicians hang out a block up from our studio.. and get a small latte. Their small lattes have doppio espresso..

Plus, they sell Droste and Ritter chocolates...

Sweet mother of mercy!!!!

Low-fat milk, ooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh........ that is walking the wild side, the kitchen equivalent of BASE jumping!!!!

When I want the SERIOUS coffee jitters, just not the usual everyday kind, I shove some fire under one of these.....



the coffee comes out, red-brown. It hisses like a demon snake. FULL-cream milk goes in the micro-wave and comes out frothing and roiling. Half/half of each - paramedics on standby.

duplicate post

I have an expresso machine. It's on the counter right next to the coffeemaker which we never use but keep intending to either find a place in the cupboard over the refrigerator for it or throw it out We got the coffeemaker when I decided to stop making expresso every morning.

You can see how that has worked out.

The expresso maker makes four tasses of about 2 0zs each. I make and drink all four with a little foamy skim milk. Yes, skim, because it foams better than the stuff with all the butterfat. Then I get on the train to Eighth and 16th Street. Here I have a decision to make - get a Starbuck's Grande now and sip it on the way to work or speed walk to the Starbuck's nearer the store and drink one at my leisure while at work.

Some mornings I do both.

I have a dopio after lunch.

One tall at about four with a chocolate biscotti.

And my day is through.

I sleep like I am dead.

Ah. A fellow soul. Bout friggin' time!

Drug addicts, the both of ya....

No reasoning with the likes of you. :wink:

foam in your milk? pah, I like my foam in the crema... the espresso foam, I mean. These froths of nares seeking milky
bubbles drive me ... to ask for senza foam. This perplexes folks.

It's not 'frothing' the milk ala cappuccino. I like to add it boiling hot to the really strong stuff. Just enough milk to cut the edge off the bitterness, if it was out of the fridge it wouldn't be HOT anymore. This is for a normal cup-sized quaff. I will happily pour crema-covered shots down my neck as is.


Now, hands up anyone who knows what a 'ristretto' is?

Ahhh, ristretto! Let me take this one, Mr. Stillwater.

Ristretto is simply an expression used among hard-core coffee drinkers. I drink approximately 32 cups of coffee a day. While that doesn't qualify me as a hard core coffee drinker it places me comfortably on the cusp and sometimes I am invited into the "inner circle" to indulge in a ristretto frenzy.

The participants are normally shaking like those paint-shaking machines and their eyes bulging at least six inches past the normal placement in the socket.

A large beaker of steaming hot risretto sludge (80% coffee- 10% water 10%canary urine) is placed in the center of the table. Each participant then inserts a syringe into the sludge, fills it, and at the appropriate signal the needle is forcefully self-driven into the left eye.

Everyone recoils from the table, blood squirting from their respective eyes, and the chant "ristretto.....ristretto......ristretto"... fills the air.

That was a very good question, Mr. Stillwater, and I am glad that I was given the opportunity to anwswer it.

I just spewed coffee all over my screen, Gus!
(Decaf, of course.)

I'll rephrase that question somewhat...




Does anyone, OTHER THAN GUS, know what 'ristretto' means?

I never even heard the word 'ristretto' until you mentioned it

http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/espresso/questions/25166

doppio funny gus

Also known as a 'short shot'