Double Tall Iced Mocha, lite on the chocolate, thanks, no need for a lid. This is how I order my coffee. For someone whose friends refer to as care free and easy going, coffee is one thing I am anal about. At least in Seattle. Put me in the midwest or the south and I will gladly drink the cowboy coffee at Dennys or the burnt brown water out of the filth ridden espresso machine in a trailer on the side of the road. In Seattle though there is no excuse. There is no shortage of well trained baristas and with coffee roasters like Vivace, Vita, and Lighthouse there is definitely not a shortage of good local coffee roasters.
When I first to came to Seattle I really had little or no appreciation for Espresso. Even though I hung out in and worked at a Coffee House in my hometown, I had never been equipped with the right skills to make good espresso or anything even close to a good espresso roast. Needless to say I thought Dunkin Donuts was great coffee (still do actually, it has a warm place in my heart) and I thought espresso tasted like bitter burnt crap or at least it had in the past.
For my first couple of months in Seattle, I stuck with “drip” as I had learned to call it. I also learned that you could not just ask for “coffee”, and “regular” is not synonymous “with cream and sugar”. It was a tough battle, I thought baristas were jerks, and needless to say my coffee reality was in need in of some serious healing.
I will never forget the first espresso drink I had in Seattle. It was at the now passed Espresso Roma on Broadway. I liked the Roma for its atmosphere. In Nashua, NH we had a Coffee House, it was where I spent a decent chunk of my teenage years. There was open mike, poetry readings, and it was a haven of sorts for freaks of all ages. There were two primary clientele at the Nashua Coffee House, High School kids who fit into one of the alternative genres of our generation and the older crazy people that walked the streets of downtown nashua. We all got along quite well and bonded quite a bit, sharing our common outcast feelings. I digress, Espresso Roma reminded me somewhat of the Nashua Coffee House, more so then any other coffee place on Broadway so I decided to pop my Seattle espresso cherry there.I ordered an iced mocha and what I saw was quite impressive. The barista whips out a pitcher of this frothy mocha substance, which I would later learn is some fancy chocolate powdered mixed with milk. The chocolate mixed perfectly with coffee, milk and ice. There was no powdered residue, or floaty chocolate chunks. I shared a similar feeling to when I first saw the Dunkin Donuts technique of melting sugar in a bit of hot coffee before putting it in your iced coffee.
Over the years I tried other drinks. After my time at Espresso Roma, I migrated down Broadway to now defunct Cafe Solstice cart. During the Solstice period, I tried Breves, straight up lattes, and iced lattes. It was really a hard to nail a solid drink down. I am not a huge chocolate fan but I have always liked some sugar in my coffee. Getting the general population of baristats to pre-melt your sugar is an impossible task. I finally had the epiphany at the Solstice cart, when I asked for an Iced Latte with just enough chocolate to take the edge off. Not that there was an edge to the coffee, but he caught my drift.
This being my regular coffee locale, I really didn’t need any fancy one liners to order my drinks it always ended being the “usual”. But to make this drink portable, I needed something snappy. Eventually it came organically over time, in fact I did not even realize it until one day my friend Matt whipped up this pseudo haiku for me:
iced mocha double tall light on the chocolate please no need for a lid
Heh, I thought to myself that sums it up. Eventually it transmogrified into “Double tall iced mochaa, lite on the chocolate. No need for lid, thanks.”
Now to explain some of the details. Why double tall? Well there are some coffee shops, we wont mention any names (cough, cough, Toppot) whose default tall configuration is a single shot. Thank you but I came here for coffee not a glass of milk. Lite on the chocolate, because really I use chocolate as a general purpose sweetener, not for chocolate taste. No need for a lid? This is coffee not a slurpee, I will never understand the rationale behind drinking coffee through a straw.
My coffee has other incantations. The normal version does work at Starbucks (sometimes they are your only option), where the term lite chocolate means three quarters of the normal gazillion pumps of chocolate substance they dispense into their mocha drinks. For Starbucks its “Double tall, iced, half pump mocha, extra ice, no whip”.
Minus a few minor details that is the straight dirt on my coffee drink of choice. Not that you really cared, but I get asked about every once and while, so know I have something to point people at.
