The case of the missing macchiato

ADJUSTING TO MOUNTAIN LIFE, ONE NON-COFFEE COFFEE DRINK AT A TIME.

By Annie Rijks Flora

The Starbucks caramel macchiato is the perfect drink for the person who is not a coffee lover but enjoys the concept of being one. I first started drinking “coffee” when I moved to Chicago. I always assumed that I would only shop at the local coffee shops like Metropolis Coffee, Intelligentsia, the Goddess and Grocer. Starbucks, however, had two advantages: one, it had a coffee shop in my office building, and two, it makes coffee drinks for people who don’t actually like coffee.

It turns out that going on coffee runs has very little to do with the coffee itself. It’s just a nice excuse to leave the office and socialize and talk about how tired you are, which is something I am very good at. I also soon became friendly with all of the Starbucks baristas, which made it feel more personal and less corporate. One of the baristas worked with the Raven Theatre on the production of “A Klingon Christmas Carol” – what’s not to love? I am basic enough to enjoy the pumpkin spice latte, but the caramel macchiato became my standby.

When I moved from Chicago back to Crested Butte (after doing much of my growing up here), I was still addicted to going on coffee runs. However, I learned something interesting about my favorite “coffee” drink. It wasn’t real. There is no such thing as a caramel macchiato outside of Starbucks, or at least not the drink that I had been enjoying for the last ten years. Macchiato means “stained” or “spotted” in Italian. A true macchiato is a small espresso drink with a tiny amount of foamed milk on top. Stain is a good word to describe it, because it is the same quantity as what you would typically spill out of a regular-sized drink. Your first sip is your last, and there is no caramel in it.

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How does Starbucks justify calling its drink a macchiato? The chain claims that it created an inverse of an espresso macchiato by starting with the milk and pouring espresso over it. The caramel macchiato debuted in the fall of 1996 to celebrate the store’s 25th anniversary. It was only supposed to be a temporary item, but its popularity made it a permanent fixture, to the dismay of baristas at other coffee shops.

We are very lucky to have fantastic coffee shops in Crested Butte, including Rumors Coffee & Tea, Daily Dose, Camp 4 Coffee and T-Bar. Going on coffee runs with friends or family became awkward, though, because I no longer knew how to order drinks. My first visit to each establishment started with me asking if I could order a caramel macchiato and having it explained to me that this was not, in fact, a drink. In lieu of that, I would look at the menu and pick the beverage that sounded the most absurd.

Luckily, after enough visits, I found the courage to ask if I could have something that was roughly equivalent to a Starbucks caramel macchiato, and the friendly baristas took pity on me and fixed it. This resulted in a coffee-ordering loophole. Now I can go to local coffee shops and order “the usual’’ so that I am not breaking any rules but still getting the drink I want.

However, the fault clearly rested with me, and I wanted to crack the case of how to order drinks. It turns out that a caramel macchiato is essentially the same as a caramel latte. If you want to be picky, the latte-maker pours the shot of espresso in before the milk, and the macchiato-maker does it afterwards. It also turns out that the macchiato involves both caramel and vanilla syrup while the latte only uses caramel. Therefore, the caramel latte is actually a more pure caramel experience. So for all my fellow not-coffee coffee lovers, may I please give you this morsel of advice: Shop at your local coffee shops, and order the caramel latte.

I recently went back to Chicago for the first time since I began working remotely from Crested Butte two years ago. The Starbucks that I loved in my office building is now closed. The store depended on office workers being in the building. Downtown Chicago is still quieter than it used to be; the local donut shop around the corner also closed. But my coworkers had already asked me to go on coffee runs before I even got to town. The weather was nice, so we walked up to Wacker Street and went to the Goddess and Grocer. I had to choose between the Nutella oat latte and the butterscotch popcorn latte. I got the Nutella oat latte, which was sugary and absurd and didn’t taste like coffee – the perfect drink for a coffee lover who doesn’t love coffee. b