Coffee

Apparently I haven't discussed American attitudes to coffee before. You probably already know that Americans in general drink a lot more coffee than tea (except at the CHF, where I was surprised to find a lot of tea drinkers). The problem is, drinking more of it doesn't mean they're any better at making coffee. For one thing, they over-roast it; so if you try to brew it strong it's too bitter and the only way to make it less bitter is for it to come out watery.

They're so obsessed with drip filter coffee that they're yet to embrace espresso. I don't mean in homes, I mean restaurants and even cafés serve filter coffee and only fancier places also have espresso coffee, which they charge more for. They've even started combining frothed milk with drip coffee, which is what you get if you ask for a café au lait (only by using the Italian name, caffè latte, do you get espresso and steamed milk). So strange that two foreign terms would get you the same thing in different parts of Europe but get you different things here.

Here's the weirdest thing: the rarity of espresso coffee makes some Americans think that it's not a type of coffee. A couple of times before I've heard them say things like, "espresso or coffee" and when I call them out on it they always say, "Oh, I meant normal coffee!" which doesn't change the fact that espresso is clearly a type of coffee.
Today Cindy told me that when she went to Dunkin' Donuts there was a poster that had two options that looked identical: iced coffee or iced latte. When she asked what the difference was, she was told, 'The iced coffee is made with coffee; the iced latte is made with espresso and milk, so there is no coffee in the iced latte'! Her response being, 'Instead of my daily dose of caffeine from the Coffea arabica coffee beans I'm going to get my daily dose of espresseine from espresso beans, growing on the espresso tree, Espressoa arabica (someone needs to tell Wikipedia to create a new page for this new species!)'