



#Coffee buzz gif free#
It wasn't merely the latte that Schlutz introduced to many American consumers it was also dark roast arabica and espresso, the Frappuccino, and sugary espresso beverages in general.Īnd there was also the comfy seating and free WiFi, the ambient music and vaguely cool baristas, and all the other ingredients of the concept Schultz describes as a "third place" - a "comfortable, sociable gathering spot away from home and work" that isn't a bar. And most importantly, to anyone wanting to run a coffee business, he introduced Americans "to paying $3-4 for a drink." In the pre-Starbucks era, most people knew of coffee as something that cost 50¢ a cup.īy making coffee more expensive, Starbucks laid the groundwork for an entire wave of coffee shops that have colonized America and the world. "He introduced Americans to the espresso bar," said Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso. Even McDonald's and Burger King are now promoting their coffee selection. People now take for granted that wherever they go - to work, to the airport, to the mall, or virtually anywhere in America - there'll be a coffee place churning out Starbucks-style drinks, if not an actual Starbucks. No one in America knows about this, I thought. Of all the coffee experts I had met, none had ever mentioned this drink. Here was the perfect balance between steamed milk and coffee, combining espresso, which is the noble essence of coffee, and milk made sweet by steaming rather than by adding sugar. I had expected it to be just coffee with milk, but I watched as the barista made a shot of espresso, steamed a frothy pitcher of milk, and poured the two into a cup, with a dollop of foam on the top. Its coffee bars were much like Milan’s, and in one, I mimicked someone and ordered a “caffè latte,” my first taste of that drink. Although it’s only a forty-minute ride from industrial Milan, it felt as if it had stood still since the thirteenth century. "One morning I took a train ride to Verona. Schultz recalls his first encounter with the latte in his book: And that's just Starbucks itself - the chain's many imitators have turned the latte and its milky relatives into a ubiquitous international commodity, as ever-present as the Big Mac, as symbolic of global consumer culture as the iPhone. Within three decades, that single Seattle espresso bar exploded into more than 26,000 cafes around the world, selling $21.3 billion worth of food and drink last year. No matter your opinion of Starbucks, it has shaped the way you drink coffee. On Monday, Schultz - the father of the American latte - steps down as CEO, for the second time in his career. The rest is grande-skinny-with-two-pumps-of-vanilla history. "As far as I know, America was first introduced to caffè latte that morning." It was a drink that "many customers had never heard of: caffè latte, espresso with steamed milk," Schultz later recalled in Pour Your Heart Into It. On the April morning when that first espresso bar opened - a 300-square-foot space inside one of Starbucks' bean stores - baristas began serving a drink Schultz had tried on a visit to Verona, Italy.

The Seattle coffee company, founded as a coffee bean retailer in 1971, didn't open its first cafe until 1984. Then Starbucks happened, or more precisely, Howard Schultz happened. Believe it or not, there was a time not too long ago when most people had never tasted a latte.
