Pardon me while I let my inner extreme coffee snob out for a brief moment. I do not care what anyone other than myself drinks. I really don't. You want to drink crap, fine, drink crap.
But, you know, it is nearly impossible to get a decent ristretto in this country, even at uber-cool "oh we roast our own and we are so cool" roastery shops that so arrogantly display ristretto on the menu. Look, you don't want to offer a ristretto, fine, no one says you have to. But, if you are going to put on the cloak of moral superiority over your beans, where anyone who is over 40 or who has a job or who wears anything synthetic (or, gasp, all of the above) is made to feel uncomfortable and looked down on while you practice your "craft" with smokey bean death looks at anyone you deem unworthy, then by god you had better offer a *real* ristretto. A ristretto is not a "short espresso." Yes, to make it, you actually have to get your hands a little dirty and change the grind. Yes, you know that grind ring that the one person who really knows coffee at your shop told you never to touch? Yes, to make a ristretto, you really do have to adjust for a finer grind than the 9 million espressos you make every day and dump into a big gulp size cup of milk, entirely obliterating even the slightest hope of tasting anything real about the coffee. I will put up with outlandish prices, your horrible taste in music, the people who never seem to leave, the other people who seem to think the place is a rent-by-the-day office suite, the oppressively boring pictures of some coffee shop in Italy that we all know you ordered off a website, the stupid, stupid, mismatched furniture that looks like you collected one chair, but only one chair, from every going-out-of-business sale in the county, the general decline of any even semi-intellectual discourse in your shop, the people who think the Virgil quote someone so wittingly stenciled above the sink in the bathroom is from someone who plays for the Boston Celtics, and even the hipsters who think being a hipster is a career.
I will put up with all of it. But, by god, if you are going to offer and charge me money for something called a ristretto, and you are too lazy to change the f'in grind, then you suck. You just suck. That's all there is to it. You are not morally superior. You are not cool. You are not going to realize your dream to win the local latte art competition (gag). Instead, you just suck. You are either too uneducated or too lazy to adjust the grind (or the machine's pressure) just the tinniest little bit to produce what you have promised me you will produce, but which has never actually existed in your shop, with all of its indie-rock and oh-so-cool little hemp baskets in which you store the artificial sweetener (really?) that most of your customers dump into their "espresso." Do you know what just stopping the pull after 15 seconds produces? Not a ristretto. No, it produces a half-done espresso, with completely screwed up ratios and crema. Let me explain it in terms you might understand: when someone asks you (gasp) for a "skinny latte," do you use whole milk and just use 1/2 as much? No. Why? Because one aint the other. Do you realize there are entire cities on this planet where I can walk into any of 500 shops and actually order and, shock, receive a ristretto? Well, you aint one of them.
To wit, the cause of my rant this morning:
OK, I feel better.
I will now put my inner extreme coffee snob back into its box and go about my day.
