“On average, low-caf subjects heard it once. But stressed coffee guzzlers buzzed three times,” said Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper. 

Summing up the results from the experiment, Professor Simon Crowe concluded:

There is a link between high levels of stress and psychosis, and caffeine was found to correlate with hallucination proneness. The combination of caffeine and stress affect the likelihood of an individual experiencing a psychosis-like symptom.

It would be prudent to note that correlation isn’t the same as causation, and this study merely suggests the former. It’s possible that excess coffee drinking and “hallucinatory proneness” are both symptoms of some underlying issue. At the same time, this isn’t the first instance of scientists finding a link between caffeine intake and hallucinations. An even more alarming study was published in 2009, claiming that individuals who drink the equivalent of 315 milligrams of caffeine — that’s three cups of brewed coffee, or seven of the instant variety — are three times more likely to hear and see things that aren’t actually there.

An article on that study, published in Live Science, also helpfully added that, “though most people who drink loads of coffee are not known to hallucinate seriously, when these types of experiences interfere with daily functioning, they are considered to be psychotic.” 

In closing: Maybe try decaf next time?

“The point is to learn to control everything at the coffee bar — the beans, the roast, the right grind, the water, the timing, the machine — everything. So part of that means learning how milk behaves, and how to control it,” says Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso, and the man many credit with popularizing latte art in New York City.

And controlling the milk means, in short (because it can get very, very long), to 1) heat it up, which brings out its sugars, 2) “stretch” and infuse it with air, inflating it like whipped cream and 3) “roll” it to pop all the bubbles. If you get it right, you have a “microfoam” of thick, sweet, glossy milk that can hold its form when poured into espresso, allowing the barista to shape and stream it into lovely, graceful, whimsical designs. Well-textured milk tastes like magic, creamy but light. It has a visible sheen and makes a splat, like oil paint, when spilled. It’s miles away from the stiff, dry foam that floats on top of many a chain-coffee cup.

“It’s really not easy,” Nye says. “It’s a good first sign for your drink, because the barista’s taken the care and effort to learn the skill.” (“But,” he’s quick to add, “it’s one point of a complex process. It doesn’t really tell you anything about how properly made the coffee itself is, or how the drink is going to taste.”)

A CONTEST FOR YOU, WITH PRIZES!

To celebrate this aspect (yes, it’s just one point, but it’s a fun point!) of the coffee arts, we’d love for you to show us the handiwork of your favorite coffee slingers. Snap some pictures of your favorite baristas’ latte art skills and send them to us. We’ll pick our favorite shots, and the top five entries will win fabulous prizes from Bodum, makers of super-sweet, design-y coffee gear.

Four winners will get a set of Canteen insulated glasses, made of wonderful-to-hold, super-light borosilicate glass. (No, I’m not shilling; I just date an architect whose geekiness about materials rubs off.) One super-extra winner will get the Canteen glasses and a classic Chambord French press. And, if you’d be so kind, please go and “Like” Bodum’s Facebook page. Yes, I am shilling now, but they’re kind enough to hand out some sweet prizes for our goofy little contest, so why not? Winners will be chosen purely based on the subjective whim of our staff judges!

HOW TO ENTER

Take a picture — or several, or many — of latte art, and email it to: coffee@salon.com. Please include the name of the coffee shop, date, and time you took the picture, and, if you’d like, the name of the barista who created the art. (Don’t you like to see people recognized for their work?) By sending us the photo, you grant us permission to publish it on Salon.

Photos must be 400 x 600 minimum size, 72 dpi, but bigger is better. Please put “Foaming at the mouth” as the subject line of the email. And please know that by sending these photos in, you’re agreeing to give us permission to publish them on Salon.

All entries must be received by 1 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 6, 2011. Winners will be announced Monday, April 11.

Francis Lam

Latte art by Trey Wrange / Ninth Street Espresso

Francis Lam

Latte art by Trey Wrange / Ninth Street Espresso

Francis Lam

Latte art by Trey Wrange / Ninth Street Espresso

Ross Satchell

Latte art by Ross Satchell / Naidre’s Cafe, Brooklyn

Those are scalding words for one of the best coffee shops in a city percolating with so many new ones that in March The New York Times decided to list the 40 “best.” The irony is that until a few years ago New York couldn’t compare to the Pacific Northwest — where the specialty-coffee trade was born in the ’60s — or cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles or Chicago. In New York, drinking diner coffee was almost a badge of distinction. But now the market here for specialty espresso has grown so frenetic that even Portland’s groudbreaking Stumptown and San Francisco’s Blue Bottle entered the East Coast fray, suddenly turning the city into an all-star showcase of American coffee.

So the darkly suave Milos is visiting from the birthplace of espresso for a year to gauge the state of coffee in the United States, illy’s largest customer outside Italy, and he has quickly learned how seriously Americans take their coffee. Call it a storm in a demitasse: He elicited a frothy response when, while blogging for theatlantic.com in May, he commented that American baristas not only need more training but are using so many different, unorthodox methods to pull shots you’d wonder if they’d ever sipped the drink in its country of origin.

“What is called espresso here sometimes really isn’t espresso,” he wrote. (The response from readers made him qualify that, saying that any drink pulled on an espresso machine is ‘technically’ an espresso, but baristas shouldn’t be playing fast and loose with the traditional water-coffee-temperature-time formula.)

One barista from San Francisco huffed that Milos’ article was culturally irrelevant and “American baristas no longer look to Italy for context.” Americans, he said, are creating their own traditions, such as making espresso with single-origin beans – i.e. beans that come from one farm or estate, to highlight the characteristics of that place – while Italian espresso is made from blends that often include some lesser-quality – i.e. Robusta – beans. In illy’s blend there are no fewer than nine bean types.

“It’s not bad to do something a bit different,” Milos says of the concoctions coming out of coffee shops across the country. “But in order to create something new, you have to follow the baseline, to know how to do something the real way. Then try to do something different. In Italy we have a saying: Learn to walk before you run.”

Another respondent pointed out that Milos hardly has room to talk. The last time he competed in the World Barista Championships – which was won in June by American Michael Philips – he came in 27th.

“A competition is not real life,” Milos counters, although he admits he did not perform his best.

But at least one self-identified veteran of the coffee business was on Milos’s side, saying that “the ultra-ristretto, staggeringly bitter shots being pulled by the likes of Vivace and Vita [both in Seattle] have nothing to do with espresso other than being a fascinating misuse of the machine … It’s undrinkable swill fit only for burying under a half-liter of foamed milk and flavorings (and THAT, friends, is America’s unique contribution to coffee culture).”

Coffee is the second-biggest traded commodity after oil , and America buys 22 million of the 130 million bags of coffee beans produced worldwide annually. On paper at least – and according to the Specialty Coffee Association of America – the formula for making an espresso across the 50 states is meant to be exactly the same as in Italy. Water: 1 oz. Coffee: 7 to 8.5 g. Temperature: 200 degrees F. Time of extraction: No more than 30 seconds. But plenty of baristas from Brooklyn to San Francisco, from Chicago to Miami, are using as much as 20 grams of coffee in an ounce of water, which, says Milos, makes an espresso look syrupy and sexy but is too overpowering to taste.

“Here in the U.S. the coffee they use is good, but the way they prepare it is bad,” he says. “Fifty percent of the result of a good espresso is in the hands of the barista. And if consumers can’t recognize that, we lose.”

The former No. 27 international barista is spending 2010 in America to train not only baristas at illy’s Universitá del Caffé (New York’s UDC is one of 10 around the world) but also consumers. Even though Starbucks might have taught Americans to buy cappuccinos and lattes – and pay more than three bucks a pop – Milos believes consumers have never learned what those drinks should actually taste like. It’s one thing ordering an espresso or a macchiato, another thing altogether being able to tell whether you got a good one.

A good espresso, he says, will depend on what coffee beans you use. But the final product should be judged on five qualities. There should be bitterness (but not too much), sourness (in balance with the bitterness), a bit of sweetness (which usually comes from some Central American bean), good body (which will depends on the preparation and the coffee used), and an aroma.

“I can’t say what kind of aroma,” he adds, “but it has to be aromatic. And that aroma will depend on the coffee that was used.”

Following Milos’ mantra to walk and not run, we do exactly that: We walk to four coffee shops that make up part of New York’s burgeoning West Coastlike, post-Starbucks generation. Added flavors like hazelnut creamers are anathema and there are a limited number of espresso-based beverages that all get pulled individually. “Regular” coffee, when served, often comes brewed to order, from a super-high-tech Clover machine or an elegantly simple Chemex drip. Milos judges the shops on one drink alone: espresso.

At Abraço, a hole-in-the-wall on East 7th Street, Milos smiles the moment he walks in. This is his idea of what a coffeeshop should look like: small, brisk service, no delay in getting the espresso to you once it’s been made. He looks at his demitasse like a wine connoisseur might a vintage, then takes his first sip. “Better than some, a bit too concentrated. Very pronounced acidity. Not the best I’ve had but it left a good aftertaste.”

Mutters one of Milos’ friends, “For him that’s a rave.” Milos admits that he does not hand out praise a lot, but he is not a regular consumer and, as a coffee taster, it is his job to be critical. (Several places in the U.S. that he has a good word for are RBC in New York, Intelligentsia‘s outpost in Los Angeles, and Caffé Greco (which serves illy) in San Francisco.)

At Ninth Street Espresso’s store on East 10th Street, the black dribbles down the side of Milos’s demitasse aren’t a good omen. Presentation is part of the experience. Milos sips, then says, “The real tasting is the second sip.” He sips again, and decries the brevity of the flavor experiece. “Nothing remains on my tongue,” he says. He swirls the remainder around in his cup like he’s looking for an answer, and analyzes the crema, the “cream” of slightly frothy coffee that must top a properly-made espresso. “It is good, not too dark brown, the bubbles very small, and it has those red stripes we call tigerskin. The barista was good, he tamped the right way. The volume seemed right.” But ultimately unsatisfied by the shot, Milos leaves the store unhappy.

The presentation at Café Grumpy’s Chelsea outlet is better, but once the crema has worn off his espresso Milos reckons there is only about half an ounce of water. It is barely enough for a second sip. “This is real double ristretto. Aggressive. It’s overextracted. You can taste bitterness at the end. Maybe the time of extraction is too long. It’s better than Ninth Street.”

Our last stop is Stumptown, the superstar Portland transplant in the Ace Hotel on 29th Street. It is the one place where Milos has been before, several times, because he likes the vibe, but each time he’s come away hoping for a better espresso the next visit. When he gets his espresso there is a white stripe across the crema instead of the tigerskin. “See that? It’s burnt. The machine is probably too hot.” A second espresso arrives. It’s also burnt. “This is less than one ounce. Very concentrated, very sour, very salty.”

We leave Stumptown, Milos giving it the worst rating of the places we have visited today. As we exit onto the street, however, we both notice the same thing. There is a line of Stumptown fans going out the door and onto the sidewalk. He might not like what he’s buying, but they keep coming back for more. 

Fourth-wave coffee? When, you might wonder, did espresso-making become the feminist movement? In 2003, apparently. That’s the year coffee purists first adopted the “wave” concept to explain the ways in which coffee taste has improved in recent years. The concept was first proposed by Trish Skeie, of Seattle’s Zoka coffee and a prominent figure in specialty coffee, in a 2003 article for the Roasters Guild’s Flamekeeper magazine.  The gist: There have been three waves in coffee consumption and preparation — and we didn’t get things right until now.

The first wave, according to Skeie, began in the years following WWII, when instant coffee was all the rage, and the drink was largely being consumed for its stimulating qualities. The second wave of coffee began in the late ’60s, when companies like Peet’s and then Starbucks began selling specialty grade coffees, folks started spending more time in coffee shops, and, egad, drinking espresso. And then, in the early oughts, claims Skeie, the “third wave” of coffee was upon us.

Marked by the proliferation of specialty coffee shops (like the West Coast’s Stumptown and Blue Bottle, and New York’s Ninth Street Espresso), third-wave coffee is all about taste. As Jonathan Gold, the L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-winning food writer, describes it, the third wave is “where beans are sourced from farms instead of countries, roasting is about bringing out rather than incinerating the unique characteristics of each bean, and the flavor is clean and hard and pure.” Since its inception, Skeie’s “third wave” terminology has become standard among baristas and popped up everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Times.

If this seems like barista pretention gone overboard, you’re not alone. As the Shot blog points out, claiming that good coffee hasn’t existed until this decade is like “saying that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.” “What constitutes quality coffee hasn’t really changed … what has changed is the education and sophistication of the American consumer palate.” Perhaps it’s not that coffee has suddenly gotten much better, Americans have just learned new words to talk about it (crema, coloration, undertones), and coffee sellers have gotten better at marketing coffee as a luxury product.

But is the “third wave” really over?  What does Slayer offer that third-wave espresso machines do not? The La Marzocco blog (a company that makes espresso machines) speculated that a fourth-wave machine would allow for “advanced soft preinfusion,” which creates “softer and more rounded” coffee. Slayer isn’t quite there yet, but it allows baristas to manipulate the pressure under which the coffee is extracted in mid-shot, changing the viscosity, shade and “sourness” of the coffee. Or, as Cora Lambert, from New York’s RBC coffee, explained to Serious Eats, the “espresso shot benefits from the analog quality of saturation brewing.”

I’ve guessing that I’m not the only person who has no clue what most of that means, but that’s just fine with me. The coffee connoisseurs and the hipster baristas will be able to taste the difference, and can argue about “waves” and “pressure” all they want. All I care about is whether my cup of coffee is hot, tastes good, and will keep me from falling asleep on the subway in the morning.