In The Barista We Trust.

We trust coffee—we trust it to wake us up, we trust it to make a difference in other people’s life when it’s sustainably sourced, we trust it to form connections with the people around us. And this abundance of trust overflows into another relationship as well—the trust between you and your barista. A trust that transmogrifies into other, fantastical and necessary stuff of our everyday life and psychological well-being. And no other coffee could be more an embodiment of that blind trust than our favourite Long Macchiato Topped Up!

But why, you might wonder.

Visualise this: you enter your favourite cafe. You order your coffee LMTU. What happens next? Do you specify the amount of milk? Do you watch over the barista’s shoulder, yelling “Yep! Stop! That’s enough, now!” No, You trust them to know. And your trust is rewarded with more than the right coffee. That warm feeling spreads much further than your taste-buds—it spreads all the way around you, forming a communion. You both now belong to the same small-world, with you and others like you as the citizens.

When you utter those two words—“topped up”, you engage in something more than a simple exchange of information. You effectively lay yourself in your barista’s hands. They are your doctor and you trust them blindly. Perhaps you trust them even more—you will get a second opinion for that knee surgery, but, once that relationship is forged, you have no need to get a second opinion on that milk.

Photo by Krista Purmale on Unsplash

And this goes beyond simple service quality—you don’t trust them simply because you know they know that if you’re not pleased, you won’t come to their cafe again—and you might even tell your friends.

No. This trust digs into the root of what a barista does for you and your community.

Because we need to feel connected and we need to feel known. It’s in our chemical balances, in our neutrons and our genes—feeling a part of something bigger, being seen by others around us and see them in turn. Often, at the heart of this network we find such places, the third-places, like a cafe. And at the heart of that cafe, stands a barista, with our LMTU in their offering hand.

This is what Long Macchiato Topped up is all about. It’s about the heart of the Perthian coffee community. It’s about being seen. About forging strong relationships inside your local network and enjoying their effects. A community doesn’t come out of nowhere. Simple location cannot turn people into a group and a transaction of money and coffee into trust. The alchemy of this interaction goes deeper than that. And the alchemist at its heart is your barista. The magic words that bring it into your life?

“A Long Macchiato, Topped Up, please.”