Coffee Sizes (November 20, 2005)

Coffee comes in small packages here. If you get the biggest cappuccino available, it comes in a glass cup about 3-4 inches tall. Espressos are popular among the locals, and they come in little 1-inch cups that you'd expect to see in a doll house, not held in a grown person's hands--or more specifically, pinched carefully between two grown fingertips. And then there are "ristrettos", also widely available, that are even more concentrated.

Today I am in Geneva, so I did a little research experiment. Geneva happens to have a Starbucks, so one might conjecture that it is possible to buy a single large coffee in Switzerland. Well, the results are in as we speak, and the answer is... yes and no. The maximum size even at Starbucks is "grande" size, which is medium for Starbucks's in the US. To round things out, "tall" is considered medium and they actually offer a "short" size.