About

Hipster Barista is an image macro series featuring a tattoo covered man wearing a black v-neck t-shirt, glasses and scarf with a scowling expression. Influenced by the common "hipster" stereotypes of being judgmental yet hypocritical, Hipster Barista acknowledges the snobby side of American coffee culture. See also: Hipster Kitty and Hipster Ariel.

Origin

The first noted instance of Hipster Barista was uploaded on August 24, 2011 as a Quickmeme submission with the caption “I got this tattoo for my love of coffee / I got this one because it’s ironic.” On August 25th, 2011, a link to another Quickmeme submission was posted in Reddit's /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit, which featured the caption "Che Guevara changed my life / Manager at Starbucks" and received 2,872 up votes (as of September 6th).





Spread

The restaurant & bar review blog Eater.com posted an article titled "The Hipster Barista Meme Is a Thing Now" on August, 26, 2011. They identified the man in the original photograph as Dustin Mattson, a "coffee boss" at Octane Coffee in Atlanta, GA who placed 5th at the Southeast Regional Barista Competition 2010 and 27th place at the US Barista Championship 2010.

On August 26, 2011, Dustin tweeted about the notoriety stating "yeah it's real representative of what I do to feed my family."





On August 29, 2011, Eater.com posted an interview with Dustin in which he talks about how seriously he takes his job.

"I do find it discouraging and disappointing that there was so much exposure brought to an attempt at making a joke of a culinary industry and the professional barista. To me, it's very telling on how we laud farm-to-table food, craft beer, cocktail mixology, but it's ok to have no respect for the specialty coffee world and the people who are committed to it."

On August 30th, several instances of the image macro popped up on both the Sherdog Forums and Bodybuilding.com Forums. On September 4th, 2011, a Facebook fan page was created that has 7 likes as of September 6th, 2011.

Additional derivatives can be found on Tumblr , and the Advice Animals subreddit.

Notable Derivatives





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External References