Ted Aljibe/AFP

, I am reminded of a photograph I once saw of a tourist getting sucker-punched by a kangaroo . It captured the incredible moment wonderfully: the full-body whiplash, the misaligned jaw, the athletic twist of the kangaroo's follow-through — even the woman's camera, suspended in flight, apparently bitch-slapped away from her eye. I mention this punch because, as my hero Saul Bellow wrote, "Truth comes in blows." And as a man, there is absolutely no way I can talk about today's coffee culture without throwing a few haymakers.

If you're at all serious about drinking coffee, you already know the trend du jour: blind reverence for the "rock-star barista" and the "super-geek roaster." For men with normal estrogen levels, the resulting experience can be humiliating: standing in an unmoving line while those ahead patiently waiting for their coffee to be "siphoned" (or similarly slow-brewed, one irritating cup at a freaking time), everything choreographed by a 22-year-old faux-junkie explaining why he's morally opposed to making your espresso the way you ordered it. And then you pay him five bucks.

Listen, the espresso machine was invented for a reason: to be "espress," a.k.a. fast (and, ironically, to replace the siphon and slow-brew). Listen up, geeks: Drop the slow-brew renaissance and pick up the pace. We have work to get to. Here are a few warnings, my way of de-geek-ifying your coffee experience. (This list isn't exhaustive.)

1. Beware the presence of the $17,000 coffee machine. It's a lot like the fad of the $100 hamburger: The beef may be good and the press may love it (at least for a day), but if you order it, someone in public relations will be laughing at you. No one was actually supposed to buy it.

2. Beware bean propaganda. Super-geeks love to claim their coffee hails from single-origin Valhalla, unapproachable for any other roaster. Truth is, we live in the computer and commuter age; the world is tiny and coffee only comes from the small band around the middle. We all have access to the same beans.

3. Beware the barista who looks like an angry bike messenger moving at lazy-eye speeds, yet when he touches the espresso grinder, he goes Eddie Van Halen on it. (By the way, "barista" is Starbucks speak. In Italy the word for "barista" is "barman.")

4. Beware the barista who goes techno-nerd on you when describing how he makes coffee: heat-surfing, pre-infusion profiling, tamp-dialing. Seriously, and how would you describe the act of opening a beer, liquid-load pressure breaching?

5. Be wary of the barista bent on removing your tooth enamel by cranking the dose of ground bean from the recommended 7 grams to a heart-pounding 21 grams. (This is called "overdosing," meant to balance out the taste of a monster latte.) You can always tell by how the espresso looks: less shiny terra cotta and more whipped crude oil.

6. Beware the freak who can only get his coffee rocks off by caging a beautiful wild civet, feeding it coffee cherries and sifting through its poop for coffee beans. Sick puppies like that should just be avoided, period.

7. When the other patrons are taking pictures of their coffee with smart phones, run.

Actually, I have to give it to the geeks — they're a creative bunch. The Web is filled with their caffeinated ramblings and "reviews," and for a long time, the culinary-minded neo-traditional roaster just shut up and took it like a man. The idea was to let the coffee do the talking. But I suppose it was only a matter of time before I snapped.

Once a name brand chef/owner told me he was a wave-surfer, meaning he surfed from trend to trend. Today this guy no longer has restaurants of his own. Instead, he hosts a cable cooking show. I suppose he missed a wave at some point, failed to "drop in."

You see, trends are like waves, and all waves eventually crash. With this particular one, it is hard to say exactly where and when. But when you're standing in line waiting for the super-geek to slow-brew another cup, you can almost feel the water beginning to curl.

Todd Carmichael is the co-founder of La Colombe Torrefaction and is the first American to cross Antarctica to the South Pole alone on foot.

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