Barista

A barista (from the Italian for “bartender”) is a person, usually a coffee-house employee, who prepares and serves espresso-based coffee drinks. Many coffee shops officially use the title for their coffee makers.

Baristas operate three different types of commercial espresso machine, manual, semi automatic, or automatic. A manual machine involves pulling a lever to push the water through the ground coffee. A semi-automatic uses an electric pump to push the water through the coffee grounds, but the barista has to stop the flow of espresso using an on\off switch or button. An automatic machine will turn on and off after a preset amount of water has been pushed through the grounds, although this does not guarantee a good shot of espresso, since the barista requires less training to operate the machine and usually has less knowledge to prepare the coffee based on the guidelines of the roaster.

The native plural in English is baristas, while in Italian the plural is baristi for masculine or mixed sex (baristi: “barmen”, “bartenders”) or bariste for feminine (bariste: “barmaids”).

The term baristo (and correspondingly baristos) is occasionally found in English to refer to a specifically male bartender. This is a hypercorrection, as it is a misinterpretation of the -a ending as a female ending, while in fact barista is used for both males and females.