My brother-in-law, who works at Starbucks, recently informed me that the term ‘Americano’ originated as an insult to Americans who could not handle the strong black coffee of the Europeans and so needed hot water added to it. A quick check of the wikipedia article on Americano proved this to at least be a common theory. If this is true it is a real insult, not only to black coffee drinkers like me (I mean by that that I drink black coffee, not that I’m black and I drink coffee), but also to American’s in general. Whatever happened to the good ol’ American tradition of drinking coffee so black that the spoon could stand up in the mug. Maybe I’ve read too many Louis L’Amour books but I thought that Americans were supposed to like their coffee black, and durned strong!