Espresso-Ing Themselves -- Coffeehouses Are The New Hip Hangout For Teenagers

Call it a soda fountain for the `90s. Fun drinks in a rainbow of flavors, whipped up by hip, youthful employees while you watch.

Or maybe it's a nonalcoholic version of a cozy neighborhood bar. A place where everyone knows not only your name, but whether you're decaf or regular, and how much foam you like on your latte.

Here, for the price of a single drink, busy teens can buy an hour or so to relax, socialize, study and check each other out. And the caffeine buzz doesn't hurt when you're cramming for exams or juggling a breakneck schedule of school, job and extracurricular activities, they say.

In an era when Northwest coffee culture seems to have reached the saturation point geographically, it now appears to be expanding generationally. From Port Townsend to Puyallup, coffee joints are vying with fast-food restaurants, arcades and other traditional teen haunts for the title of hippest hangout.

"It's like a place to be, without your parents, away from home," said Samantha Oldfield, 16, who spent a recent Sunday evening hanging out with friends at the Bauhaus, a Capitol Hill espresso bar that's hot among local teens.

Oldfield, a Holy Names Academy senior, certainly looks as though she'd know what's in vogue, with her rainbow-colored tresses, pierced tongue and spikes-and-leather apparel. What lures Oldfield and her friends to the coffeehouse scene is not that different from what drew their parents to burger joints and drugstore soda fountains a generation ago.

"It's in, like, a good neighborhood, so our parents don't really have to worry," she said. "And you meet a lot of people just by hanging out here."

"Everybody pretty much knows everybody here," said her friend, Rob Olsen, 17. "All you need to do is pay for something . . . and you can hang out for the whole evening with your friends. It's a sweet deal."

Local baristas say they've seen considerable growth in the teen coffee scene in recent years. "I get that report from a large number of coffee retailers," said Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, a California-based trade group. No studies have been done specifically on teen coffee consumption in the Northwest, but anecdotal evidence abounds.

Nathaniel Jackson has worked at one of Seattle's oldest coffeehouses, the Allegro, since it opened in 1975. Now the owner of the University District institution, Jackson says he's watched the number of teen customers in his store surge in recent years.

"There's been a marked increase," he noted. "The youngest who come in on their own are probably 13 or 14 years old." For many of the teens, Jackson said, "It's a meeting place, rather than getting together at home. They can't go to the bars yet, and it's more lively than school."

The teens get to mingle with the University of Washington students and staff who are the Allegro's mainstay, "and it's a place that's safe, where they are treated like adults," Jackson said. "We don't talk down to them. Everyone is treated equally."

When Steven Hayes attended Garfield High School in the 1960s, the big hangout was the Bulldog, a nearby burger shop. Thirty years later, Hayes is still hanging out just a few blocks from Garfield, running the hottest new gathering place for students at his alma mater: Seattle Central Grind. Hayes and co-owner Jerry Daniels offer discounts on coffee and other food and beverages to teens who show their student body cards, and their place is flooded with Garfield kids during lunchtime and breaks.

Part businessman, part barista and part mentor, Hayes enjoys the rapport he's developed with the students who come into his bright storefront, with its African-themed decor.

"These are really, really nice kids," Hayes said. "I try to talk to them about the importance of education . . . and we try to keep an eye on what they're doing. If they're here after everyone else has left, we kind of move them along. We don't want them majoring in coffee shop."

Actually, espresso bars as a course of study at local high schools may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Many schools are cashing in on the coffee craze by opening their own carts in student stores and cafeterias, allowing business students to gain some real-life experience running them. At Sammamish High School in Bellevue, stopping by the coffee stand in the student store is just another part of 16-year-old Tirrell Harrison's morning routine. He even keeps a favorite coffee mug, decorated with cartoon characters, in his locker. "I've been drinking coffee since about the third grade," said Harrison, who will be a junior in the fall. "I like the taste, I like the caffeine, I like it all."

Indeed, the enthusiasm of Harrison and teens like him is already percolating down to the next generation. Lynne Siefert, 11, has been known to drop by the local coffeehouse in her Mount Baker neighborhood with a friend or two. She enjoys frappuccino, a sweetened coffee drink made by Starbucks, and plain old drip is fine by her, too. "I like the taste of coffee," the sixth-grader said simply.

And even at the farthest fringes of Seattle's coffee-crazed core, teens are serious about their java. In Enumclaw, Starbucks is a popular meeting place for coffee-drinking teens, said Erin Barnes, 17. "They're the only place where you can really sit down and talk," she noted. Nonfat vanilla lattes are one of Barnes' favorite Starbucks concoctions, although she's scaled back her coffee consumption some - "I used to go like twice a day, but it drains you of your money," the Enumclaw High School senior noted.

Vanilla lattes, mochas and other sweetened, flavored drinks are by far the most popular among teens, baristas say. Many teens start out drinking hot chocolate, flavored steamed milk or Italian sodas, then move on to ordering a little coffee mixed in with the sweet stuff.

"They definitely order more of the foofy drinks, more multiple-flavored lattes," said Howard Long, an assistant manager at the Green Lake Tully's, a popular hangout for teens who attend nearby schools. "They're trying to order hot chocolate without ordering hot chocolate."

But as they edge into their upper teens, some coffee drinkers start to get a little more serious, said Carl Miller, manager of Espresso Express, a coffee shop across the street from Seattle's Roosevelt High School.

"The older ones, the juniors and seniors, are doing more adult things," Miller said. "They're studying a little more, they're partying a little harder, they have jobs. They are starting to discover the usefulness of caffeine."

Just how much danger, if any, does that caffeine pose? That depends, experts say.

If you're like 18-year-old Ryan Mooney of Seattle, who started drinking coffee about three years ago and worked his way up to a dozen or more cups a day, it can be a serious problem. Mooney, an Eastlake barista and aspiring violinist, said he dropped more than 50 pounds and often stayed up until 5 a.m. until he tamed his java jones. He now tops out at four cups a day.

Heavy caffeine use can pose other problems for teens as well, said Dr. Cora Breuner, a pediatrician and member of the clinical faculty at the University of Washington Medical School. Research shows that caffeine can leach calcium from the bones, Breuner notes, putting girls who are heavy coffee drinkers at risk for osteoporosis, especially if they're substituting coffee for milk. Caffeine-induced insomnia is another problem, since teens still need 10 to 12 hours of sleep each night, Breuner said.

For most teens, however, coffee consumption doesn't get to the point where it's a serious hazard, said Dr. Jeffrey Lindenbaum, director of teen health at Group Health Cooperative and a Seattle Times columnist. The kids he sees "don't seem to be junkie-ing up on 10 cups of coffee a day," Lindenbaum noted. "I don't see it as a big problem. . . . It does have some effects, but they're fairly mild." And for the record, Lindenbaum adds, coffee won't stunt your growth, no matter what your grandmother said.

In fact, for parents like Bernadette Corde of Seattle, looking around at what many teens are dealing with makes an occasional cup of coffee seem downright wholesome.

"I'd pick coffee over a heck of a lot of other things," Corde said with a chuckle. Her son Mike, 16, gets good grades and doesn't smoke, drink or do drugs. He does have an occasional cup of coffee, particularly on school mornings, his mother says, when he has to leave the house at 7 a.m. As his mother points out, that's earlier than most adults leave for work, and teens need more sleep. Corde, whose background is Irish, recalls having a cup or two from the family teapot herself as an early-rising teen.

"I think kids have always needed some sort of a jump start," she noted. "I really can't complain. Presented with a lot of the alternatives, it's just not that bad."