LETTER FROM BERLIN: Tell me, what's your flavour? A tall mocha Frappucino? A Colombian Narmo Supremo? Nothing at a Starbucks cafe can be ordered in less than half a dozen syllables. Small wonder, then, that the US coffee chain has finally opened up shop in Germany, the country that gave us polysyllabic mouthfuls such as schadenfreude and doppelgänger, writes Derek Scally.
The chain has spread quickly through Berlin since it first opened its doors in September.
There are already five outlets in prime locations with the promise of nearly 200 more around Germany in the next three years.
Berliners are curious, local cafe owners are anxious and the country's left-wingers are hopping mad that Germany has fallen victim to what they see as yet another example of US cultural imperialism.
Starbucks wants to insinuate itself into your life as a regular stop-off between work and home, what it calls the "third place".
However, a quick scout around Berlin's new Starbucks' cafes shows that rather than a third place, Starbucks is Anywhere USA.
The first Starbucks cafe set up shop opposite the Brandenburg Gate where, just over a decade ago, armed East German border guards patrolled what was a no-man's land around the Berlin Wall.
Yesterday at lunch-time the coffee shop filled with a dozen customers, the vast majority embarrassed tourists, all sitting on cheap sofas and clutching Starbucks' paper beakers.
"The coffee in Starbucks always tastes muddy," says Ms Abigail Lazzerine from Oxford, on a visit to Berlin.
"Here we are getting mediocre coffee and paying over the odds for it," adds her boyfriend, Mr Nick Dickens. "Why do we buy into it then?"
Few bother to ask that question any more back in the US where the chain now has over 4,000 cafes and annual profits of $200 million.
Today the company has 1,300 stores outside the US, and Germany is its latest target.
The chain has already begun to employ its notorious "cluster method" of opening two cafes within blocks of each other to squeeze out the competition.
Café Einstein was one of half-a-dozen German-run Starbucks imitators which emerged during the cappuccino-fuelled dot-com era. Shortly after Starbucks opened its doors, Café Einstein went bankrupt.
Starbucks has already run into some obstacles.
The chain is named after Starbuck, the coffee-swilling first officer in Moby Dick. But in Germany, the name has other less happy associations: Starbuck was the nickname of Holger Meins, a member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) left-wing guerrilla group which terrorised Germany in the 1970s.
Rather than hot coffee on the high seas, Starbucks awakens memories of a bloody shoot-out in Frankfurt in 1972 and Meins's death after a prison hunger strike two years later.
Despite the onslaught, Germany may not be as easy a target as Starbucks thinks.
The chain could yet go the way of Wal-Mart, the US retailing giant which entered the German market with a roar only to be beaten to a bloody pulp by local supermarket chains Aldi and Lidl.
Also, Starbucks began its European strike on the back of an economic boom.
These days, Germany is teetering on the brink of recession and money is tight. As one columnist wrote last week: "These days people turn over a euro coin three times in their hand before putting it back in their pocket." Germans are unashamedly price conscious even in the good times. So when a cup of foamy coffee costs over €4, many Berliners have already decided the price isn't right.
Even the tourists, a notoriously gullible bunch, have caught on.
"I think the prices are disgusting. How can a huge chain like Starbucks justify charging over €4 for a cup of coffee?" said Ms Ann Hastings from Scotland.
"I was in a cafe next door to another Starbucks yesterday that charged half that for a much better cup of coffee with waitress service. That's more my cup of tea."