Whether iced or hot, with cream and sugar or not, Americans love coffee a latte.

According to a Drive Research survey released earlier this year, roughly half of people in the US frequent a coffee shop at least once per week. At AU, faculty, staff, and students can get their fix from a trio of rivaling java joints—the Bridge Café, Starbucks, and the Davenport Lounge—located no more than a three-minute walk from one another.

Over three weeks, AU Now is spilling the beans on what makes each of those coffee shops special.

This week: Starbucks

Three days a week, Jheelum Sarkar, CAS/PhD ’27 settles into the same small booth nestled in the back right corner of AU’s Starbucks in Lydecker Tunnel. There, she’s far enough from the line but close to an outlet for her laptop charger.

“I like the environment,” said Sarkar, a third-year doctoral student in economics. “There are people around me and there’s an energy and easy access to drinks. Also, Starbucks has an advantage in that I can study here.”

Sarkar often slips into Starbucks between classes and her teaching assistant duties. Her go-to order is a strawberry acai lemonade Refresher—which is among the store’s most popular drinks, along with the caramel macchiato, matcha, and iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso.

Each day, baristas take about 300 in-person orders at the register and another 200 mobile orders through Grubhub. They sell about as many chocolate croissants and double-smoked bacon breakfast sandwiches as they can stock.

AU’s Starbucks is among more than 50 locations across DC and 38,000 around the world and counts familiarity and standardization among its advantages. A Frappuccino or a Refresher should taste the same in the nation’s capital as it does in the Emerald City, where the coffee behemoth was founded in 1971.

There’s comfort in that fact—which is as soothing to devoted regulars like Sarkar as the gentle hum of the espresso machine.

“It’s very quiet,” Starbucks manager Ashley Alao said. “Very chill in the afternoon.”

This three-part series concludes next week with the Dav.