Say what you want.
Get what you meant.
From kopi C siew dai peng to a grande oat flat white — caffeine has developed an unreasonable amount of vocabulary. Here is the translation layer.
Four ways to ask for caffeine.
Different counter, different grammar. Pick the world you are about to enter.
Build your kopi or teh.
The clean grammar for this decoder is drink → milk style → sweetness → strength → temperature. Real-life kopitiam speech can be flexible; uncle and auntie have heard worse.
“Kopi.”
The words that unlock the kopitiam.
Coffee + evaporated milk + less sweet + stronger + iced. You may hear modifiers in a different order in real life; this is a useful, consistent way to learn the building blocks.
Italian words. Tiny cups. Serious faces.
These are useful working definitions, not international law. Recipes, cup sizes and ratios vary between cafés.
Tall is the small one.
For Starbucks Singapore, the current official sizes are wonderfully simple once you surrender to the vocabulary.
Example: “Grande iced latte, oat milk, extra shot.” You do not need to recite a spell in perfect corporate syntax.
The percentage department.
There is no single Singapore-wide bubble-tea grammar. Chains differ in available sugar levels, ice levels, toppings and what can be customised. The useful mental model is this:
Pick the tea or milk-tea base first, then the sweetness and ice options that the shop actually offers, then toppings. If the screen gives percentages, use those; if it gives words such as “less” or “normal”, use the shop's language.
Brand-specific options change. Caffeine.sg treats the ordering pattern above as a decoder, not a promise that every chain offers every percentage or topping.
There’s more to caffeine than ordering it.
Chocolate, coffee-nerd vocabulary and a small piece of Caffeine.sg history. Pick a rabbit hole.
Chocolate contains caffeine. But that’s not the whole story.
Cocoa naturally contains caffeine, but its predominant methylxanthine is theobromine. How much you get depends on the chocolate, recipe and serving size.
Things you nodded at without asking.
These words describe beans, processing and brewing rather than the name of your drink.
Coffee identified with one origin rather than intentionally combining multiple origins. How narrowly “origin” is defined varies.
Coffees combined to create a particular flavour profile or consistency.
A processing family in which fruit is removed and coffee is washed/fermented before drying; methods vary.
Coffee dried with the fruit around the seed before the dried fruit is removed.
Some fruit mucilage remains on the coffee during drying. No actual honey is required.
Fermentation conducted in a low-oxygen or sealed environment. It describes a processing approach, not one guaranteed flavour.
Broad descriptions of roast development. There is no universal boundary where medium suddenly becomes dark.
In tasting language, lively or bright sensory qualities — not simply “this coffee is acidic and therefore bad”.
The perceived weight or texture of coffee in the mouth.
Dissolving flavour compounds from ground coffee into water. Grind, time, temperature and ratio all matter.
The initial wetting stage in many pour-over recipes, when freshly roasted coffee releases trapped gas.
Different brewing devices. V60 and Chemex are pour-over brewers; AeroPress uses immersion plus pressure.
The chart that started it.
The original Caffeine.sg guide to ordering kopi and teh — preserved exactly as it appeared in 2019.
Some wording has been refined in the Caffeine Decoder above. The original remains untouched here — caffeine archaeology.
