The Green Mermaid is dressing herself up to look like a neighborhood coffeehouse to sell beer and wine; plus, does your coffee give you an eerie feeling? This one might.

Seattle locals, beware! The next time you set foot in an “authentic” little coffee house with live music and the option to order beer or wine with your espresso, take a good look around. You might be sitting in Starbucks’ latest covert venture, 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea.

The coffee giant is currently renovating a former Seattle Starbucks store to create a more rustic, eco-friendly shop. But that’s not all – the new store will also take on the atmosphere of other local coffee shops, selling alcohol to patrons and hosting local bands and poetry readings.

In the interest of further duping customers into this inauthentic “authentic” experience, the store has been re-named using its street address as its new moniker. Gone also will be any trace of the Starbucks brand, including bagged coffee which will bear the name 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea instead.

Tom Pfeiffer, Starbucks senior vice president for global design, said the new name is meant to give the store “a community personality”.

Yeah, right, say other local coffeehouse owners who endured multiple visits from Starbucks design teams bent on copying the stores’ look and feel.

Dan Ollis, owner of the shop’s neighbor, Victrola Coffee Roasters, watched the teams visit several times.

“They spent the last 12 months in our store up on 15th [Avenue] with these obnoxious folders that said, ‘Observation,’ ” he told The Seattle Times.

Not one to feel threatened by the coming competition, Ollis wondered aloud if the new store would be open to participating in a “Victrola Barista Smackdown.”

“We should set that up,” Pfeiffer responded.

No word yet on when the store will open, but I’m sure a smackdown of some sort is likely inevitable.

Coffee at the “Peak” of perfection

Director David Lynch has always been known for putting the creep factor into the movies and television shows he produces. The surreal nature of shows like cult favorite Twin Peaks and movies like Mulholland drive are so distinctly original, critics have taken to describing similar projects as “Lynchian”.

Now Lynch wants to be known for putting his signature spin on something else: coffee. Culled from a small coffee farm in Oaxaca, Mexico, David Lynch Signature Cup Coffee is now available for purchase through Amazon and similar sites.

The taste? Who better to describe it than the man himself?

“It has a good taste to me when it first enters, and the aftertaste is equally as good,” he writes on his website. “It is like the powerful smoothness of a 12-cylinder engine, as opposed to a jangled 6-cylinder, or a V8. It has a richness and the flavorful constituents of this coffee fuels my thinking. I like to think and work with this coffee, and ideas seem to be in every bean.”

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