If you're looking for quick energy, and don't really care about taste, just drink an energy drink.
Coffee should be reserved for those who care about flavor. It's an art, not a tool to get you wired.
For regular coffee
Gotta get a good fair trade medium roast. If I'm at home I'll use my parents coffee machine. It's decent, but it has a tendency to overheat the water and add some bitterness in.
Best way to make brewed coffee is by doing a pour over. It's sorta like camping coffee, where you just pour hot water through the grounds in a good unbleached filter.
French press is good as well, the lack of a paper filter allows for more of the coffee oils (crema) to be released, so you get a lot more caffeine.
If you're gonna drink espresso.
Do not go to Starbucks or any other coffee shop where they use an automated machine. Find a shop where they manually grind the coffee, and manually tamp the shots. If you get a good look at the machine when they are pulling the shot, make sure it takes 20 - 30 seconds for the shot to run out into the glass. If you get lots of liquid in like 14 seconds, you're probably having sex wrong... Er.. I mean making the espresso wrong.
When steaming the milk. There shouldn't be a loud screaming sound. Actually, if the barista knows what they are doing, you shouldn't hear much at all except a change in frequency from high to low as the milk thickens up. The milk should have uniform texture, and it shouldn't look like soap bubbles (starbucks). Really, the milk should be quality enough that you can draw art with it, or rest a shot right below the foam and on top of the steamed milk (macchiato style). Lots of people make fun of yuppy latte art, but if you get a rosette on top of of your latte, it's likely been made well.
White chocolate flavoring is like putting ketchup on a steak. It's bad. Mocha's are acceptable, but you have to remember that they date back to an ancient tradition of putting chocolate into coffee to mask poor quality. Coffee from Mocha was very high quality, and traders used to add chocolate to their mix and call it Mocha to sell inferior product.
Vanilla or hazelnut lattes are a good choice if you don't believe that the coffee shop is competent. The flavor will help to mask bad shots and sup-par milk.
If the shop really knows what they are doing, get a Caramel Macchiato. Not the starbucks kind, but a well made one that is a good balance of coffee and caramel syrup.
The first picture is a Caramel Macchiato made at a local shop in Tacoma. The espresso is locally roasted, and it's probably the best macchiato I've every had in my life. The shop is super consistent, and I can always count on them.
The second is either a cappuccino or a latte that I got in Vancouver. I'm pretty sure it was at caffe artigiano. It was pretty damn good, but I had been driving for three days by the time I got to Vancouver, so anything would have tasted good at that point.
