So, I’m a black coffee drinker. No sweetners, no creams, none of that garbage. Went one time to get me a cup of coffee from Starbucks. It tasted like shit. It was burnt. I thought it was just that one place, but nope, it’s every Starbucks place. Their coffee recipe is shit in and of itself, but they hide it under the ton of sugar and other shit they put in it. I never understood why people would kill for it. Also, why does a small cup of black coffee cost $2+?
Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).
Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.
People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.
In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.
I’m from a country where we literally, grew, harvested, roasted and brewed our coffee. lol
We had a tradition where the coffee HAD to be roasted and brewed on bone fire that is made out of certain shrubs stems. I know, it is crazy, but that is how it was there. Oh, and did I mention that we had to grind the coffee by hand?
So, I have completely different standards/expectations when it comes to coffee, and that’s also why I drink it black. That is how we drank it. I now grind and brew my own coffee at home, and those starshit encounters happened only because I was traveling, otherwise, my coffee is all made at home.
Their black coffee isn’t great, but their espresso is good which is what makes it into the sugary drinks. I think the main draw is that it’s pretty consistently decent, while with other chains like Dunkin or Wawa you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get but it’s probably not going to be that good. I’ll also add that the coffee they sell at grocery stores isn’t bad (although it’s far from my favorite). I think it’s much worse at Starbucks itself because it inevitably ends up burnt pretty shortly after it’s brewed.
As far as price, it costs $2 because that’s the price that Starbucks determined maximizes profit. From what I’ve seen at other coffee shops though including Mom and Pop ones, that price point is pretty typical.
If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).
You can get coffee from other places than chain coffeeshops for less money and better coffee. The café near me sells great espresso for 12 MAD (about 1 €). The place is nice, has a waiter and coffee is server in glass or porcelaine cups in stead of cheap plastic. You can get it from other places for the cheapest place at 6 MAD.
Dark Roasted coffee is the only way Starbucks can be Starbucks.
Lighter-roasted coffee emphasizes origin flavors and i agree with you --generally tastes better and is more interesting.
But you can’t sell coffee like that in tens of thousands of coffee shops and have it remotely consistent.
Coffee growing from the same plot but on one side of a hill will taste different from the other side due to getting different quantities of sunlight. Complex origin flavors will always be the domain of small specialty coffee shops.
Starbucks has McDonalds-like consistency serving millions of customers a day and that’s only because they emphasize the flavors they can get consistently–roast flavors.
TL;DR The bigger the chain, the darker you have to roast. That’s just how coffee works.
To add to all this, if most of your customers are seriously there to taste their flavored syrups and milk of their favorite drink, you wouldn’t want to alter or even ruin that with unexpected, unique coffee flavors.
That shit is disgusting. I have read somewhere (not 100% sure) that Starbucks failed miserably in Australia because of how shitty their coffee tasted for the Aussies.
Edit: If you like black coffee, go for a medium roast premium or specialty grade coffee from Costa Rica that goes through a honey process. Very smooth, low acid and a hint of natural sweetness from the coffee fruit.
Yeah, they over roast their coffee. It’s deliberate. I assume it’s for consistency and because it’s a low effort way to cut through all that milk and sugar in expensive lattes. Americans have also been conditioned to associate dark, bitter coffee with “strong”.
The irony is dark roast has less caffeine than lighter roast and it’s usually done to mask defects in the bean. Whether to roast light, medium or dark typically isn’t an arbitrary decision or based on any preference. There’s a whole grading process where the ideal roast is determined based on the quality of the beans.
The highest quality beans will often be roasted medium and you start going darker as you get into the lower quality stuff. Basically, you’re cooking off bad flavors that may be the result of sour beans, mold, insect damage, chemicals or worse. There are all kinds of farming practices you don’t want to know about where they get away with it by roasting dark and/or blending with a little bit of a higher quality coffee.
The thing with Starbucks is they actually start with good beans so they don’t have to do this. They also have a wide variety of suppliers and bean types. They could easily put together a great flavor profile that would work for lattes as well as black coffee. But things do change a little bit from one harvest to the next. Starbucks is all about consistency. You can order the same drink at any location in the world and it tastes exactly the same every time.
A small black coffee is $2 because people will pay that much. The cost is less than 25 cents for the coffee. The cup and lid might cost more than what you’re drinking if it’s a commercial grade bean. Coffee is a high margin business.
So, I’m a black coffee drinker. No sweetners, no creams, none of that garbage. Went one time to get me a cup of coffee from Starbucks. It tasted like shit. It was burnt. I thought it was just that one place, but nope, it’s every Starbucks place. Their coffee recipe is shit in and of itself, but they hide it under the ton of sugar and other shit they put in it. I never understood why people would kill for it. Also, why does a small cup of black coffee cost $2+?
Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it’s a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).
Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their ‘blond’ coming in closer to a medium.
People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.
In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don’t stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their “signature taste”. This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That’s his preferred coffee taste and that’s what he demands the company makes.
I’m sure it’s also completely coincidental that burnt coffee tastes mostly same no matter where and when the beans came from. :-)
I’m from a country where we literally, grew, harvested, roasted and brewed our coffee. lol We had a tradition where the coffee HAD to be roasted and brewed on bone fire that is made out of certain shrubs stems. I know, it is crazy, but that is how it was there. Oh, and did I mention that we had to grind the coffee by hand? So, I have completely different standards/expectations when it comes to coffee, and that’s also why I drink it black. That is how we drank it. I now grind and brew my own coffee at home, and those starshit encounters happened only because I was traveling, otherwise, my coffee is all made at home.
Their black coffee isn’t great, but their espresso is good which is what makes it into the sugary drinks. I think the main draw is that it’s pretty consistently decent, while with other chains like Dunkin or Wawa you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get but it’s probably not going to be that good. I’ll also add that the coffee they sell at grocery stores isn’t bad (although it’s far from my favorite). I think it’s much worse at Starbucks itself because it inevitably ends up burnt pretty shortly after it’s brewed.
As far as price, it costs $2 because that’s the price that Starbucks determined maximizes profit. From what I’ve seen at other coffee shops though including Mom and Pop ones, that price point is pretty typical.
If you need drinkable brewed coffee from SB, you have to order the blonde roast. They scorch the everliving fuck out of their regular stuff to ensure consistency regardless of source, so even if you normally don’t, if you want “black” coffee from SB, you’ll be better off with the blonde. If you’re brewing by volume of grounds, lighter roast will have more caffeine anyway (they’re the same if you brew by weight).
You can get coffee from other places than chain coffeeshops for less money and better coffee. The café near me sells great espresso for 12 MAD (about 1 €). The place is nice, has a waiter and coffee is server in glass or porcelaine cups in stead of cheap plastic. You can get it from other places for the cheapest place at 6 MAD.
Heavily disagree, I drink the espresso there once in a while and it tastes like shit every time.
*When compared to independent shops.
Yeah, their espresso is also roasted to death.
CEO needs another yacht, my dude.
Dark Roasted coffee is the only way Starbucks can be Starbucks.
Lighter-roasted coffee emphasizes origin flavors and i agree with you --generally tastes better and is more interesting.
But you can’t sell coffee like that in tens of thousands of coffee shops and have it remotely consistent.
Coffee growing from the same plot but on one side of a hill will taste different from the other side due to getting different quantities of sunlight. Complex origin flavors will always be the domain of small specialty coffee shops.
Starbucks has McDonalds-like consistency serving millions of customers a day and that’s only because they emphasize the flavors they can get consistently–roast flavors.
TL;DR The bigger the chain, the darker you have to roast. That’s just how coffee works.
Totally this.
Pretty much every chain cafe roasts their beans to an inch of their life, to give them a generic “coffee” flavour profile.
Because god forbid coffee have even the slight variance of flavour.
To add to all this, if most of your customers are seriously there to taste their flavored syrups and milk of their favorite drink, you wouldn’t want to alter or even ruin that with unexpected, unique coffee flavors.
May as well add caffeine to a milkshake at that point …
Plenty of independent coffee shops sell Lotus energy drinks for this exact reason.
From what I understand, part of Starbucks thing is catering to people who like burnt and bitter. Kind of like the emo crowd.
That shit is disgusting. I have read somewhere (not 100% sure) that Starbucks failed miserably in Australia because of how shitty their coffee tasted for the Aussies.
Edit: If you like black coffee, go for a medium roast premium or specialty grade coffee from Costa Rica that goes through a honey process. Very smooth, low acid and a hint of natural sweetness from the coffee fruit.
Yeah, they over roast their coffee. It’s deliberate. I assume it’s for consistency and because it’s a low effort way to cut through all that milk and sugar in expensive lattes. Americans have also been conditioned to associate dark, bitter coffee with “strong”.
The irony is dark roast has less caffeine than lighter roast and it’s usually done to mask defects in the bean. Whether to roast light, medium or dark typically isn’t an arbitrary decision or based on any preference. There’s a whole grading process where the ideal roast is determined based on the quality of the beans.
The highest quality beans will often be roasted medium and you start going darker as you get into the lower quality stuff. Basically, you’re cooking off bad flavors that may be the result of sour beans, mold, insect damage, chemicals or worse. There are all kinds of farming practices you don’t want to know about where they get away with it by roasting dark and/or blending with a little bit of a higher quality coffee.
The thing with Starbucks is they actually start with good beans so they don’t have to do this. They also have a wide variety of suppliers and bean types. They could easily put together a great flavor profile that would work for lattes as well as black coffee. But things do change a little bit from one harvest to the next. Starbucks is all about consistency. You can order the same drink at any location in the world and it tastes exactly the same every time.
A small black coffee is $2 because people will pay that much. The cost is less than 25 cents for the coffee. The cup and lid might cost more than what you’re drinking if it’s a commercial grade bean. Coffee is a high margin business.
I drink espresso (like just shoot a double shot back) and their stuff leaves a terrible aftertaste.