circa 1990 my roommates and i would spend our off work days practicing the delicate balance of coffee and alcohol consumption. well maybe the wrong choice of words as there was little moderation involved. we were either hair tingling caffeined out or tipsy. back and forth. all day and into the evening when the tipsy part took over. i remember the starbuck's at pike street market. had coffee there once and never again. it was a easy choice. most any other cafe served better coffee. the starbucks espresso had a taste and aroma...
my trusted old friend the olympia cremina
....that suggested burnt toast. when you try and salvage that burnt piece of toast and scrape off the dark naughty bits. that charred black shit has a distinctive bad flavor. starbucks coffee has a nuance of this flavor and it wasn't until 2011 that i finally learned why.
i was battling my own coffee demons at home. drip, espresso, cappuccino... however i made my morning coffee there was always something off. a coffee related twitter post led me to an article by some dude in the bay area who takes his coffee fetish to an extreme level. but one tidbit of info sparked my interest... 'good tasting coffee depends on beans being roasted no more than a week before brewing'. if true i'm screwed, i thought. who knows when the beans were roasted once they reach my island paradise. then i found out we do have a local roaster on the island so i went to his cafe and barked up his tree about my coffee woes. yes, indeed much of his inventory is roasted within a couple days. and my espresso woes could be helped by cleaning out my trusty old olympia cremina with cafiza. he pointed out that i could adjust the cremina's water temp (to 195F). he also got me back into 'drip' style coffee by turning me onto a great little coffee press called the aeropress.
but what really got the coffee dude going was when i dissed starbucks. he went off on a passionate rant on why, as a roaster, he has such scorn for starbucks. "...they over roast their beans...all of them, everything they roast is technically a dark roast...over cooked to the point of becoming bland..." he went on to explain that skillful roasting is a delicate balance of heat and timing. and all the coffee beans from different parts of the world have their own distinctive flavors. it's the roaster's art , the roaster's responsibility to prepare the bean such that flavor takes center stage. but in the case of starbucks Howard Schultz came up with a biz model to globalize the coffee giant without having to roast carefully and without having to be dependent on any particular coffee bean source. just 'dark' roast all the coffee. roast the shit out of it all and you'll have consistently mediocre coffee. kinda like mcdonalds and beef.
but what really got the coffee dude going was when i dissed starbucks. he went off on a passionate rant on why, as a roaster, he has such scorn for starbucks. "...they over roast their beans...all of them, everything they roast is technically a dark roast...over cooked to the point of becoming bland..." he went on to explain that skillful roasting is a delicate balance of heat and timing. and all the coffee beans from different parts of the world have their own distinctive flavors. it's the roaster's art , the roaster's responsibility to prepare the bean such that flavor takes center stage. but in the case of starbucks Howard Schultz came up with a biz model to globalize the coffee giant without having to roast carefully and without having to be dependent on any particular coffee bean source. just 'dark' roast all the coffee. roast the shit out of it all and you'll have consistently mediocre coffee. kinda like mcdonalds and beef.
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