2007-02-03

Starbucks Coffee Beaten by McDonnalds

People who think that Starbucks has "good coffee" just don't know good coffee. Nothing could possibly be easier than brewing excellent coffee. Starbucks does everything correct, except the crucial first step: selecting excellent "single malt" coffee. Instead, they gather various beans into "blends", and then over-cook them. In the same way that different forms of mediocre, light-weight bread taste the same if you over-toast them, this burnt Starbucks coffee tastes the same at every outlet around the world every hour of the day all year round, regardless of what crop of beans they scrape off the bottom of the price list and combine together.

Long live real coffee! It will help you live long!

2 comments:

Nadir said...

My homebrew is better than any of those fastfood coffees. And I refuse to buy the expensive stuff anymore. I've discovered Yuban, a cheap Columbian coffee that Paul will deem undrinkable because it comes in a can.

It's not the best I've tasted, but it keeps me awake, and doesn't cost $8 a pound like the stuff Paul turned me on to.

Paul Hue said...

Nadir: Holiday Market in our neighborhood has freshly roasted $4/lb coffee from India that equals any on earth. They also have several equally genius coffees for merely $6/lb.

At those prices, I would reject anything in a can! Colombia usually produces only the lighter, "milder" coffees, and mostly the mass produced "robustica", though they seem recently to have gotten some quality Arabica to market; Holiday Market has two such coffees from Colombia. I prefer -- as with my women -- coffee that is richer. That Indian "Kiri" (I think that's the name) is amazingly rich and dark. The owner of the plantation lives in Canton, MI a Detroit suburb that neighbors the Paul-Nadir suburb of Westland. Some day enough other coffee snobs will discovery it and it will sell for much more.