Thursday, August 23, 2012

Someone loves his coffee waaaay too much

I think I finally found the secret fetish of the Market Ticker's Karl Denninger. Here is what he wrote in a critique about Starbucks in a post about the company's stock recently.

The problem is that unlike most foods roasted coffee doesn't turn into something dangerous and thus unmarketable after it expires.

It just tastes like crap.

A properly-pulled espresso with fresh beans has about a 1/4-1/3" layer of crema on the top; a natural "foam" that is produced from the extraction of the coffee under ~120psi of water pressure. To get a proper crema layer you need three things to be right:

* The coffee has to be fresh; no more than 2 weeks post-roast, and the roast must be neither too dark or too light (for most coffees suitable for espresso this means you want to pull the roast just as it enters "second crack".) Starbucks fails here -- their coffee is roasted too dark for optimum extraction.

* The temperature of the water in the brewing unit has to be almost-exactly right. Proper extraction takes place around 198F. The exact temperature varies somewhat with the blend of coffee being extracted, but once you have the proper temperature you need to maintain it with no more than ~2 degree variance for best results. If the water is too cold the coffee is extremely acid in taste, if too hot it tastes burnt.

*In addition, the pressure in the brewing basket must be around 8 bar, which means your coffee grind must be exactly right, since that's what provides the back-pressure on the system. If the grind is too coarse the coffee will be "thin"; if too fine it will be extremely bitter.

I have never gotten a Starbucks espresso with a proper layer of crema on it.

If you roast your coffee too dark on purpose you degrade a lot of the flavors that are in the natural bean. This, however, results in coffee that doesn't get much worse if the roasted coffee is older than they should be. It just sucks to start with and continues to suck.

If you drink your coffee with all sorts of crap in it you probably don't notice this much; the "Carmel Macchiato Grande'" is almost all milk and caramel syrup, with a couple of shots of coffee in it. I bet you could substitute battery acid for the coffee and you might not know the difference!

But I drink my espresso as straight shots, and unfortunately every sin the cafe makes is blatant and exposed to the palate when you drink it that way. And I'll not kid you -- I find Starbucks coffee nearly undrinkable, to the point that I will only buy shots there if I need the caffeine and am willing to simply not care if it tastes like brewed dog****.

Think of it as the McDonalds' model. You'll never get an outstanding hamburger at McDonalds'. But you will get the exact same hamburger at every McDonalds' anywhere in the nation. I can pull into one here, one in Michigan, one in California and one in Colorado and when I order a Quarter Pounder with Cheese I know exactly what it's going to taste like. McDonalds' goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that this happens, as it's basically what they are selling -- the same thing, everywhere, every time, even if it's uninspiring at best.

This is the Starbucks' business model.

Unfortunately for people like me, I want an exceptional espresso. I want to taste nuances of chocolate, nut and even fruit overtones in the cup, and I don't want to have drown it with sugar or crap like caramel sauce.

I'll never get that coffee at Starbucks. Their entire system is designed around "make it fast, get it out, price it to wherever you can get away with."

That might work in an iPhoney world, which we seem to be in.

But as earnings showed, perhaps, on balance, people just expected too much from a company that at its core turned from being a coffee lover's paradise into the McDonalds' of coffee.

Now please excuse me while I drag my snobbish coffee-swilling face in front of my espresso machine and pull myself another shot.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everything he is saying is correct. Starbucks has, little by little, gone back on everything they said they would NEVER do, namely:
1) Make flavored coffee, because the flavoring might bleed over into their pristine coffee.
2) Sell food, because the smells of the food might interfere with their pristine coffee.
3) frappucinos. Need I say more?

They've done all these things because they are a public company and they don't have a choice but to keep their shareholders happy.

I don't think anyone is operating under the illusion that Starbucks has the best coffee. Are they?

Anonymous said...

So all of this being said... is there a place that does it "right" around here? If Starbucks is serving "swill" I would certainly love to know what "real" coffee is supposed to taste like.

Anonymous said...

Cups and Sneaky Beans do it right. And, now, Sneaky Beans serves Beanfruit Coffee, locally roasted in Brandon!

Starbucks is crap.

Anderson said...

BREAKING: Chain Restaurant Fails to Gratify Idiosyncratic Tastes of One Man! Film at 10.

... One wonders how such a sophisticate ever came to enjoy coffee in the first place, since everything he drank was presumably just awful.

Anonymous said...

Yes, he is totally correct. I'm not even much of a coffee "snob" but even my unsophisticated palate recognizes that SB overroasts their beans. I'm told that is because of their distribution system....overroasting makes the beans last longer...don't know if that is accurate. Cups is locally roasted and someone here said Sneaky Beans is, too. When traveling, always try to find a locally owned coffee shop. You'll taste some amazing things. I forget the name of the one in Atlanta where I first tasted the chocolate tones in a coffee bean. I had no idea!

Mark Geoffriau said...

Big fan of Beanfruit Coffee, available at Sneaky Beans. Beanfruit roasts frequently so you don't get coffee made with stale, moldy, oily beans.

KaptKangaroo said...

Speaking of coffee, I was out of it this AM. Don't care what brand at that point I drink. It could have been stale moldy oily beans.

Anderson said...

"even my unsophisticated palate recognizes that SB overroasts their beans"

But my wife, the real coffee-drinker in the family, *likes* her beans roasted that dark. As do some other Starbucks fans I know.

Ain't no accountin' for taste.


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