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Nah, I don't believe dark roast should mean burnt roast and have had enough dark roast that was tasty without tasting burnt to know it's possible. As far as my one experience at Starbucks goes, I didn't specify, I told the guy taking my order I didn't want to have to read a short story to order coffee, I just wanted a decent cup of coffee and what i got was meh.
Understood.
I just get their medium roast (now just k-cups for the office Keurig) and enjoy it quite a bit. Significantly more than other brands of K-cups I’ve purchased from the grocery store. For reference, I always drink my coffee black, and I am one of those that doesn’t mind McDonald’s coffee. Not the greatest, but decent enough. Well, used to find it okay before they dropped the temperature because people apparently don’t know that hot coffee is hot.
My take on SB's is on the merits the coffee is generally better than most people seem to argue. However, their espresso based drinks are generally excellent. SB's batch brews are solid but not great my guess is they are forced to make large batches and that is always tough. SB's nitro cold press is just spectacular.
For you guys who think SB coffee tastes burned:
1. Have you ever tried French and especially Italian roasts? I read somewhere SB roasts its dark coffee to general roast French temps (455F?)
2. SB heats water to Gold Cup standards etc. It's not like they don't know what they are doing.
Now from the money side.......for roughly SB prices I can V-60 brew 100% Kona Peaberry, 100% Kuaui Estate Peaberry, the best African, Costa Rican, real Jamaica Blue Mountain etc. and the yield is orders of magnitude better. I control the coffee, the grind, the strength, the water temp and flow rate.
They are cannibalizing their own stores with so many locations and with more people working from home I'd bet the hassle of leaving home to get coffee is cutting into their sales.
Understood.
I just get their medium roast (now just k-cups for the office Keurig) and enjoy it quite a bit. Significantly more than other brands of K-cups I’ve purchased from the grocery store. For reference, I always drink my coffee black, and I am one of those that doesn’t mind McDonald’s coffee. Not the greatest, but decent enough. Well, used to find it okay before they dropped the temperature because people apparently don’t know that hot coffee is hot.
I think part of what throws people about SB's batch brew coffee is that regardless of roast the coffee is always strong and very well extracted*, I'm guessing 15 to 1 or close (water to dry ground coffee) and that is too strong for many to drink black or close to black.
FWIIW our Euro buddies typically drink coffee at 17 to 1 or weaker. Technovorm (makes some of the world's best consumer brewers based in the Netherlands) recommends right at 18.18 to 1.
*Most Americans are used to drinking under-extracted thin coffee because most machines cannot heat water to proper brewing standards and the only way to deal with that is to grind finer that optimal = thin coffee with little complexity and no finish.
A. Have you tried making Japanese style ice coffee?
Here's how I do batch brew some maybe 200 days a year.
Tools/stuff: Hario V-60 #3, filter, 1500ML mason jar or any carafe laying around, scale, timer, grinder, precision kettle, good coffee, clean water and ice.
It varies little but I generally use the James Hoffmann recipe/ratio - in my case 600 ml/mg ice, 900 ml water and +/-90 mg ground coffee.
The immediate yield is 1500 ML of cold, strong coffee. In my experience, probably because 90 mg coffee in #3 Hario is really pushing it, the recipe scales down really well. I make individual cups all the time that are usually a little better than the 1500 ML brew.
6 to 9 ice to water ratio, 10 to 1 hot water to coffee ratio for a final coffee to water input ratio of 16.667 and yield of around 1440 ML. There's a little loss to evaporation and some water remains in the grounds of course.
B. My mom has brewed a little weaker ratio into a Chemex since I was a little kid.
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Hoffmann also has a YT vid. about immersion brewing ice coffee that is frankly a tad better than the above but slower and there is no way to make more than maybe 375/400 ML of coffee at a time.
Way back when they first started, SB's focus was on selling whole beans displayed in bins behind glass. It was great. Now they primarily hawk sugary drinks and food.
Now I only go there when on the road and I need a strong cup of black coffee.
I haven't bought anything in a Starbucks in years. The closest thing is buying one of their bottles ice coffee from a gas station on a road trip for a pick me up. I'll add it to my thermos to keep it cold and add water since it's way too sweet to drink regularly.
I brew my own coffee at home using a French press and put it in a thermos. Easy and no waste.
I have a comment on coffee bean quality as it relates to Starbucks.
When you think of the quality of coffee beans, it is good to imagine the "Normal Distribution" a.k.a. "Bell Curve." Global production of coffee beans exceeds 9 million metric tons, or 150 million 60-kilogram bags per year. Some years produce more tonnage. And, not too surprisingly, the quality of coffee beans, like so many things in nature, tends to fall on the bell curve.
Many things impact the quality of the bean, including plant varietal, climate, altitude, shade, soil, and method of processing of the coffee bush fruit (e.g., "dry process" or "wet process"). Worldwide tonnage of beans in the top 1% or 5% of quality is relatively small (only 5% of the crop is in the top 5% of quality, by definition).
Starbucks and other massive coffee companies do not purchase beans in that top 5% or 10% by quality. Money isn't the issue; the issue is tonnage - there just isn't enough tonnage of coffee at the very high end. Above all else, Starbucks wants a consistent product so that no matter where in the USA you walk into a *$ (the usual shorthand among the coffee cognoscenti) and you order a Pike Place, you get a consistent more-or-less identical cup of coffee.
Thinking back to that quality bell curve, Starbucks purchases above the median quality, but not the best stuff. The high quality coffee beans tend to go to smaller boutique roasters who don't need to buy thousands of 60-kilo bags of coffee at a time. The very, very best quality coffee beans usually ends up in the hands of enthusiasts and hobbyists like me because (a) we hobbyists don't need to buy massive quantities, and (b) we are willing to pay double the price without blinking because even at double the price, it isn't that much money.
Grocery store coffee roasters such as Folgers tend to buy at the median; truck stop coffee is below the median and includes a larger % of robusta relative to arabica beans, boosting caffeine.
The dregs of coffee bean quality - the bottom 10 or 20% or so - tastes bad and isn't even used in a blend. It used to be fed to pigs - until a bright marketing guy had an idea to combine it with flavorings, and that is how French Vanilla and Hazelnut flavored coffee were born, which laughably sells at a price premium.
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