Dark Roast, bitter notes ovepower flavor, finishes pretty clean.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Standing in the shadow of the Big Mermaid, we "little" coffee people can take solice that Starbucks IS NOT about the coffee. They are about Chic. Trendy, a place to get out of the suburbs and an antidote to social deficiencies. They give people a sense of cachet, of importance and prestige. They would have us believe that they are selling coffee magic when all it is is slight of hand. The sanctimonious crap they dish out about the "Starbucks Experience" is nothing more than a cheap cloak for perfectly ordinary hard core commercialism. Howard Shultz's "passion" for coffee makes an effective sales tool while he systematically hunts down and crushes any competition that might look as though to get in his way.
After all, with some 15,000 Starbucks stores serving some 4 million cups a week, just how special can the coffee be? We know there isnt that much really good coffee in the whole world. That would be like saying McDonalds or Burger King have the best hamburgers in the world. Of course McDonalds and Berger King arent selling us cachet, they are sell us convenience. But then again so is Starbucks. The ubiquity of the brand has made it seem blasphemous to even think of getting our coffee somewhere else. This too is by design. When a protester threw a metal newspaper through the window of the Starbucks in Portland, Maine...Conan O'Brian quipped...(paraphrasing) "Yeah, and it is causing a great deal of inconvenience to the customers..they have to go to the Starbucks across the street."
The ONLY thing that makes it special for the amateur coffee drinkers is the big green logo. These people don't know good coffee, they know what makes their ego feel good. Hell, the customers really belive the superautomatic "baristas" are really their friends! Starbucks would have us believe that by buying their products we are somehow being benevolent to mankind. Starbucks is about feelings, and they have crafted a marketing apparatus that has been designed to shovel this tripe upon us. Indeed the Starbucks cachet of making people feel as though we are really important, worth the indulgence, and special has been calculated in board rooms and meetings and all kinds of research into what people are missing. They certainly werent missing coffee. But it would seem to us "real" coffee men, that is just what they are missing...the joy of great coffee. I love it when people ask me about Starbucks, epecially at the roadshows. "Is your coffee as good as Starbucks?",they'll ask. My initial gut reaction is to go into some dry long sermon about the intricacies of coffee, and minutiae about acidity, and flavor profiles, etc. I want to wax on about what really great coffee is about but of late, I just say, Oh, Starbucks..they're pretty and all... and they have whay I have come to call "charming coffee." "We think our coffees are terrific but they probably aren't as charming as those that flow from the caffeine aqueduct overseen by Big Mermaid."
2 comments:
Standing in the shadow of the Big Mermaid, we "little" coffee people can take solice that Starbucks IS NOT about the coffee. They are about Chic. Trendy, a place to get out of the suburbs and an antidote to social deficiencies. They give people a sense of cachet, of importance and prestige. They would have us believe that they are selling coffee magic when all it is is slight of hand. The sanctimonious crap they dish out about the "Starbucks Experience" is nothing more than a cheap cloak for perfectly ordinary hard core commercialism. Howard Shultz's "passion" for coffee makes an effective sales tool while he systematically hunts down and crushes any competition that might look as though to get in his way.
After all, with some 15,000 Starbucks stores serving some 4 million cups a week, just how special can the coffee be? We know there isnt that much really good coffee in the whole world. That would be like saying McDonalds or Burger King have the best hamburgers in the world. Of course McDonalds and Berger King arent selling us cachet, they are sell us convenience. But then again so is Starbucks. The ubiquity of the brand has made it seem blasphemous to even think of getting our coffee somewhere else. This too is by design. When a protester threw a metal newspaper through the window of the Starbucks in Portland, Maine...Conan O'Brian quipped...(paraphrasing) "Yeah, and it is causing a great deal of inconvenience to the customers..they have to go to the Starbucks across the street."
The ONLY thing that makes it special for the amateur coffee drinkers is the big green logo. These people don't know good coffee, they know what makes their ego feel good. Hell, the customers really belive the superautomatic "baristas" are really their friends! Starbucks would have us believe that by buying their products we are somehow being benevolent to mankind. Starbucks is about feelings, and they have crafted a marketing apparatus that has been designed to shovel this tripe upon us. Indeed the Starbucks cachet of making people feel as though we are really important, worth the indulgence, and special has been calculated in board rooms and meetings and all kinds of research into what people are missing. They certainly werent missing coffee. But it would seem to us "real" coffee men, that is just what they are missing...the joy of great coffee. I love it when people ask me about Starbucks, epecially at the roadshows. "Is your coffee as good as Starbucks?",they'll ask. My initial gut reaction is to go into some dry long sermon about the intricacies of coffee, and minutiae about acidity, and flavor profiles, etc. I want to wax on about what really great coffee is about but of late, I just say, Oh, Starbucks..they're pretty and all... and they have whay I have come to call "charming coffee." "We think our coffees are terrific but they probably aren't as charming as those that flow from the caffeine aqueduct overseen by Big Mermaid."
Thank you Sacto for your comment.
freshcoffee
Post a Comment