Starbucks coffee

amen brother!...before Starbucks American coffee sucked...and CJ I love the European coffeehouse stuff. I enjoyed Italy Vienna...Spain...the US didn't have anything comparable

twice, once I had it in San Diego when I was visting my brother and once in london across the street from my hotel. godawful stuff it was.

doppio macchiato...that's my secret at Starsucks

Only $1.99 with lots of foam...it's a great deal

yeh but your hardly someone who's opinion we value.
You eat bull balls

prairie oysters...please!

rocky mountain oysters.

scrotum sushi

Even though I don't eat the things you cite above, one of the few bad things I found in my recent trip to the US was coffee at Starbucks...

see, at least you could go home and be done with it. We have these green and tan drive ins every 15 miles or so.

A lot of beans in a lot of suppliers' cases are robusta beans grown, I gather, in different places and roasted different ways. I hear that arabica beans (ethiopian, for example) are better beans to start with, as are Jamaica blue mountain, and so on.

There is much I don't know about this, for example, if Colombian is a certain level of roasting of the robusta bean grown in Colombia, or what.

Then there is the matter of shade grown, which is said to be better re the survival of bird populations. I don't know if the coffee tastes the same, or better, for that.

I really liked the ordinary seeming cup of coffee I had at the cafe on Rio Grande (street) named something like Flying J. The cafe, I mean, not the coffee. It was a house coffee, Colombian. Tasted great sans sugar, etc.

On Starbucks, I avoid it generally, although I stopped there once in a while in Eureka because it was one place I could find the New York Times, not an easy find in that town. I agree that the beans are overroasted there, and suspect that wasn't how they first started out, but not sure. I agree with cjhsa and panz that much of american coffee was total dreck before european style coffee presentation caught on here, and Starbucks was a big part of that - but not the only purveyor. I think I had my first Krups espresso machine before Starbucks showed up.

A few years ago, I bought a large bag of coffee beans at Costco, some Starbucks' beans. They must have been rejects from the Sb system... they were coated with grimy charred grit right in the bag. I don't easily go back and forth to Costco, busy, ya know, so I just tossed the bag in the trash.

i'm not even a regular coffee drinker but i gotta say their new cinnamon dolce latte is pretty awesome. like candy...mmm.

We used to have a chain of coffee shops in the Boston area known
as "The Coffee Connection." I loved it. As with most of those here, the
CC folk thought Starbucks over-roasted and refrred to it as "Charbucks".

But money talks and Starbucks bought out the Coffee Connection.
And nuked it.

I drank a lot of the Evil Green Lady's brew while my daughter was
working as a barista in the cafe at the B&N bookstore in Saugus. I could
drink on her discount and that brought the price back to within the Earth's
gravitational pull. The girl got to be quite good at espresso-based
concoctions as well.

Now I drink Sarbucks every one and again and I find I have acquired a
taste for that level of roasting. But not as a regular thing.

I like Starbucks solely because of it's availability. I have always preferred the independent houses for flavor and environs over SB.

People often complain about SB coffee being burnt. While some of their coffee is very darkly roasted there are an equal amount that are very mild and very lightly roasted. I myself am of the camp of the darker the better.

As a side note: Did you know that the roasting proccess takes out some of the caffeine in coffee? So the darker roasted, stronger tasting coffee actually has less caffeine then the milder lighter roasted coffees.

Circa 1980, when the city abandoned the styrofoam cup and returned to the use of paperthe Greek coffee cup sprang out of nowhere and into every deli, diner, streetwagon and doughnut shop throughout the five boroughs. If you bought coffee to go, it came in a greekcup. It just did. It is rumored that the first episode of NYPD BLUE was re-shot when a sharpeyed pre-release reviewer noted that the cops drinking coffee out of something beside the ironically iconic blue and white containers.

The only problem was they forgot to put something in the cup that was drinkable. Order it up regular or light or half-white, you still got something that tasted like the bottom of an ashtray. But hey, 80 cents. Starbucks arrived with their $1.50 cup of coffee and the deli owners all laughed. Starbucks was the first to ban smoking in their places and the deli owners howled. "You gonna pay two dollar for coffee and you don't get to smoke. Sha.!!" Oh, and Starbucks had those overpriced cookies too. What a joke!

Today, a good left fielder could make his way across the city throwing a baseball from one Starbucks to the next. There are four within a block and a half from my work. They all make money by serving really good, overpriced, but really good, coffee drinks. I shudder when I think I am paying the same amount for a grande skim latte that I used to pay for a shot and beerbump, but I like the way it tastes. Mostly, I order $2.00 grande drips and put a little skim milk in it. It's good.

Starbucks doesn't have flavored coffees, Hazelnut etc so I don't know what was in Chia's gift box, they do have flavored syrups so Mrs. Nation can have a shot for her hazelnut fix(ation). Their expresso tastes like the best expresso I've had down in Little Italy, sharp, smooth, earthy.

The delis make money, more money now says my friend Moishe from the Pick-a-Bagel, from the bottled teas they sell. Coffee not so much. "We watch them, they buy the bagels here and go across the street, through traffic, to the Starbucks for the coffee." Whatever. The little independent coffee shop next door, which promised their smoking customers they would allow smoking until the day they closed, closed. I miss the chess games.


Joe(have a cup)Nation

PS Starbucks stockholders, me included, saw a $3.04 rise in the stock price yesterday.

Well, I've read every post in this thread, something I rarely do when it's already six pages long before I join in. Fun--and very interesting!

I avoid Starbucks whenever possible, which, in this town, is no mean feat. Mainly because of their manifest destiny approach to world domination. I hate the idea that they've bought out local chains--they've done it here, too.

I go to a father-and-son roasting operation for my beans. They roast the beans right there, and the place is definitely no frills. They've been doing it for 30 years...

You definitely are obsessed! :wink:

Anon

Definitely delicious! You haven't lived ...

Anon

Too sweet! I almost went into insulin shock.

Anon

I'm with ya on the "too sweet". I generally won't go for the sweet coffee
drinks (but I confess to having an eggnog latte during the holidays).