Life is too short…

We took our kids down to the city for a Boxing Day movie and to take in the bright lights. We really don’t get off-island that often, at least not down to the Big Smoke of Seattle. We find our needs met here and I don’t miss having to actually wait to cross the street because there are cars. I live in a town where there is one cross walk signal, and that is for crossing the “highway”. That said, it was nice to see the reaction of my daughters to the sights and sounds of the city at night, and they throughly enjoyed Arthur Christmas 3D.

Strangely enough the big disappointment of the trip was Starbucks. We took a little walk after dinner, circling the area around Westlake Center, and in a ridiculously small area we saw five Starbucks. I know it is an old joke by now, but when you can stand on the corner of 7^th and Olive Way in Seattle you will find that there are literally 5 Starbucks within a one block radius.

That is crazy. It is crazy and it is wasteful and it is indicative of many larger problems, primary among them is the lack of choice that this level of “convenience” has wrought. If you are downtown and want coffee, what is there besides Starbucks? But worse still, when I went into the Starbucks at 400 Pine Street – and please note this is actually a sixth outlet, not noted because it is a block and a half away from Olive and 7^th – the cappuccino was really, really bad.

Let me confess right now that I am the sort of food snob who has been known to rant on and on about esoteric aspects of food and beverage service. It drives me nuts when I order a cappuccino and am asked the now universal question “do you like your cappuccino wet or dry”. I rail against the corruption of authentic Italian coffee culture, because in Italy a cappuccino is actually a specific drink. Anywhere you order one you get pretty much the same thing, no questions asked. I don’t want it wet or dry, I want it cappuccino… So while I do find Starbucks corporate coffee double speak – where a “tall” is the shortest cup they use – incredibly annoying, that was not my beef last night.

You see I don’t normally rant about large companies simply because they are large. I used to sort of admired Starbucks for being so successful and helping to create the very wave the that they eventually rode to total coffee domination. I was a little peeved when both Torrefazione and Stewart Brothers Coffee a.k.a Seattle’s Best Coffee a.k.a. SBC were both bought by Starbucks. I thought both of these other, former producers made better coffee than Starbucks, but I understood that the nature of business is such that these sorts of things happen. The reason I was generally ok with Starbucks was that when I would find myself in a Starbucks the coffee was, if not my personal favorite, very consistent and really pretty high in quality. As someone who has spent decades in the food industry I know how hard it is to do things right, every time, over and over again, in thousands of locations. On such a huge scale it was really pretty impressive that Starbucks could deliver a decent espresso drink in the airport in Detroit for example.

But for the past I am not sure how long, every time I have had a beverage at a Starbucks the coffee has less good. I really did not pay much attention to it because I drink it so infrequently. I make my own daily espresso at home. When I have coffee out it is usually at one of our local, Whidbey Island coffee roasters. All of them are quite good-by the way and interestingly different from one another, so that my coffee drinking experience on the island is worth savoring and paying attention to. My experience with Starbucks of late is just the opposite. It has been limited to airports, a recent trip back to California, and last night in downtown Seattle. So for most of my recent trips to Starbucks I really haven’t been paying very much attention to the quality of the coffee because my expectations were pretty low to begin with. As such I have been universally unimpressed, but also unoffended.

Last night’s coffee, however, was so bad, so really, very, very bad, that it is worthy of note. I was taken aback at my first sip. The espresso itself was completely nondescript, indistinguishable and almost impossible to detect. There was clearly something in there beneath the over heated, scalded milk, but was there espresso in there? So I paused and took another sip. I tried to understand and dissect what I was tasting. The best way I can describe it is as scalded milk and dirty, watery, weak… something. Something that really bore no resemblance to coffee. Dish water perhaps? But where was the distinct taste of soap? No, it just tasted dirty and completely without character. Stunning. And did I mention they scalded the milk? Belch.

I have to wonder, has Starbucks stretched too far? Have they passed the size level where it is possible to maintain any adequate level of control over both products and services, even here in Seattle, their home town? I believe it is important to remind ourselves that at a very real level a cappuccino is an agricultural product, and both coffee beans and milk really don’t care what your corporate strategies are. And when you have grown to the point where you need to acquire the unfathomable amount of raw coffee each day that Starbucks does, eventually you must reach a point where the coffee that comes into your great, gaping maw is not being in any real sense “selected”. More accurate verbs might be “strip mined” or perhaps “pillaged”.

I have to assume that underlying this inferior coffee quality is the fact that most of what they actually sell isn’t really so much coffee any longer. It’s candy. I do not know their specific product sales blend is, but what percentage of sales is actually coffee, and what percentage are some of the myriad pancreas-destroying, made just for the obese American market beverages, like the 520 calorie Vente Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino®? Starbucks sell so much confection under the guise of coffee that perhaps the quality of the actual coffee really does not matter any longer. I mean if only a small, perhaps single digit percentage of their customer base actually orders straight up espresso or cappuccino or Americano, then maybe they just don’t need to focus on the coffee any more.

Have you had a cup of coffee at Starbucks lately? Did you taste it? I mean, did you really take just a moment to taste it? Next question: Is there a local roaster in your town that deserves your business instead?

Life is too short to drink crappy coffee.

Advertisement