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If you take a shot of espresso from Starbucks and compare it to a shot of espresso from a cafe which roasts their own beans, you'll taste the difference quite i
by fsociety 11y ago
If you take a shot of espresso from Starbucks and compare it to a shot of espresso from a cafe which roasts their own beans, you'll taste the difference quite immediately. Starbucks beans are over-roasted by a large margin.
Their coffee has the same story. Grinding Starbuck beans results in what looks like ashes from a campfire, and doesn't release those wonderful smells from the oil. Just smell the difference when you grind a higher quality bean, never mind how much more appetizing the texture looks.
My understanding, from working in the industry for a short time, is that Starbucks roasts the largest quantity of beans in the world and that is why their coffee is so burnt. It's impossible to control the temperatures when they roast these large quantity of beans with much precision, so they compensate by over-roasting them.
That said, coffee snobbery isn't a good thing, and their drinks aren't that bad when you put in tons of sugar or milk. But without the dressings, it's pretty terrible quality.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoSurely Starbucks can afford an engineer to design and manufacture a roaster that can properly handle their volume?
- alaskamiller 11y agoMost people can't taste the difference between the two, that's the difference. Third wave independent coffee shops harp on the idea it takes months of palette training for their baristas to calibrate tasting minute differences and somehow every other person comes in here to opine about how burnt or nasty tasting their cup of bean juice is. Starbucks optimizes for different things than other shops. They over roast as a signature, to create bolder flavor. Over the past decade they have great control over their supply chain and beans yet they still over roast beyond the flavor signature because when most of their products are milk-based drinks the extra flavor of the espresso comes through. It's meant to be that way, not because of some conspiracy to deliver mediocrity, but because it's their culture. And ignorance paired with pretentiousness in coffee culture is on whole other level cargo cult-iness. Besides, when one really wants to talk about bad coffee and they're not mentioning Philz then they have no clue.
- ceejayoz 11y agoIt wouldn't shock me if Starbucks over-roasts because people (incorrectly) believe that the bitterness is the caffeine. It tastes "strong".
- rdancer 11y ago> It's impossible to control the temperatures when they roast these large quantity of beans with much precision You're trolling, right?
- tsomctl 11y agoYou realize that there is much more to roasting coffee than just heating them up to some pre-specified temperature, right? You have your bean temperature, air temperature, and drum temperature, all of which are controlled separately. You also need to bring them up at the right speed. You also control how much you circulate the air versus venting it. And all of these things are interrelated, adjusting one will change the others. I help maintain the roaster at a small coffee company, and the head roaster likes to manually control each roast. The PLC can automate an entire roast, but since there are so many variables, he likes to run it manually.
- rdancer 11y agoI'm really sorry if not doing things by hand offends your artisan sensibilities. Why pick on Starbucks, though, there are plenty of coffee producers who have been roasting coffee on industrial scale for much longer than the company exist.