OT: Starbucks

Agree.

We had one of those great finds by expermentation moments recently. My bride was clearing out old coffee and mixed some instant expresso in with our regular ground coffee. I'm hooked now. We do 2:1 regular ground to instant expresso.

--
Chisolm 
Republic of Texas

Blech. I brew regular French Roast in a Krups Il Primo. My first fave is actually the store-roasted stuff from the Stew Leonard's in Yonkers, and my second is Peet's Major Dickason's blend. Starbucks is terrible.

(When I have no choice I always order a quadruple espresso--none of the baristas know how to say that in Italian, so they can't be superior about it.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

We dust ice cream with espresso powder... fantastic! ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 

     Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions.

We used to drink Major D, but lately we just go with the Peets French Roast. I buy it ground, because grinding my own beans got to be a chore. Houseguests often cut it with hot water before they can drink it.

Starbucks is awful.

I asked one barista what was the strongest thing he made. He said that he has one customer that gets a big coffee with five extra shots, which is 7x equivalent.

When I was young, a double expresso after dinner was just the thing. As I get older, I can't drink coffee after sunset, or I won't sleep. Life sucks. Well, there is rum.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Try a tablespoon of good rum, like 10Cane.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

It is very well marketed and uniform everywhere in the world.

They burn the hell out of the beans and use deionised water to make it up so that it is incredibly reproducibly bad. They actually bought up a patent on making the right hardness of water to defend their method.

Went to a fascinating lecture on the chemistry of coffee making a couple of years ago with a famous barrista doing the coffee prep. A bit of the content is still online at the RSC but the lecture notes aren't.

One of the demos was the enormous effect of the hardness of the water on high quality pure strain varietal coffee. Too soft and it tastes thin and lifeless, too hard and there are bitter free bases and just right turns out to be approximately like the tapwater in Newcastle, UK.

Try making some coffee up with Evian water if you want to see how awful an otherwise good coffee can taste when made up with the wrong water!

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Certainly there is no room for personal preference. All those leftist Starbuck lovers should be shot!

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Rick C

Their basic cup-o-joe isn't very good. Their "specialty drinks" are what people go for and aren't bad at all, but absurdly overpriced.

Their standard-issue cup of coffee sucks, but nobody goes for that.

Their no-water chai tea latte is IMO delicious. I hear it turns you gay, though.

I see pick-em-ups with Trump stickers outside the local Sbucks all the time, so it looks like we got some down-low foofy drink drinkers on the team.

In Australia they don't. Starbucks (aka Tastesucks) tried to crack the Australian market, but the Australian subsidiary went bust a couple of years ago.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

It makes you hungry for Social Justice.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Blech. Ground coffee becomes worthless after 3 or 4 hours. The same goes for flour used in baking - best if it's ground fresh.

Coffee grounds are great for compost even after being used! I feed them to worms.

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Rick C

For special occasions I roast my own from a local purveyor of green beans, grind & use a French Press or Aeropress.

Downtown & they're run like a bloody commune so service is dubious but they carry good stuff.

AFAIUI, the more you roast the beans beyond a certain point the less the quality of the beans themselves matters- probably why Starbucks does it.

For quick down-scale coffee I use instant 3-in-one packets imported from Vietnam. A cheap fast fix and has a nice amount of bitterness.

Google tells me it's "quadruplo", so you can preempt them.

--sp

--
Best regards,  
Spehro Pefhany

I can't stand Starbucks but Folgers isn't far behind. We use Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.