Okay this is the obligatory coffee house post. Starbucks is betting its customers can’t tell fresh brewed from instant. Choose X or Y — the two are separated by gender apparently. Results could prove V, their space-age “VIA” instant product improves on Folgers, or W, their customers can’t tell good coffee from WORSE. I tried it.
Starbucks gave itself a break by putting its VIA instant, specially priced at $2.99 for three doses, against its ordinary brew, no Sidamo or Yirgacheffe for comparison. It’s probably the base they have stewing on the BUNN to caffeinate all their products. I couldn’t tell that from truck stop coffee. Good luck differentiating from that.
If Starbucks has set out to prove what Folgers never could, it’s proved what we already suspected. Starbucks has a lock on the best beans in the world, but its customers have been gorging themselves on the caramel whipped creme milkshakes and no longer know espresso from chocolate syrup. VIA will remind them of what coffee used to taste like at Duncan Doughnuts or the Waffle House. Bitter Americana.
There is a substance made from the crushed shells of the coffee bean that is used as a spray or sticky liquid to give instant and old roasted beans a “fresh” brewed taste, and I’m sure a new variant is used in the Starbucks instant stuff. Coffee beans are one of the fastest oxidizing foods you can buy, and if the roasted beans are more than a couple of weeks old, they will taste bad when you brew them. Grinding your beans loses half of the taste within two hours.
My bother-in-law will go down tomorrow and check it out, but not if we have to pay 4 bucks for it, Serrano and High Rise have fresher beans, anyway…
boycott starbuks
I’ve had Starbucks coffee, but always on somebody else’s dime, or more precisely somebody elses $3.95
maybe it that’s 10,000% markup that gets me, if I brew it at home I pay like 4 cents a cup for it.
Unless I buy Starbucks beans then it’s more like 11 cents a cup.
Their WiFi doesn’t suck though.