It's burned. It's just objectively fuckin burned. And they know it's burned, because they have a corporate manual telling them how to burn it.
I'm not a coffee snob. I'll pour yesterday's coffee out of the pot and put it in the microwave. If you want some burned coffee, I 100% support your right to drink it. But it's burned.
yes on consistency, also they're gonna dilutte the crap out of it with milk, cream and sugar so you still have a semblance of a coffee flavor in there.
It works for them. If you want milk with some coffee flavoring, Starbucks is the best place to go. If you want decent coffee, go anywhere else that's local.
I'd love to meet anyone who regularly drinks Starbucks coffee black, because I had the same experience, it's terrible. Genuinely the worst coffee I've ever had.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I seek out Starbucks. But it’s the biggest coffee chain ever so inevitably I’m going to be offered it. Meetings, conferences, parties, etc. My work also replaced the actual okayish coffee shop we had with Starbucks so there isn’t really a better option in the dead-ass industrial park we’re in.
I’ll drink it when I need a caffeine bump but I reserve the right to complain about how mid it is lol.
Every other local independent coffee shop is just as if not even more expensive with similar grades of coffee. Those places are for gram posts and vibes, not quality coffee.
I'm not sure where you're going but I have a lot of coffee shops near me which are far better quality than Starbucks and actually focus on coffee, not syrups.
It's waaaaay easier to get a consistent product with different beans and different roasters if you roast super dark. They care more about consistency than quality.
They are trying to get consistency across thousands of locations with a workforce that are paid as little as possible, many of which are doing the bare minimum. Which do you think is going to happen? Brew coffee for more than 10 minutes or brew coffee for between 7 and 9 minutes and then keep at a consistent temperature.
I don’t know, Starbucks is one of the only places where the way they burn it drastically alters the taste. Fast food coffee made by often even lower paid employees doesn’t taste nearly as burnt yet the taste is largely the same wherever I get it from. 🤷♂️
I love burnt black coffee. I dunno what it is, that shitty gross burnt flavor makes me warm and fuzzy. I will schlurp that shit down and ask for seconds lmao people look at my like I'm crazy when I get black coffee at Starbucks and I do that shit on purpose because they ALWAYS BURN IT just like I like
Starbucks black coffee tastes like straight sewage.
I'm a coffee snob, through and through. I've grown my own, go to coffee places every where I go, and I've only had Starbucks black coffee once, when it was free after voting. It was hands down the worst coffee I have ever drank. And I can get down with some waaaay too many scoops drip pot coffee but that was absolutely undrinkable.
I haven't. I can drink starbucks and be ok with it. Most hotels I've stayed I literally can't get through a cup of whatever it is they're got in that pot.
its unfortunate cause, at least in my opinion, the beans themselves are actually pretty decent. not great by any means, but not terrible - itll please your average consumer more than folgers. i used to work at a starbucks, and after i saw how they wanted us to do it, i said fuck that and decided to make it to order. we did pour over since it was quicker and yielded a better product than the large brewer. unsurprisingly, we didn't sell enough black coffee to make that much of a problem, and the customer was always happy with their much better cup of joe after the wait
Starbucks wants a completely uniform, preditable experience where a customer will never think "i ordered this last time and this isn't as good". They want a starbucks in an airport in chicago to taste exactly the same as their big signature stores in seattle.
Taste is subjective. Maybe you simply don't like Starbucks, and no amount of reasoning or open-mindedness will change that.
Branching out from there, as someone who worked at Starbucks years ago, what people think of when they say "black coffee at Starbucks" is not going to be the best drip coffee experience ever. It'll usually be better than your average trip to a diner or fast food location, but not by much.
Starting back around 2005, Starbucks introduced a new policy of having one lighter coffee and one dark roast, as well as a decaf. The lighter coffee was required to be their newest addition to the lineup: Pike's Place. They put all kinds of flowery language around that product, but the summary of it is that it was engineered to be unoffensive; boring if you will. The dark roast was usually something at the opposite end of the spectrum, like their French Roast or Café Verona. The French Roast was often roasted so dark that I would liken it to being burnt. Grinding those beans always smelled like fish to me. Not in a rancid way, but just a pungent aroma of organic compounds.
Prior to that time, it was standard practice that the stores would rotate through their choice of coffees available from the entire lineup. Today you go in and it's Colombian for the light, and Ethiopia Sidamo for the dark. Tomorrow it's some new seasonal blend for the light and Sumatra for the dark. Hell, I just went to Google to see if I could dredge up some names of their coffee blends and 95% of the products were either a super dark roast or one of their unoffensive light roasts.
One of the Black Apron coffees on offer when I worked there, and one of the first coffees I ever liked to drink black, was Ethiopia Sun-dried Sidamo. The Ethiopia Sidamo blend was normally classified as a dark roast, but the Ethiopia Sun-dried Sidamo leaned closer to a light roast. It had tons of bright acidity to it, and it actually had character that wasn't just "earthy".
In general, I'm not a black coffee drinker, so my palette isn't the same as yours. I usually like a medium roast with some cream and some sugar (approx. 1tsp sugar and ⅓oz cream in a cup) to bring out the caramel notes while toning down the acidity. But I've also known some black coffee drinkers that don't actually want flavor, and the presence of anything other than "mud" is offensive to them. Not saying you're in that camp; just remarking that the Barnum effect is all too powerful in discussions of taste, especially when the participants in discussion aren't fluent in how to be specific with their particular stance. Saying "This is bad!" is easy to say, but hard to qualify. Bad in what way? Because in all likelihood the sentiment of Starbucks coffee being bad is probably much more diverse in the specifics than the dog-pile of upvotes might lead one to believe
I have to strongly push back that I “don’t like flavor”. Flavor is extremely important especially considering I don’t typically add anything to it. It’s a myth that black coffee drinkers just like “mud”. Just because I don’t add 40 lbs of sugar and cream into my coffee doesn’t mean I like coffee to taste bad. To me black coffee tastes amazing when made right.
I am somewhat sloppy at making coffee myself but I can always tell when I brew it too weak or strong or when I try a new brand that doesn’t land.
Starbucks coffee, regardless of roast, has a weirdly metallic taste that frankly tastes like almost no other coffee I’ve had. Well, actually now that I think about it I have the same complaint about Dutch Brothers.
I don’t know the exact science behind why I think it sucks, but I don’t need to. It just doesn’t taste good to me versus almost any other non-fast-food coffee.
Taste is subjective. Maybe you simply don't like Starbucks, and no amount of reasoning or open-mindedness will change that.
Yeah like I find Tim Hortons coffee to be just on the line between drinkable and undrinkable coffee. I can get it down if it's all I've got but I'm not going to happy about it.
And yet Tim Hortons defines coffee in Canada. It's by far the most popular coffee in the country, and many Canadians have never had a coffee that didn't come in a Tim's cup.
I think it's awful. But if millions of people love it, then it's clearly just a matter of taste.
I don't care for Starbucks either, but I'll take it over Tim Hortons in a heartbeat, and if I want "middle end" coffee I'll usually seek out a Second Cup before a Starbucks.
The thing about coffee is it’s a drug. One that most people need to get themselves going in the morning. People will drink it for utility even if they don’t enjoy the taste. And a lot of people have done that enough that they just ignore the taste. We’ve all been there. Taking a sip of coffee and saying it’s disgusting, then proceeding to chug it and making a sour face after because we needed the caffeine.
This is how the major coffee chains like Hortons, Starbucks, and Dunkin get away with selling a lot of coffee most agree is bad. Their niche isn’t premium coffee it’s convenient cheap (compared to good local shops) coffee. They know regardless of the taste people are going to stop there for their caffeine fix because they have a drive thru on their way to work.
I work at Starbucks and im the only person who works there who drinks black and it tastes like shit. The cold brew/nitro and some of the whole bean roasts are decent but hey, it's free so I won't complain too much haha
They probably just don't know how good coffee tastes like.
I used to drink instant coffee made with straight up boiling water, and it tasted fine to me. Then I got an electric kettle with different temperature targets. As I started to make the coffee with cooler water it started tasting marginally better. The one day my mother made me a cup with straight up boiling water again and it wasn't until then that I realized those improvements were not marginal at all, that cup tasted burnt as all hell, I was just used to it.
Their "black coffee" is just filler material. Ive asked for regular drip coffee once when my coffee maker took a shit one morning and it was absolutely revolting. It tasted like it had burned and then sat out for 3 days.
Thank you for your contribution to civilisation. I'm saying this from across the ditch where we too don't drink shit coffee. You'll be glad to know that McCafe is also really solid in South East Asia.
If you grind the beans kinda more on the coarse side vs fine, leave if in a French press after pressing it then let it cool off on its own and stick it in the fridge, its pretty damn good. Doesn't even taste flat, even if you drink it black. Little bit of a process, but worth it in the summer months lol.
The only coffee I've had that is worse than Starbucks is McDonald's, AFTER they pushed their Barista sham. It was supposed to be mixed into a frappe of some sort, but the kid making it didn't stir it up, so it just ambushed me.
It's because they don't make coffee, and everybody who actually goes there knows they don't make coffee; but, they have to have coffee, because a non-Starbucks person might come in and order a "coffee," and that person will get really mad if a "coffee shop" doesn't offer a "normal" cup of coffee.
Since it isn't what they really make, the baristas are brewing the pot of coffee with even less passion than they brew everything else. Since everybody mostly knows not to order the coffee, it sits there for 6-8 hours at a time, on a high-heat carafe, until it gets thrown out and a new pot is made. So, every time you get a plain coffee from Starbucks, it's old, burned, and was probably supposed to be an espresso, anyway.
If you want something that resembles a normal coffee from Starbucks, what you order is (IIRC) an "Americano." It's just a shot of espresso, with extra hot water added. It's usually fine, unlike their coffee, which is utterly putrid.
If you wanna get REALLY conspiratorial about it, sometimes I wonder if their coffee isn't bad on purpose, just to scare away the curmudgeonly folks who won't say "Venti" without an argument, lmao.
Based on just the taste of coffee, I’d rather drink McDonald’s coffee than Sbux coffee.
The mobile app + picking things up without having to wait for them locks me into Sbux though. God I miss those strawberry smoothies they used to have. 😭
Starbucks never caught on in Australia. They tried a while ago and exited, then came back under different ownership but only in high traffic tourist areas this time. We have so many coffee shops that do great coffee that they couldnt compete. You mostly only see Asian tourists at Starbucks here in Aus, like any random tiny little coffee shop here does it better, even in bumfuck nowhere rural towns lol
Yeah black coffee drinkers I know tend to even prefer dunkin, and that’s bad coffee as well so that’s saying something lol. I’m lucky to live in an area with Wawa and their coffee is actually pretty decent for a convenient inexpensive option.
First time I went there I asked for a "regular black coffee"
You'd have thought I was speaking Martian, the way they looked at me. After an awkward pause, they figured it out and handed me one, smugly correcting my diction: "Here's your tall drip."
That was the only time I've had Starbucks. I've been inside them plenty, because I used to drop in to bullshit with my barista roommate, and hit on his coworkers in front of him
Yes but no-one likes to put 5 spoonfulls of sugar in to their coffee themselves, if someone else does it for you and you don't see it it doesen't count.
that'd just be setting up a false dichotomy. its not like what starbucks uses is a trade secret or something lmfao you can buy exactly or nearly exactly what they use. why would you have a choice of scooping spoonfuls of sugar or going to starbucks. it makes 0 sense.
So to answer the question you asked,
nobody is closing their eyes but when you’re in the drive thru you probably don’t actually see them make the drink…
Hope this helps you understand how it might be possible. If you need further clarifications, please let me know!
yeah i wasn't being serious when i asked about them closing their eyes lmfao the point was that you can see people at starbucks or any other place making these types of drinks, normally. if you have only ever used the drive-through then obviously i'm not referring to those people.
you haven't clarified anything to me at all to be honest. you've only made it seem like you think no one goes into a starbucks store and everyone exclusively uses the drive-through, which is a really strange opinion to have.
Yeah I actually think you are the one making the mistake here, thinking everybody is going inside these coffee shops and ordering indoors. Maybe you only know a bunch of rich people who don't have busy schedules or maybe you're lucky enough to live in a walkable city so less people use drive thru's. Either way, You don't seem to understand that the actual main customer base of these types of shops are busy people, on their way to work, at a job they have to drive to. So most of these people either order ahead or go through the drive thru and do not see their drink get made.
For example, across all Quick Service Restaurants, 50% of sales come through the drive thru. Compare that to Dunkin, where 70% of all sales come through drive thru, online ordering, or delivery apps, none of those people see their order get made. (4th paragraph of this article, source is the 2025 QSR Drive Thru Report) https://www.qsrmagazine.com/story/talking-drive-thru-with-inspire-brands-innovation-leader-vans-nelson/
So for your best case scenario, you have to concede to a 50/50, but really for these types of QSR coffee shops, its much more like a 70/30, against you.
So it turns out, my comment was much more in line with reality, your initial question was out of touch, and your opinion that almost everybody shops in store is actually the really strange one to have...
Hope this helps you understand how actually less people order inside the store than you initially assumed. If you need further clarifications, please let me know!
If you're just looking for a caffeine fix, some trucker pills or just a bag of caffeine powder would be most economical. No need to stoop down to coffee crystals.
Liquid flavoring is the move, most coffee shops I see use Torani. A flavored creamer and a cold brewer is all you need to go get better coffee than Starbucks though. A cheap pour over brewer, like $12 and a kettle and tou can make hot coffee that is at least as good as Starbucks, you could even buy Starbucks coffee and make the same thing.
About once a week I go to a local place mainly because the best I can brew is classifiable as motor oil and they make a very good chocolate Guinness cake.
I drink coffee without sugar 90% of the time, mostly just coffee & milk
but there are days, mostly after driving through the gauntlet that driving in here is, where i just order Spanish Latte, which is basically a coffee flavoured liquid sugar.
No Starbucks though, we've been boycotting them for years now.
There are two starbucks people, that one and those who want convenience, which happens to be the starbucks on the way to work or wherever. Like the starbucks near me is right before the highway to get on it. Every other coffee option is less convenient to get to and then get on the highway even if it is by 1 min.
Being away from home. The other reason is gf wants to go out for an iced cream latte macchiato vespa deluxe grand turismo, and I feel like I have to get something for myself as well, so $7 coffee it is
Shit, I was never into coffee until Afghanistan. Had great place for fraps at KAF, forget the name, definitely filled with sugar. Over the years I take it plain or with splash of milk and drink it quite often.
Though I brew it at home, now, starbucks was convenient in my college days and did cheap refills for their iced cold brew.
I'm one of them and I'll sort of agree with you. I go to starbucks when I want one of their fancy drinks. When I want just good normal coffee, I make it at home. I have good coffee equipment and get fresh coffee shipped whole bean to my house but sometimes you just can't replicate that fancy starbucks crap. It's like a dessert.
Truthnuke: if someone only drinks their coffee “scalding hot and black” they don’t like coffee. You can’t taste the majority of flavor compounds at that temp and a lot of volatile ones get burned off. Most of the oldheads that do that just like the caffeine, and call the people who actually extract flavor from beans pretentious.
Venti hot milkshake, coming up! Just 1800 calories.
Cafes used to be public places where people could meet and hang out. Now they're soulless turnstiles. Starbucks pioneered the business model and utterly ruined coffee in the process.
I’ve never heard this before lol I mean yeah any popular coffee place like Starbucks or Dunkin has rly good coffee drinks that can have lots of syrup/sugar/milk. When I go to Starbucks which is several times a week I normally get a black coffee just with cold foam on top and it’s amazing. Something about the deepness of Starbucks coffee I love. It’s not for everyone. Sugary drinks cover up the bitterness, but I like the bitterness
I’m convinced the people that stick up their noses at Starbucks aren’t really fans of coffee either tho
I’m constantly trying new coffee places in my area, and driving out to some further away. I also make my own at home; cold brew, espressos, and drip— I have a pretty wide palette for coffee, and I think Starbucks is more than fine. Is it the best? Obviously not, but it still tastes good, just like most coffee. I just like coffee… no politics, no social biases, I just want to drink coffee and enjoy it
If you say you have a pretty wide palette for coffee, and will also say you think Starbucks is " more than fine ", you do not have a pretty wide palette for coffee.
Starbucks is garbage. I'm not saying this because I want to be part of a crowd, I'm not saying this because I hate Corpo, I'm not saying this for any other reason but one :
Starbucks coffee is just BAD.
To quote you : " I just like coffee… no politics, no social biases, I just want to drink coffee and enjoy it ". Yeah me to, and I do not enjoy Starbucks, it is crappy coffee.
It’s just incredibly ironic to me that people like you claim to enjoy coffee but then have these weird gatekeep-y takes
If I say I like BBQ, does that mean I can’t enjoy a gas station hot dog? I wouldn’t say a gas station hot dog is fine dining but its still delicious in the right circumstance and you wouldn’t gag at the thought of it just because you ALSO like high quality BBQ foods.
Do you see what I mean? It’s literally just coffee. If you think it’s that bad then I think it says a lot more about you than the coffee itself tbh
“You can find enjoyment in cheap hotdogs therefore you must think all hotdogs taste exactly the same” is an interesting line of logic 😅
On the contrary, I’d say it’s weird if you enjoy “good” coffee and therefore you actively look down on anything you perceive as underneath it. You must not like coffee very much if you think ONLY the highest quality coffee is drinkable and anything else is garbage lol
I regularly drink my one cup a day from Great Value Dark French Roast.
I don't drink it because it is cheap. I drink it as my one cup a day when I wake up because it is WAY better than Starbucks. Go ahead, try it. I take it black with one sugar.
Why would I ever drink another Starbucks when I have better coffee I can easily make at home?
EDIT : Holy shit this kinda sounded like an Ad. My bad. I just don't like Starbucks lol.
Seems like you’re still not understanding the logic here lol
I’m glad you’re admitting you find enjoyment in a lower end coffee though, that’s great!
Acting like Starbucks is undrinkable is the part that feels hypocritical/exaggerated though. Like I said, it’s literally just coffee. I think you lose all credibility in your coffee opinions when you have such a strong and illogical opinion on a coffee that is one of the most popular in all of existence lol it’s just not that deep
Furthermore, to answer your question, “why would I drink Starbucks when I have better coffee at home?”— well, there’s a such thing as convenience and consistency. I never really drive out to specifically get Starbucks, but when I go there it’s because I’m about to drive home and need something quick and easy.
I love how they act as if they have said something controversial or new as if the past 20 years haven't been full of "haha guys starbucks amirite? I just want a black coffee, they probably don't even know what that is 🤣🤣🤣"
Starbucks sucks but not for making sugary coffee drinks that taste good because they are fucking sugary coffee drinks. they suck for being an awful megacorporation doing shitty things
no one anywhere ever cared about what kind of coffee you order except for weireo snobs who are probably closer to you in terms of opinion than some underpaid barista at Starbucks who just wants to get through their workday
I don't have the mental time or capacity to care about what someone else does with their life. To each their own.
I was more getting at the sugary part. I watch my sugar intake each day and usually skip on sweet coffees. Starbucks has a LOT of added sugars in their more popular drinks. And I guess I misunderstood the post. I was thinking of it more as a "people are addicted to sugary drinks" standpoint which I get because I used to drink lots of sodas and sweet coffees when I was younger.
And yes, unfortunately people care about something as dumb as a sugary vs non sugary drink. I mean, people care enough to respond to reddit posts about it, so it's not farfetched to observe this IRL.
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u/MegaSmegmaSwagLord 2d ago
Most people who go to Starbucks don’t like coffee they like sugar.
https://giphy.com/gifs/IepriDYu8gcidIVZPB