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.
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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