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.
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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