Time together — alone

Over on Coffee Geek, Chris Pluger explores the existential meaning of why we go to coffee shops to sit with a bunch of people we don’t speak to, in “Two Hours of Joint Solitude“.

Eric Clapton is jamming away on the guitar solo of Layla. The windows look out on a parking lot, which looks out on a major through street. People who had to work late on a Friday night are bustling past in their cars on the way home. There are eight other customers and two employees behind the bar. There are two college girls studying. One guy sitting by himself, trying to flirt with one of the girls. Another guy in a corner and wearing his heart on his sleeve, and a third doing paperwork and talking on a cell phone. Three middle-aged ladies are clustered together, talking about real estate and home improvements and the gazebo that one had built in her back yard. Then there’s me.

Me, I suspect that sometimes you’ve got to be reassured that life is going on, even if it’s ignoring you at the moment (or vice versa).

Starbucks Fair Trade Challenge

October is Fair Trade Month 2005, and “GreenLAGirl” has put together a “Starbucks Challenge” to see just how serious your local Starbucks outlet is about their published commitment to produce Fair Trade coffee on demand for anyone who asks for it.

“According to its own policy (PDF), Starbucks will make fair trade coffee for you, any day of the week, in the 23 countries it is licensed to including: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the U.K. and the U.S.

But just how easy is it to get a fair trade coffee in a Starbucks in one of those countries?

We aim to find out.

Join the challenge:

1) Simply visit your local Starbucks and ask: “Could I get a cup of fair trade coffee?”

2) Tell us what happened next. Was it hard or easy to get a cup? You can see our first posts here.”

Bloggers can report their results by tagging their posts on del.icio.us with the tag “starbuckschallenge”; non-bloggers can find e-mail instructions here.

It sounds like fun, it’s for a worthy cause, and there’s even a prize.

I don’t have a lot of excuses to go into Starbucks anymore, but this seems like a great reason to make an exception. Apparently you’ve got to be rather insistent if it doesn’t happen to be their coffee of the day/week, but if you insist they should offer to make you a cup via French Press, which is liable to be better than their normal drip brew anyway.

Pumpkin Spice Latte Profits

According to Starbucks Gossip, our favorite purveyors of overroasted coffee are making money hand over fist with their new “Pumpkin Spice Latte” fall drink.

In the four-week period ended Oct. 31, the company’s comparable-store sales grew by 11% over the same period last year — thanks, in part, to the pumpkin drink.

Now if they’d just get over calling this stuff coffee, everything would be grand

If you must, however, the folks at Starbucks Gossip also included a link to a knockoff drink recipe you can make at home, or you could just get some pumpkin spice syrup at your favorite vendor — either way, you’ll save a few bucks per fix…

Escher & Starbucks…

Man, I have nightmares like this some nights…

Starbucks Barista Burr Grinder (Solis 166) Review

It’s no real surprise that when people “step up” from blade grinders and poorly built home-store grinders, they often end up with a Starbucks grinder. Starbucks is omnipresent in most parts of the US, and although I’m ever more disenchanted with their coffee, they do sell some quite nice equipment.

The Starbucks Barista Burr Grinder is essentially a rebranded version of the Solis 166 Conical Burr Grinder. Solis is a well-known manufacturer of coffee and espresso equipment, and they make a nice grinder, particularly if you’re more interested in drip brew or press-pot brewing than high-end espresso. Solis has updated this grinder slightly in their own line, and market the updated version as the Solis Maestro (pictured above).

I spent about 6 months with the Barista Burr Grinder and was in general quite pleased with it.
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Sending for backup

With the Barista Aroma on injured reserve, it’s a critical issue to get a backup brewer in here stat — it’s not like I’m going to get much work done this week without coffee…

At least it will give me the opportunity to do a new review or two…

So much for Starbucks

Well, I managed to break my Starbucks’ Barista Aroma.

The “pour” button on the thermal carafe (which never went down terribly far anyway, making pouring a relatively slow experience) gave up the ghost; the top of the carafe lid came away from the bottom, and as a result, the button lost all of the spring tension.

Since this also causes the “carafe is in place” button to not stick up properly, the whole thing announced itself early this morning by the coffee maker determining that the carafe was not in place, filling the grounds basket with hot water, and then proceeding to flood the kitchen counter with hot water and coffee grounds…

Grrrr…
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Today’s Coffee Is Tomorrow’s Debt

This just in — Starbucks is expensive, and buying on credit is even more expensive…

There’s a shocker, eh?

It must have been a slow newsday, but the Washington Post has an article on how college students are in debt, and still buying lattes…

To quantify the craziness, Lim distributes coffee-consumption charts. One shows that a five-day-a-week $3 latte habit on borrowed money can cost $4,154, when repaid over 10 years. She also directs students to a Web site she helped create.

The whole point being that it’d be much cheaper to make their own coffee in the dorm.

Of course, that’s assuming that they don’t go nuts on exotic blends, decent grinders, espresso machines, home roasting, etc…

So what’s next? An article about how it’d be cheaper for fraternities to brew their own beer for weekend blowouts?

My daddy had a much simpler way of putting it — if you don’t have the cash to buy something without borrowing, you can’t afford it.

He was right, of course — not that I was listening back in the day, mind you.

Somebody has to drink the Folgers

bread coffee chocolate yoga has a great post on getting involved in an coffee “taste-test” for ABC’s 20/20.

Not surprisingly, it was quickly apparent that this was going to be one of hit-and-run “people pay too much for coffee” pieces.

stossel immediately started in with the slant: he read the prices of the different coffees and encouraged audience reaction at the “high” prices. “US$12 a pound!” he exclaimed. “can you believe it? that’s what the dean & deluca costs!”

i managed not to interject that i would happily pay much more for a beautiful cup of excellence or kona coffee.

So, after the coffee was all (incorrectly) brewed and the “tasting” done, the slant was “grocery store coffee is just as good and a lot cheaper.”

No surprises there… Maybe it’s even a good thing — after all, somebody has to drink the Folgers.

I drank Folgers for years, until I slowly came to understand the difference between good coffee and bad, and wanted coffee I could taste and enjoy.

Today, your average grocery store coffee (and really, most restaurant coffees, etc.) seem tasteless, bitter and thin to me. I still drink them when they’re the only thing around, but they’re subsitance coffees.

Likewise, Starbucks tastes bad to me too, but I’ll still drink that if I end up there with friends, etc.

Any coffee is better than no coffee.

Most people will never hassle with finding good roasts, grinding their own beans, investing in a good brewer, etc. Let them drink what they want to drink, and let it go.

But don’t suggest that good coffee isn’t worth the money. If someone is willing to pay the money for Starbucks, or a bag of Kona, or a high end espresso press, then that means it is worth exactly that much, to them.

Indie Coffee Finder

Delocator promises to find you a cup of coffee in your area that’s NOT the same ol’ grande by the same ol’ earthtones & mermaid crowd.

A nice idea, except that a) they seem to be determined to use popups (come on, folks — do you really want to make IE users that haven’t installed updates your primary audience?) and b) they only find 1 indie coffee shop in my area (which granted, isn’t the left coast, but still has more than a few), and by “my area” they mean 15 miles in traffic across town.
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