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Why Starbucks Is Bad – The 3 Reasons You Need To Stop Going
September 25, 2017
Have you ever been chatting away with a bunch of friends when someone would say something like,
“Yea but Starbucks sucks, anyway.”
To which the whole group would nod in agreement. I’ve been there plenty of times…
But the thing is, no-one would ever explain why.
It was just assumed that a coffee chain that had over ten million customers every day was actually kinda crappy. So why is Starbucks bad?
Well, the answer is a combination of the taste of its coffee which is generally over-roasted, bitter and stale, but also its corporate practices pushing out the little guy and the way they have shaped coffee shops and their influence.
Oh and by the way,
they make one major error in all their coffee. It saves them loads of money in convenience but is an absolute landmine when making coffee that you should know about for your own home coffee making or even just selecting a good coffee shop.
It ain’t all bad though.
In the interests of fairness I’ll talk about a few of the good things Starbuck’s has done, including the reason why I still even sometimes go there (even if I feel a little guilty haha).
Reason 1: Taste
The major issue with Starbucks is that the coffee tastes bad. The processes used are seen as clearly inferior to anyone who knows the first thing about coffee. Or anyone who has tried a straight espresso from one of their branches.
But at the same time it is an incredibly successful franchise. So, what’s the deal with that?
Well, to summarize,
Starbucks prioritizes a big hit of caffeine over the taste of the coffee. They use stale coffee beans that are burnt to a crisp and hide it all with a dazzling selection of drinks that are loaded with sugar, cream and other sweet and high-calorie embellishments.
The thing is… when people crave a tasty, sweet, big hit of caffeine and they know what they’re getting from any of the thousands of stores across the country then you have a recipe for success.
Can you blame them?
And if you’re interested in a professional’s opinion then check out the 30 seconds of this video.
The way I see it, the poor standard of their actual coffee is overlooked because people don’t have a great understanding of what good coffee tastes like. Let’s look at why.
The Coffee Beans They Use Are Stale
Here’s the biggest problem with the taste of Starbucks coffee:
it’s all stale. In other words, they are using beans that have been roasted ages ago.
It’s difficult to find much actual evidence for how fresh Starbucks coffee is because they don’t give any information on it – a bad sign in itself.
For reference,
coffee goes stale pretty fast. After the roast, you want to be drinking your coffee beans within 30 days and ideally less than 15 or you will notice a serious drop in quality.
I’ve known baristas at great coffee shops that only brew beans that are between a specific post-roast window of a few days.
Any online or local roaster worth his salt will have the roasting date on the bag of coffee beans so you know its fresh.
I’m always telling people that it’s not even difficult to make better coffee at home than the coffee you get at Starbucks and other big name coffee places.
If you like the idea of making delicious coffee each morning for a fraction of the price of buying it out somewhere, then you’re in the right place.
You just have to realize there’s one thing you’ve got to take care of, the issue is that no-one outside of enthusiast coffee circles ever talks about it.
So much so I decided to write an in-depth article explaining all about it,
click here to read it.
Seriously, if you only ever read one thing about coffee brewing, make it that.
They look pretty, but how fresh are they?
Let’s look at the evidence we can find then.
The first point is that there is no roasting date on the coffee beans they sell. This comes in useful when your priority is the mass production, commoditization, and selling of coffee beans. Not the taste.
Not giving a roast date means you can sell coffee beans without any time pressures. The logistics become easier and you don’t lose money when you have to throw out batches of old beans.
Here’s an online thread with a few people who give some insight.
To save you a click, one guy was looking for fresh beans and had no other option so gave his local SB’s a call. They told him:
“the freshest beans they have are just over a month old”
“She said they get their deliveries but nothing is ever that fresh”
And from someone else:
“I used to work there and never saw anything come in fresher than 2 months.”
And probably the biggest piece of evidence is the taste of a Starbucks espresso. Try one with nothing else in it. It just doesn’t taste fresh.
Do you know anyone who orders straight espresso when they go to SB’s? No, me neither.
They Over-Roast Their Coffee Beans
Starbucks tends to use a dark roast with their coffee beans.
Roasting is the process of turning the green beans you get from the
Coffea plant into the brown coffee beans that are suitable for brewing.
The longer you cook ’em, the darker they get.
Dark roasting coffee produces a taste that in some ways is appealing. It’s burnt, charred, smoky. A taste many have come to associate with coffee.
The problem is that this process of cooking the beans to within an inch of their life destroys the rich tapestry of floral, fruity and earthy flavors that are inherent to each coffee bean.
No-one has walked away from a Starbucks commenting on the wonderful floral and blueberry notes in their Latte but that’s what coffee is supposed to taste like.
Lightly roasted coffee is a trip down the rabbit hole in terms of spicy, fruity, nutty and flowery notes that light up your senses and enrich your taste buds.
Dark roasted coffee removes the major regional and seasonal differences between coffee beans and
leaves your coffee all tasting the same.
Why do they do this? Well, it’s very easy to scale. It’s simple to create a uniform taste by roasting the heck out of your coffee beans. It’s consistent, reliable and cheap.
This over-roasting of the beans is the reason why in some circles, the
charred texture of their coffee has given them the moniker
Charbucks.
The Over-Reliance On Sugar, Milk And Cream
So if the coffee beans that are used are stale and burnt, why do people still go there? It’s because the focus is on selling sugary coffee-flavored treats rather than high-quality coffee.
People don’t walk out of Starbucks with
americanos, espressos and ristrettos.
They walk out with lattes, frappuccinos, and mochas. They even invented a drink loaded with caramel and milk and stole the name from an Italian favorite. Yes, the macchiato is actually something completely different in Italy!
Such is the depths to which they have sunk, these days Starbucks is more known for atrocities like the ones on the right here.
Annoyingly successful atrocities, I might add.
I must mention a personal anecdote here. I’m a huge fan of iced coffee. A black cold brew or a pour over poured into a glass full of ice and guzzled down on a summer’s day is one of my all-time favorite small-things-that-make-you-happy.
I once wanted to get the experience at a Starbucks. I was in a foreign country and there was nowhere else nearby. Sorry.
So I ordered an iced Americano with no milk. That’s a decent bet, right?
Wrong! I have never had a more obnoxiously bitter coffee in my whole life.
It was awful…
I thought about taking it back until I realized that I got exactly what I asked for and exactly what I deserved. I drank it down anyway just for the caffeine, almost retching at every sip. A good lesson, in any case.
There’s only one thing I’ll order these days, I mentioned above I think, but I’ll get to that in a second.
Reason 2: The Corporation
Starbucks has over 11,000 stores across the US, many more across the world and as you’d expect they do an absolute boatload of business. Starbucks moves in, local stores get put out of business.
It’s the same story with any corporation that has a huge amount of success. That success translates to impact on local businesses and communities.
It’s turned every high street up and down the country into a terminal procession of stores of the same 5-10 mega-corporations.
A counterargument – and a pretty good one, I think – is that the existence of one mega-brand that dominated the espresso coffee landscape forced small business owners and entrepreneurs to innovate and carve out a niche where they could thrive.
That niche became the ethically sourced, artisanal approach to coffee that resulted in the Third Wave of coffee and a lot of great cafes and roasters springing up and being able to compete.
I bet there’s even a really good coffee roaster near you!
And this section is much more subjective. Is it really wrong to criticize success?
My personal view is that you can’t be too upset about there being one or three big companies that have thousands of coffee stores across the country.
If it wasn’t this one some other would fill the gap. It’s just a shame that a lot of good, local coffee houses and roasters closed their doors as a result of not being able to compete with the bulk buying, bulk processing and convenience and ubiquity of the Starbucks that moved in down the road.
Classy stylistic choice or tasteless decoration?
Reason 3: It Has Changed What Is Expected About Coffee
Such is the ubiquity of the company, Starbucks has played a big role in changing what is expected of coffee. Here are a couple of the more pernicious examples.
Downplaying The Skill Of The Barista
Making nice espresso is tough. The high-heat and high-pressure conditions that the very finely ground coffee is subjected to leaves no room for error.
As such, the making of espresso became something of an art. The lattes and cappuccinos the canvas, the barista the artist.
Starbucks introduced and now use superautomatic espresso machines. Huge beasts with six group heads capable of delivering hundreds of shots every hour.
These superautomatics reduce the barista’s role from tamping, adjusting, tasting, checking, dialing the espresso in and whatever else to simply pressing a button. Any issues with the quality of espresso are masked with the mountains of milk and sugar applied by the milkshake maker.
Sorry, Starbucks barista!
Prioritizing Caffeine Over Taste
Walk into any SB’s and you know you can get a whopping 20oz monster filled with caffeine, sugar, milk and all that good stuff. It’ll have a nice coffee flavor and enough caffeine to make even the most miserable of cubicle monkeys awake and alert for a meeting or two.
And to be honest, that’s enough for a lot of people. But it’s not
good coffee and given their success it misrepresents what coffee is and how good it can be.
When people ask for coffee they’ll more likely say they like it
strong rather than
tasty,
big rather than
bright,
perky instead of
dripping with gorgeous notes of lemon and a delicate acidity that just shines on the tongue.
Bigger and more caffeinated is considered good coffee, it seems.
Go to Italy and cappuccinos don’t have a size. This idea of Tall, Grande, Venti (1,2,3 shots of espresso or 2,3,4 shots in an americano) – is totally artificial.
It doesn’t matter because Starbucks coffee is simply a vehicle for a lightning bolt of caffeine that lessens the Tuesday morning hangover.
(Nothing wrong with being hungover on a Tuesday, of course.)
Great espresso doesn’t taste bitter. It doesn’t taste bad. It doesn’t
need gallons of sugar and milk to make it taste nice. And I don’t think a lot of people realize this.
Wrecking The Image Of Italian Coffee
Starbucks was one of the key instruments in popularizing espresso and Italian-style coffee in the US. But along the way, it misrepresented a few things.
1. Caffe Macchiato. Possibly the most egregious example is its invention of the macchiato. An Italian macchiato is an espresso shot with a drop of milk to soften the taste.
It’s a lovely, delicate tasting drink. Starbucks macchiato is little more than a caramel milkshake.
This is what a macchiato should look like.
2. Espresso tastes bad. This is probably the third time I’ve mentioned this but I’ll say it again.
Espresso can and should taste great.
Strong, yes, but not bitter and not roasted to a crisp. Unfortunately, that’s what people seem to expect from espresso these days.
So Why Is Starbucks So Popular?
In many ways, Starbucks is a product of its time. It’s hard to imagine a similar company making such a splash in 2018.
It began in the 70s as one of the first few chains to offer exotic Italian coffee in an economy that was booming.
People loved the idea of getting custom-made coffee in all these different styles rather than the brown sludge they were used to from the diner down the road.
It grew and grew and as it became larger it chanced upon on another benefit: convenience combined with ubiquity. Starbucks is everywhere.
Anywhere in the US you’re never farther than a few miles from one and even abroad it’s hard to not run into them in any busy urban area.
It’s the same with McDonald’s or with Subway. You want an easy burger, sandwich or coffee then you know where to go.
You can rely on seeing the green mermaid sign to guide you into a place with ambient music, nice seating, wifi, snacks and the same coffee you can get everywhere else.
Who among us hasn’t been feeling weary on a trip and gone for the easy SB’s rather than the risk of a local coffee shop?
It is not popular without cause, and to stress the point a little more I’m going to take a few seconds to defend the company and show the other side of the argument… Only fair given how long I’ve spent writing about why Starbucks sucks!
