Monday, September 8

No Surprises.

Ok, so this post is being posted a little later than I’d planned to, which leads me to my first complaint, of many.

I decided to tackle the entity that is Starbucks, for all their wealth and resources they refuse to supply free Wi-Fi to its loyal customers and demands payment!

This really annoys me, lesser known places like Esquires and Central Bean provide free readily available Wi-Fi.

First moan over.

Ok, so I’ll be honest, I know what I was to expect at Starbucks, and do try to avoid it unless I’m stuck at an airport or it’s free, so here enter myself, Seamus, Jess and Ting. First problem, we can only just afford a small latte but somehow manage to scrape £2.05 together. I fiddle around with my amazing new barista accessory-A Macbook- whilst Seamus gets the drink in. I’m gonna leave out the craic Seamus had with the barista on the bar, because there was none to be had, he reported not an unfriendly service but one which wanted only to get the drink out on the bar and nothing else.

Ok, the latte arrives and is put on the table. Oh dear. The mug it was served in was like nothing I’ve seen before in any café or coffee bar, it was chipped, scratched, dirty and just looked unpleasant, this is low, even for a large corporation.

Onto the important bit, the coffee, as you can probably guess it turned out to be a cappuccino, a very dry one at that! It was fairly bubbly, wouldn’t have took too much effort for the barista to hit the jug on the counter but that didn’t happen, so instead we hit the mug on the table we were gathered on.

So the foam wasn’t integrated into the espresso at all and was completely white on top, no sign of a crema at all, no taste at all, other than very hot nearly burnt milk., which keeps going to below halfway.

Coffee. At last.  It’s very weak, dilute and tasteless, I couldn’t tell you at all any of the component flavours, there’s a bit of colour too, but its pale.

Ok so I’d have preferred a peppermint tea, this is indeed a child’s introduction to coffee, no wonder there’s so many syrup variations on drinks in here to give some flavour.

My mouth is left dry and milky, and needing water, to which Seamus points out there’s water for sale at £1.20 a pop, wow! So anyways, I’m going to be fair, and give Starbucks its dues, it was on the scene first in Newcastle and was the only option, but now there are many Thirdwave outlets and it needs to seriously up its game, which I believe it’s trying to do. Apparently according to a friend of mine they’re upgrading all the machines with a paddle controlled steam arm. That’s all I know though. I’ve had better coffee from Starbucks, but only the milk was better, the shots, are obviously consistently boring and tasteless. Ok, so this has been a massive rant, sorry, but its better to get Starbucks out my system and over with!

 

Cheers,

Dane

3 comments:

Seamus McFlurry said...

Good first post. Well, real post anyway. Reviewing the Big Firms is something I've been interested in doing for a while, and when Dane mentioned it over the phone I must admit I got a bit excited.

I agree entirely with Dane that Starbucks has to be given it's full dues. It's a perfect Second Wave café. It's good at what it does, which is to churn out a consistent drink in order to create vast profit. And it's the main reason that better, Third Wave cafés can charge the prices we do.

Hopefully we'll be doing Costa at somepoint as well, which I'm looking forward to. Assuming we have some money by that point...

Seamus.

Dane McGreevy said...

Cheers Seamus, yeh I'll have my card back by then! Was just thinking, I'm going to leave willies to you, I just remembered something lol.

Anonymous said...

Its really good to hear people get their claws into Starbucks for the right reasons! The coffees are terrible, dirty crockery is insane to get in a chain, and the wi-fi thing bothers me as well. Nero also charge a hell of a lot for free wi-fi, most pub chains don't though!

Chris, Common Grind

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