I did take note of your comment that you don’t make your own coffee, but that has been my solution to this problem. I agree – there’s often far too much milk, and not enough umph in coffee. I use Gevalia in a french press and if I need mocha, then it gets a little squirt of Hershey’s extra dark choco syrup. The other bonus to making my own is there is an ample supply of Kaluha and Bailey’s at my house, neither of which I can get out at any of the places we’ve mentioned.
If I’m on a road trip or something, I’ll take whatever I can get to get caffeine, grimacing and bitching the entire time I’m drinking my substandard, burnt, tastes-like-ass coffee. Hey, it beats a kick in the head.
Well, not exactly, although it did occur to me (5 minutes and 1 second after I hit enter) that my post may sound douchy. Can you get Coke at Starbucks?
If you go to Sonic you can tell them you want a chocolate/cherry/coke with light ice.
Wait, what? I can understand coffee snobs putting down Starbucks, since their standard fare is overroasted and usually uninteresting, and their espresso drinks are generally mediocre.
I can’t fathom complaining about Starbucks and praising Dunkin. Dunkin’s coffee is drinkable, but it’s bland and thin. The Pike Place Roast as Starbucks is handily better.
I’m sorry, but I have to take the cake here. My order at Starbucks is by far douchier than yours. It completely throws the barista off their game and makes them leave their station and go to another one where they have to work with equipment they don’t touch often and sometimes open specialized containers to fulfil.
At mine they go get a plastic cup, go to the ice machine in the back of the bar, then open a fridge with gallon bottles to pour from. The straws are on the opposite side too. Other Starbucks may be laid out better, but it’s quite the production at the one I occasionally visit.
Does anyone else find that Starbucks finds a way to mess up a simple order surprisingly often? Or is this just for us tea drinkers?
The thing is that they have really good black tea. In fact, it’s hard to find the strong shit I like in the US except for at Starbucks. I usually get “tall awake tea with lots of room.” (I put in a lot of whole milk) It’s just a bag and water in a cup. Easy?
They fill it up all the way and then pour out some of the water. This dilutes my poison.
They put 12 ounces in a grande (16oz) cup instead of 8 ounces in a tall (12oz) cup. (“This way you get more room!”) This dilutes my poison.
They just fill it all the way. Then I proceed to dilute my own poison and drench their garbage so I can drink my poison with milkfat.
Appendix. I don’t need 2 cups and a sleeve thingy. Especially back when there was a staple in the teabag paper which the barrista would inevitably put between the cups so that I couldn’t remove the bag without spilling precious poison all over myself.
In specific, I think it depends on how strongly you taste bitter and/or acidic flavors. I pick them up a lot more strongly than other people seem to, to the point that one of Starbucks’s candy-bar-in-a-cup drinks is still undrinkably bitter and acidic to me. Those aspects are so strong they cover up all the actual, you know, coffee flavors. DD coffee isn’t great, but what you perceive as blandness comes through to me as a refreshing mildness that lets me really taste the coffee.
Quad shot grande caramel sauce latte, light on the caramel sauce.
I sort of hate myself sometimes for being the sort of douche who asks for - nay, demands (I’ll return it if it isn’t done right) - a complex, foo-foo Starbucks confection.
But there you go. I like it, it’s an occasional indulgence, I can live with being a douchebag sometimes.
I also am picky about the coffee I buy for home use - Starbucks Sumatra, or from Peace Coffee or Freeds. Dunkin Donuts and Tim Hortons…ewww.
I don’t like drinking coffee away from home, mrAru makes it exactly the way I like it, with coffee that tastes good. Starcrap has burnt weak nasty shit brown water they call coffee. Everywhere else they want to put lots of nasty crap in it and pretty much anything is jaw-wrenchingly sweet.
I may not be able to drink coffee any more [gives me heart palpitations and hypers my BP up too high] but stash makes a decaf chai that is amazing when turned into a hot or cold chai latte. And i can use splenda in it. Chai lattes out in the world seem to always have way too much sugar in the syrup.
I just want black coffee. In this sort of coffee shop, this can be harder than you imagine - I don’t want an espresso with water! At least Starbucks has filter coffee, but I do sometimes get a surprised look for just wanting coffee…
If they give you a mf’ing tea bag, they may as well spit in your face! It is as if they gave all their coffee customers Sanka.
Tea, lose or in a bag, needs to be hit with boiling water (some argue nearly boiling). Handing you anything less than brewed tea is a rip-off and an insult to one of the worlds great beverages.
It’s not hard at all to get black coffee at Starbucks. My brother-in-law drinks black coffee and has gone to Starbucks with me dozens of times. The exchange, nearly without fail, goes like this:
BIL: Grande black coffee please.
Barista: Grande black, that’ll be $____. Have a nice day, sir.
I order just a large Latte. It seems to throw off the Baristas.
There was a phase when I had lost a little bit of weight from playing squash instead of eating lunch on my break (it’s usually my smallest meal of the day anyway), so I decided to treat myself to a whole milk latte, as the God you may or may not believe in intended.
You have not LIVED until you’ve tried one of these. But this also seemed to be met with disgust with the baristas and my friends, who didn’t like to see me drink foam thick enough to shave with…yeah, I’m a glutton, what can I say? ^___^
Yeah, if I just want coffee, it’s a “Venti Pike Place (their house roast).” No chit chat, cash and carry. And I don’t have to deal with the silly people and their double whipped soy milk, lol.
Yeah, Starbucks is fine for it, but there’s other coffee shops I’ve been to that only have espresso. But then, I’m in England where quality coffee isn’t something most people care about…
(Not that espresso isn’t quality coffee necessarily, it’s just not my cup of, er, tea, so to speak).
