Maybe it’s the Firestone tire dealer’s wating room: their (otherwise pleasant) new tire smell mixing with the bad courtesy coffee outdoes Quaker State’s & Jiffy Lube’s offerings.
Airline coffee used to be gold standard of bad, but the coffee boom of the 90’s brought improvement.
Hospital coffee: and indeterminate brown fluid whose temperature depends mainly on the body temperature of the person holding the cup.
Navy coffee: boiled at 6AM yesterday, and you need it to stand watch at 2AM today.
My dad was a combat aircrewman on an AD-4 Skyraider during Korea. As an AEW aircraft, the crew were not expected to get into fights with enemy aircraft. So summer flying suits were the norm. The AEW aircraft landed after the other aircraft. One Winter’s day an aircraft crashed on the deck. Dad’s plane had to divert to the mainland. They ran out of fuel on rollout. No fuel, no engine. No engine, no heat. Dad said that Korean winter was the coldest he’d ever been. The base only had a skeleton crew. The coffee had been there ‘for days’ (exaggeration). But it was hot. Dad said it was the worst cup of coffee he’d ever had. And it was the best. (I have a cruise book somewhere that shows the crew posing by their ‘Able Dog’, wearing ushankas. The caption is ‘Kimpo Detachment’)
There used to be a restaurant on Sunset Blvd. called Ben Frank’s. In the wee hours it was about the only place to get coffee and a bite. Pretty sleazy place, really. It had the worst coffee I’ve had. But I always got it because I wanted the caffeine.
West of the Appalacians and east of the Sierra Nevadas (with the exception of big cities and librul enclaves) is still The Great American Coffee and Beer Desert. It’s Folgers/Maxwell House and Budweiser/Miller/Coors and don’t you turn your effete city slicker nose up at it, mister. :rolleyes:
IMO, Starbucks.
Then again, I was raised on deli coffee that came out of Bunn machines that hadn’t been cleaned in decades. So what do I know?
I think of this as the NDCZ – the Nondairy Creamer Zone. I used to zigzag the Lower 48 quite a bit in the 80s and early 90s, and everywhere I stopped for coffee on highways in the NDCZ, they only had powder to add to the terrible coffee. It just makes it taste worse and doesn’t make it any cooler.
My university’s dining hall served as “coffee” a hot, brown beverage that had been designed by a team of food scientists to be something like coffee, tea, and hot cocoa without tasting quite like any of them, or good.
Locally, the breakfast bar of the La Quinta Inn at I-45 and FM1960 (warm water with dark coloration, overlaid with a horrible odor of burnt waffle from the self-service griddle), or a certain convenience store off the Beltway near the Hardy Toll Road. First time I went in there, I walked over to the coffee stand and found myself thinking, “Why does this whole store smell like feet?” Sure enough, it was the coffee.
Many who skulked about Harvard Square in the wee hours have stories to tell about The Tasty. Truly a place that made up in location and accessability what it greatly lacked in palatability.
The Harvard Campus police station kitchen at 2am had some truly putrid coffee, but it was perfect for keeping me awake when I was working as late-night campus taxi dispatcher. As I used to remind myself while drinking it, the next best thing to really good coffee, is really bad coffee.
Today, a salesman from some food-service company came to our office and left us a coffee maker with two dozen sample packs to try for a few days. There’s a comment sheet next to it, and I don’t believe anyone’s said anything positive about it. All the work of a premium cup of espresso, with the taste of a microwaved gym shoe.
The gas station coffee at about 12pm on a Sunday. I can always taste it hours after drinking it.
As far as the Navy coffee, I assume it is the same as all military coffee. What I would do for a cup of that mud right now.
I find that Denny’s has the same shitty coffee no matter what state you are in, including Hawaii… I don’t think it is the worst, but it is consistently bad…
Dude, WTF?
Is it still as bad now that the place is Mel’s Diner? That could make it a bad taste tourist attraction.
Our local McDonald’s sells something they claim is coffee, but I strongly suspect is hot water with food coloring in it.
Just don’t spill it on your vagina! It is hot, and it says so on the cup now…
Everywhere within a five block radius of my college. I can choose from the inert coffee in the cafeteria, the nasty stuff from the lunch carts, the I-better-not-think-about-it-too-much flavored coffee from the nearby convenience store, and, of course, the Starsucks at the westernmost edge. To the south of all that lies a four-block DCZ (de-caffeinated zone) that I must cross before I can get to some decent coffee.
A second for this one. I recently redeemed a coupon I got in the mail for a free cup of McDonalds “new gourmet roast” coffee. Tasted just like the muddy runoff coffee they’ve been serving as long as I can remember.
I do!
I’m a real tea snob, but I have no coffee taste buds: the best coffee in the world and lightly colored mud are as one to me. So what you get at my house might be one, or the other, for all of me.
Same here. I follow the directions on coffee to water ratios but still it just doesn’t come out right. If anyone else is visiting and needs coffee, I have them make it or we go to the gas station for Green Mountain coffee.
Could you be more specific?
Coffee at spring two-style wrestling tournaments is consistently bad. My hypothesis on that is because more often than not the first-year wrestlers and their parents are being ‘hazed’ and end up doing most of the setup, so you have someone who’s only working so their kid can wrestle free today, or god forbid the kid himself, making an industrial-size urn of coffee. The urn is usually older than I am, and the coffee is somehow capable of eating the lining off my stomach without being strong enough to taste good, and the flavor of the styrofoam cup seems to leach into it.
On the bright side, as a ref, I usually get it free.
And they like it piss weak and (in the case of the joe) hotter’n Dale Jr.'s exhaust manifold.