Comments on Today in Fights to the Death

Holy fuck. How fast do you have to be going to hit an elk and then shear off not one but TWO utility poles?

Looks like another candidate for a Darwin award.

The word is "patroned".

Who the hell is "patronizing" starbucks?

transformational doesn't sound like it should be a word, but alas, it is.

"Starting in mid-April, the company said, it will introduce Pike Place Roast, a blend Schultz called 'transformational' and various shareholders called some combination of bold, mild, smooth and light."

a combination of bold and mild and smooth and light? couldn't all coffee be described this way?

The road where it happened is all farm land, not to excuse it, but a lot of people drive fast around there.

Um, Andrew, that's a perfectly acceptable use of the word "patronized."

Please die, Howard Schultz..

Gee, Andrew, I don't think I've ever seen a more seriously wrong usage correction. "Patroned"? Seriously? You believe that? Wow.

If Starbucks was serious about the "gourmet" (spit) attributes of their coffee, they wouldn't make up marketing brands like "Pike Place Roast"; they'd be promoting actual regional varieties of coffee, like Yrgacheffe, Coatepec, Mandheling, etc. That probably wouldn't make commercial sense, since there aren't that many people who give that much of a shit, and Starbucks is aiming for the mass McDonalds market, or a large enough share of that market that can be persuaded to pay extra for something that SOUNDS like class (but isn't).

Apparently the fight to the death results in some collateral damage too. In the aforementioned elk v. car battle, the power to 100 homes nearby was cut.

Is it really that bad for Starbucks? A fight to the death? Has Howard left the practicers of Judy-ism and gone over to the Islamo-fascist side of seeing things?

Fnarf, you and I would know the difference between those coffees . . . or maybe not, after they got done burning the bejesus out of the beans.

You have to give Starbucks some credit - without them, the likelihood of hearing the words 'loathed' 'coffee' and 'company' all in the same sentence would be about nil.

@1

Charles Darwin was not a eugenicist.

I grew up near 276th, and there was a girl I went to school with whose car had fights to the death with not only an elk, but also a cow and a horse, all near that area. However, it is a very, very fun road to drive when it's light out and you're sober, and neither of these sound like they can be applied to the situation.

Well, this isn't, strictly speaking, eugenics, since he removed HIMSELF from the gene pool.

Jeez, so much kvetching. This place has tons of great coffee shops who go the extra mile to serve quality service and product. So what if they're mediocre, they serve a different market. And too many of the "coffee snobs" are hypocrites. Everybody likes to say that they know about coffee but the simple fact is, if it hadn't been for Starbucks, most would never have had any contact with coffee any better then Folgers. Starbucks is pretty poor quality but that mediocrity created the drive to seek out a better product and demand for places like Stumptown or that place in Capitol Hill which begins with a V which I can't remember at the moment. Just enjoy the fact that we have a choice here.

"Patroned"???

I buy Folgers and brew it in a gallon can on my hotplate - I am the true coffee snob.

The rest of you are pretenders.

And cup which is mixed with crap, be it sugar, creme or jism is pretender stuff. Black, strong, nothing else. Good hot OR cold.

@14

Charles Darwin was presented with that interpretation of his theories by his cousin Francis Galton, who coined the word "eugenics." Darwin rejected the concept of the human "gene pool" being improved or worsened by individuals being removed from it, whether by accident or intent. His main objection was that he thought people were moral agents. He also recognized that human qualities were far to complex to be judged by such crude criteria, as if we were cattle.

You're associating Darwin's good name with a disreputable ideology when you say "Darwin Award." Pick somebody who believed in eugenics, like Francis Galton or Adolph Eichmann.

@17

Aren't you familiar with the Darwin awards? It's not the most serious organization in the world so I don't think anyone is going to care about your nitpicking. Anyway, I think the man who brought the theory of evolution to light is a great namesake for the awards. Go spread you buzzkill elsewhere.

"Spreading buzzkill" is another term for telling the frat boys to keep their shit on frat row and away from decent people.

@7 They may actually be doing that. The following is the part of the new plan that I'm least happy about:

"Late in the two-hour meeting, Schultz revealed that Starbucks has bought The Coffee Equipment Co. of Ballard, for an undisclosed sum. Its product, the Clover, custom-makes individual cups of coffee from fresh-ground beans, using a combination of French press and vacuum techniques.

Many stores will be getting a Clover, but probably not those with low foot traffic or short hours, Gass said. Very busy stores may get two. About 30 percent of U.S. stores will get Clovers by year-end, Schultz said.

Stores with Clovers will offer up to six specialty coffees to be ground and brewed one cup at a time. That's in addition to brewed Pike Place Market blend and the coffee of the week, Gass said.

Schultz said stores in New York are charging $7 a cup for Clover coffee. He wouldn't say what Starbucks may charge but admitted he was "very encouraged" by the price Clover coffee can fetch. The cost of a cup of Clover coffee may reflect the cost of the coffee from which it's made." (emphasis mine)

If you've not yet had coffee from a Clover (and you like coffee), you should seek one out and get a cup. The machine makes a very, very good cup of coffee (probably the best I've ever had).

Right now they're scattered across the city (and to some extent the country) in small, independent coffee houses. And the beans that tend to go into a Clover are purchased from individual growers in pretty much every coffee producing region you can think of (and then in many of the stores, there's a corresponding menu wherein the description of the coffee reads like something you'd see for wine or scotch or craft beer ["hints of ____" and "____ finish"—that sort of thing]). So the "six specialty coffees" alluded to up there are likely that sort of thing.

Also dismaying (apart from the price of $7/cup, when many places here with a Clover charge about half that or less) is that Starbucks will own the company. I don't know the specifics of the deal, but I woulnd't be surprised to see them do one of two things: 1) maintaining exclusive rights to the technology or 2) jacking up the price on the already expensive (~$11,000) machine, thus making it more difficult for the independent coffee houses to buy them up.

The Clover has been the best part of drinking coffee in Seattle for a few years now, and I'm going to be sad and pissed if the only way I can get such good coffee is by going to Starbucks.

You can get Clover coffee at Zoka in, uh, Tangletown. It's good. It's not worth the extra money to me, but it's good. I'm not happy to hear that they got bought by Starbucks. The whole problem with Starbucks is the mass approach; the reason they don't let baristas actually pull their own shots, but rely on an automatic machine, is that there is no conceivable way to train a million baristas to do a good, consistent job.

Mass marketing pretty much demands a reduction of quality, along with a reduction of variation -- it's impossible to get a Vivace-level masterpiece from them, but it's also very unlikely to get an undrinkable bilge squirt, either, which is an undeniable improvement over most espresso huts (most commercial espresso machines are not in hip urban archipelagos, but rather in nasty strip malls and suburban drive-bys).

Similarly, people who sneer at McDonalds and the like are usually not old enough to have encountered some of the truly frightening roadside diners that they usurped. Consistency is usually a good thing.

Similarly, the Clover will probably increase the quality of the average cup of drip nationwide, but the average quality of a Clover cup will go down.

And the cost -- well, let's just say I'm really rooting for a big success by Dunkin' Donuts in their big marketing drive. I prefer cheap, reasonable coffee to the expensive elite stuff. I ain't paying $7 for fuck. I wonder, if the economy heads the way it's heading, if I might have a lot of company in the next few years.

@21 I know about Zoka. Both Trabant and the Vita on Pike sell it for less than they do, so that's where I've tended to go.

I honestly don't know that the quality is going to dip *that* much, unless they buy inferior beans. The machine, from what I've read, takes a lot of the process out of your hands. You just grind the beans up, dump them in and set the machine to whatever temperature and steep time is optimum for each variety of bean. I suppose Starbucks (or its employees) could fuck up those variables, so maybe there'd be a quality dip there. But I'm pretty sure that a Clover cup at Starbucks is going to taste very similar to a Clover cup at any of the independent stores that have the machine now, assuming they buy the same sorts of beans, get the variables right and their employees don't screw it up (a lot of assumptions I know, but not unreasonable ones).

Honestly, I don't care that Starbucks is going to use the machines: the thing that bugs me is that they bought the company, rather than just buying *from* them (though I imagine the buying out was an offer that the Clover folks couldn't refuse).

There's no way it will taste the same at Starbucks as it does at an independent roaster (at least one which knows what they're doing). Starbucks' batches are just too big (I think they do 500lb batches) which allows hot spots to form making some beans roasted too much and some too light. Plus, they seem to think that every bean should be dark roasted which is just not the case. This is really the origin of their quality issues.

Ah, yes. I'd forgotten about the roasting. They could majorly fuck that up (or, I suppose, just continue to fuck it up). Medium roast for the win. (And strange that a company that likes to play up its caffeine content would prefer the darker roasts, as they have less caffeine than the lighter ones.)

PUBLIC SAFETY MESSAGE: Never swerve to miss wildlife in the road!The only safe reaction is to gently slow down and hope the animal will cross before you hit it. Yes, roadkill is a tragedy and hitting animals may damage your car. But, swerving will only put you, the driver, in extreme danger and the animal will probably get hit anyway!