Caffe Vergnano is a real Italian coffee company (from near Torino), perhaps best known here for using ads featuring Dustin Hoffman.

They should know what they are doing, but I'm not sure what the relationship between the overseas cafes and the home base is (some kind of franchising?). I first saw one of those in Nice a few weeks ago, and was slightly tempted, though the reality is that Nice has so many smaller and cheaper cafes run by real Italians that getting decent coffee isn't a serious problem.

I'm very glad I like coffee, as it means I can buy some nice coffee grounds, take them home and make a nice cup of coffee in my cafetiere, all without having to set foot in a Starbucks. One day, I must go on a coffee tasting course, so I can appreciate the taste even more. I susprect however that I am not one of nature's 'supertasters', and that the subtle nuances of the coffee's flavours are forever destined to pass me by.

We shouldn't kid ourselves that any of these homey non-Starbuck's "brands" are any better.

It depends on what you mean by better.
It gets back to what I said about brand choices sometimes being stupid and mock-worthy.

Insofar as Starbucks is serving the same thing at a higher price just with prettier packaging and "experience," one's choice of Tim Horton's or Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's or 7-11 marks one as both shrewd and unpretentious. These are generally good qualities.

However, my unscientific research suggests that Starbucks' coffee is actually a good deal better than the coffee served at those other establishments, in which case an attempt to eschew Starbucks in order to appear - either to others or in one's own mind - as shrewd and unpretentious, makes one just as much of a sucker for marketing bullshit as the ponce who thinks going to Starbucks proves they're sophisticated.

SR's charge the Starbucks goes out of his way to drive out competition is a serious accusation that deserves inquiry by anti-trust authorities. However, I'm not aware of evidence that they're doing that in this country, at least. In most places, if there are establishments competing in roughly the same "space" as Starbucks, they probably came after Starbucks.

These days, I only go to a Starbucks if I want coffee and it's the closest option, which it often is since there are so damn many of them.

My morning routine, however, is to buy a Diet Coke from the little Korean market in my building. It's an ideal beverage for driving. The 20 oz or 1 liter bottles fit perfectly in my car's cup holder and doesn't spill.

SR: Donut holes, known in these parts as "Timbits"

Excellent post by Reed. Except for the Diet Coke habit (yeurgh!).

QUOTE:
Insofar as Starbucks is serving the same thing at a higher price just with prettier packaging and "experience," one's choice of Tim Horton's or Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's or 7-11 marks one as both shrewd and unpretentious. These are generally good qualities.

Sure: and as you say, if not, not. But however you slice it, making ones choice of hot drink part of ones self-image is daft, as is imagining that either chain is doing anything but unsentimentally pitching for a slice of your money.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the down-hominess of Tim Horton's is just as much a piece of corporate spin as the look-at-us-we're-so-sophisticated thing that Starbuck's do. Buy either coffee if you like it, but don't buy the hype in either case.

I hate "traditional" North American coffee, personally, because it's weak and stewed. It's the worst coffee in the world, unless "the world" includes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which I guess it does. So in that case it's the second-worst.

QUOTE:
"Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the down-hominess of Tim Horton's is just as much a piece of corporate spin as the look-at-us-we're-so-sophisticated thing that Starbuck's do. Buy either coffee if you like it, but don't buy the hype in either case."

I think that was the point of that article and sort of what I was saying. In the pre-Starbuks era, people would go to Tim Hortons or Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's (I'm pretty sure every small town in America has a group of old guys who meet in McDonald's every morning) simply because it was there, it was cheap and that's where one's neighbors were. It was "down homey" because it was the default/only choice for the locals and turned out that way naturally.

But now the companies have cottoned on to that and tried to sell it back to their customers, going to such an establishment doesn't "feel" as natural as it did before. It feels like one is buying into the company's ad campaign, which is unsettling for a lot of people.

QUOTE:
Excellent post by Reed. Except for the Diet Coke habit (yeurgh!).

What you need to understand, PT, is that when you're into Diet Coke, you have only one worry: finding enough change for more Diet Coke (or Coke Zero, or Diet Pepsi, or whatever. I'm not picky). And when you're off it, you're suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shit. Got no money, can't get drunk. Got money, drinkin' too much. Can't get a girl, no chance of a ride. Got a girl, too much hassle. You have to worry about bills, about food, about some football team that never fucking wins. About human relationships and all the things that really don't matter when you've got a sincere and truthful aspartame habit.

All right, since we're having a go at national coffee cultures, here's mine: the Germans. Jesus Christ their coffee is undrinkable. Ask for a cappuccino as likely as not you'll get Sanka with whipped cream.

Sanka still exists?

Sanka is something that really, really, really old ladies order.

Is there a connection between quality of coffee in a country and the colonies it formerly possessed and or stil influcences?

Yes, it still exists. And it's German (although its name comes from the french "sans cafeine"). It was the first ever decaffinated coffee, dating back before WWI.

As I recall from my restaurant days, Sanka's branding was so dominant that the color orange (the color of Sanka's packaging) became the universal symbol for "decaf." So in restaurants, the decaf pot has an orange handle.

But I haven't seen their ads in a long time.

All right, since we're having a go at national coffee cultures, here's mine: the Germans.

Depends how you define the "national coffee culture" in Germany. If you go to a Kaffeehaus in the sticks, where the chairs are made of wood, the list of beverages contains more German words than English or Italian words, the waitress says "draußen nur Kännchen" and the only hot drinks they've got are Filterkaffee, Milchkaffee and Kakao (and possibly tea as well), then the coffee's all right. It's the places where they put caramel flavouring in everything and serve what they think is cioccolata calda and whatnot that the coffee's shit.

Whereas I always thought that Kaffee Hag was the first decaffinated coffee.

And now Wiki tells me that the same stuff that was sold as Hag in Germany and elsewhere on the continent was called Sanka in France and the US.

Hag was still synonmous with decaffinated coffee in Italy 15 years ago, just as Sanka was in the US of my youth.

Gramsci is right about German coffee, especially if one is talking about what one gets at conferences or on planes or trains. The fact that a country that otherwise revels in multitudinous versions of fresh dairy products sees nothing wrong with using completely ersatz "whitener" in their coffee tells you all you need to know about the general lack of respect for the product. It also goes a long way towards explaining why Starbucks has been quite successful in Germany.

There are, however, some decent coffee places in Germany if one knows where to look.

Reed: that's true, except for those places that served Folger's in which case the decaf pot had a green handle.

QUOTE:
Reed: that's true, except for those places that served Folger's in which case the decaf pot had a green handle.

I didn't know that.

I think a big part of Starbucks success, at least thus far, isn't that most people like their dark roast taste. Indeed, Starbucks just introduced a new blend that doesn't taste burnt.

Why so many people responded to Starbucks is that it tasted like something. The problem with most coffee that one gets at McDonald's or 7-11 or from the big metal thing in the back of a conference hall or church basement is that it is so watery.

This came as a revelation to Americans. And of course, people who are looking for a caffeine fix may associate, wrongly probably, a strong taste with a strong kick.

The cause of this being, obviously, that water is cheaper than coffee so it makes sense for the seller/provider to put as little actual coffee in the pot as they can get away with.

Most Americans are accustomed to putting a lot of sugar and milk/cream in their coffee out of habit, but what they're really doing is giving an otherwise near flavorless drink some flavor. Indeed, in New England, a "coffee regular" does not mean, as I first assumed "black coffee with caffeine." It means, coffee with cream and sugar. A bit like Canada's "double double."

Starbucks introduction of the new flavor on top of recent news that their same-store sales are stagnating, suggests perhaps that the novelty of coffee that tastes like coffee has worn off and now people want coffee that tastes like coffee that they like. We'll see.