How coffee became a joke

On the overarching question, standard coffee in the US was mostly weak drip and unsophisticated instant stuff, and I don't think most took coffee "seriously". Kids drinking it from teacher's room or not.

Starbucks and others gave it a more hip position with more variety and consideration, while still being something considerably different from "serious" coffee made by small independant shops for instance.

And now the author's complaining that coffee's image has changed again because Starbucks isn't the miracle company anymore. Does it matter much?

If anything the coffee culture that grew in parallel to these Pumpking Spice days is probably there to stay and "serious" coffee is probably stronger than it ever was considering the starting point.

I'm waiting for the next analysis on how the toast culture lost its lusture as avocado toasts are on the fall.

I don't get all the hype and the following that the brand has, since the coffee tastes as muddy water and the cappuccino is just milk with some droplets of coffee in it. Obviously the price is exaggerated.

What impresses me is that now Starbucks is opening in many cities in Italy and it gets more followers/adopters.

If you really want a good coffee, just go to any bar/café which isn't branded (Starbucks, Einstein, whatever). Their coffee will taste much better and at a cheaper price.

Fun fact: it even applies to horticulture.

Ever been to a garden center, and seen those nice looking, bushy coffee plants? Shiny leaves, a label saying "Coffea Arabica" and all?

Well... they're not. More exactly: those "plants" are "bushes of plants", each fighting for survival against their bros & sistas 1/2 cm. next to them.

When these are grown, 6 to 10..12 (yes, coffee) beans are planted in the same pot. A single coffee plant looks rather thin & uninteresting. And that single specimen could be too likely to not survive (for growers / garden center's taste). So what to do? Put a bunch of 'em in the same pot, nice & bushy, buyers will like that look.

Never mind that's not how a young Coffea Arabica looks like. Or that an image search online will mostly turn up those distorted-reality groups-of-Coffea in a tiny pot. Or that most coffee plants are in fact, large bushes (like 1.5~2m tall for easy harvesting, much taller if left to grow unimpeded).

For the record: I don't mind the Coffea-as-fashion-item aspect. Or that you get ~10 plants for the price of 1. But I do mind the distort reality, "what is it what you're selling?" aspect. I have yet to see a label on one of these pots explain there's a number of Coffea's in there rather than just 1.

As the article says: this is all too common nowadays. It's almost as if [what's underneath] is irrelevant.

Exactly the opposite.

Unlike other addictive drugs, selling coffee is not at all regulated, let alone a crime. So the competition to sell you some is incredible fierce.

No people in offices means no need for an upper middle class smoke break.

Straightforward, really.

There’s nothing that bothers me more than this sort of cultural critique about X vague value that doesn’t have much meaning in and of itself. They give me an immediate knee-jerk reaction, since they’re usually pretty meaningless. Things need to be more “serious?” What?

And since the birth of pop-culture, it’s always been a bit shallow, image-driven, and insusbtantial – that’s not new to this generation, or even the one before that.

Companies want monopolies. Pure coffee is not a monopoly. Anyone can acquire a storefront and beans and make a coffee. But not everyone can make a Frappuccino(c). Starbucks wants to make a market in copyrighted specialty beverages that no other business can reproduce.

The same thing is happening with Nestle’s Vertuo product line. They lost the patent stranglehold on the original line so now other business can sell compatible pods. They’re like a printer company that lost their proprietary ink business. So they’re trying to create a new line of products where they have complete patent coverage — this is the Vertuo line. The Vertuo is a weird drink, in my opinion much worse than the original line. But Nestle is pushing it hard because if they can convert a customer to Vertuo, no one else can sell to them.

Vendor lock-in.

As a moderate 'coffee person', Starbucks has always been somewhere between convenience and last resort. It has always sold an image, rather than an excellent product. Its practice of widening its offerings with weird and wonderful concoctions that bear little resemblance to coffee itself has been around as long as I can remember Starbucks existing as a presence in the high street. And frankly, I'm minded to be more forgiving of the derided 'Oleato' drinks - at least they're coffee-focussed, and novel enough to be interesting.

Also, the headline of the article is flat wrong: while lots of people aren't serious about coffee, it's possible to be more serious about coffee than ever before - very serious indeed.

If you want really good coffee in a reasonably-sized city, don't go to a chain. (Although I think most people that care, knew this already.). Instead, download one of the various coffee-shop-listing-and-reviewing apps out there, or alternatively (in a pinch) add the phrase "third wave" to your search on Google Maps - it's not guaranteed, but is usually a good starting point.