Coffee Fancy

By far, the most remarkable thing about Starbucks’ new Reserve stores, which will not look anything like regular Starbucks stores — “Starbucks is vanquishing to a great extent its green mermaid logo at the new shops and in the product line” — but like something out of a Stumptown fiend’s wettest dreams, with German Probat roasters, Uber boilers, Modbars, Hario pourovers, Japanese siphons, and burlap sacks of single-origin coffee not roasted within an inch of its life, are the grotesque contortions that the company manages to perform in order to avoid saying outright that the coffee it serves in the rest of its twenty thousandish stores is molten sewage. There will be one hundred of these Reserve stores across the globe, serving much better coffee than Starbucks has ever offered, for four to seven dollars per cup. Most of the other stores will continue to be pits of sadness, except for the salted caramel mocha, which is actually pretty good as long as you don’t think of it as like, coffee.

Photo by Elvert Barnes