The First Handful

I happened to be in the grocery store today and was walking throught the coffee aisle when I noticed that someone had opened a bag of Starbucks "House Blend" coffee to grind but left it all in the grinder. I took the opportunity to inspect the beans and was really surprised to find how bad they looked. Call me naive but I had never really inspected a bag of beans from the #1 coffee retail chain in the world. The roast was dark, of course; everyone knows that but there was bug damage on alot of the beans, as well as signs of scorching (dark spots on the beans where they were in contact with the roaster's drum too long). There were broken beans all over the place and fragments all over my hand. I decided to buy a bag and bring it back to the shop and it turned out to be a very illuminating experience, for both me and some of my customers. After we saw how much nastiness was in the first handful of beans we began to wonder what Starbucks was thinking. This stuff was not what I would call specialty coffee, not premium coffee. If I had bought this bag with the intention of brewing it up in the morning, I would have felt really cheated. At better than $8 a pound, it is simply unacceptable to sell a bag of what looks like rejected beans. If they buy beans so bug damaged and haphazardly gathered that a single handful yields dozens of pieces and bad beans, it makes me question the actual taste of the bean as well. "Well, a little bug damage shouldn't affect taste," I can hear someone out there saying. To that I can only reply, "Would you like to buy a bushel of apples riddled with wormholes? They might be OK to eat, but would you like to buy them?"

Here is a picture of our beans (from Terroir Coffee) on the left along with Starbucks' beans on the right. Click to enlarge. (Special thanks to John for providing these superior photos.)

The level of quality between the two sets of beans is miles apart here and, honestly, I'm glad we cull from the first set. I'm not even really sure what to do with the Starbucks beans now that I have taken pictures of them. Fertilizer maybe? Cleaning the grinder between flavored coffees and regular ones? Toddy?

Yeah, fertilizer it is.