Lo que tiene el café de Starbucks es que le meten un tostado muy fuerte. Y es que a fin de cuentas Starbucks no es una empresa que venda café, es una empresa que vende leche a la que le pone un poco de café para darle sabor a un público estadounidense o con gustos muy americanizados. De aquella cafetería para hipsters de Seattle que querían café al estilo italiano ya no queda nada, han tenido que evolucionar.
Si tu coges granos de café etiope con un tostado ligero, haces un espresso y luego le metes medio litro de leche aquello no sabe a café. Y si además le pones siropes, cacao, nata montada y a saber qué mas ni te cuento. Así que gastan café muy tostado para que el invento sepa más a café. Si el consumidor quiere un trago muy largo de algo dulzón, con mucha leche y seguir considerando que está bebiendo un café… pues tienes que meter algo muy potente para que haya un recuerdo del sabor tostado.
No sé si usarán algo diferente cuando hagan espressos o cappuccinos.
Once, back in the company’s evangelistic days, its paper bags of fresh beans included a stamped sell-by date, and its baristas possessed a near-encyclopedic knowledge of espresso arcana. The Starbucks employees of old preached relentlessly about quality, raising the consumer’s expectations of what coffee could taste like in the process; essentially, they made the average American cup of coffee better. The company’s early zeal so impressed Mark Prince, who now runs the popular coffee Web site Coffeegeek.com, that he becomes emotionally stirred when remembering the first time he visited a Starbucks, in 1993. Prince requested a ristretto shot — a smaller, bolder espresso that requires making subtle tweaks to the equipment. Outside of Italy, very few people had even heard of it. “The barista said, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about,’ ” Prince recalled. “He actually went and adjusted the grinder and pulled one shot he didn’t like, then he pulled another. You’d never see this at a Starbucks past 1998. I don’t want to say it was as good as the espresso I got in Italy, but it was damn close.”
Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (pp. 211-212). Hodder & Stoughton. Edición de Kindle.
The company didn’t build a forty-million-strong customer base by turning people into monocle-wearing, snifter-sipping dilettantes, nor does it aim to. Today, with its thousands of stores to supply and its forays into music and books to worry about, Starbucks wants to accomplish two coffee-related goals: keep people interested and turn out a consistent product. Starbucks’s focus on capturing the consumer’s attention traces back to the midnineties, when the colossal success of the Frappuccino amazed everyone, especially Schultz. Before, Schultz assumed Americans were snapping up Starbucks’s drinks because they hankered after a pure European coffee experience, but the Frappuccino’s popularity was evidence otherwise. Consumers just wanted luxury-priced caffeinated fun in their cups — what the coffee consultant Tim Castle calls “beverage entertainment.” Nobody cared that coffee aficionados sneered at the whipped cream and caramel they desired; people love sugar, and a beverage like the Toffee Nut Latte is a dessert they can order every morning. “You can look at Starbucks as a beverage theater, as opposed to a movie theater,” Castle said. “You come in for things that entertain you.” With this in mind, Starbucks unveils a slew of new drinks each season, many of them featuring flavors God surely never intended to see paired with coffee. As of a decade ago, no coffee drinker in history had ever looked down at his mug and said to himself, “You know what would make this so much better? Banana puree and coconut flakes!” Yet today we’ve witnessed not only the Banana Coconut Frappuccino, but also the Pumpkin Spice Latte, the Raspberry Mocha Chip Frappuccino, and the Eggnog Latte. Each is what Starbucks calls a “sophisticated coffee indulgence.”
Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (p. 214). Hodder & Stoughton. Edición de Kindle.
This widespread preference for sugary drinks raises an obvious question: if customers like sweet things, why would Starbucks deliberately produce bitter coffee? Indeed, Starbucks has made a fetish of its ultra-dark roast, even using it as a selling point. In a tour of the company’s roasting plant, the Starbucks coffee specialist Major Cohen once boasted to a Boston Herald reporter that “the black coffee beans are seconds from incinerating into cinders,” as if burning something to a carbonized crisp could only result in deliciousness. The dark roast is partly a product of tradition; Peet’s, the company’s spiritual forefather, still roasts quite dark as well. But some believe Starbucks has an ulterior motive in blackening its beans: the bitter coffee, they say, baits customers into buying milkier, higher-margin drinks. “I would guess they don’t want to sell just coffee,” explained Illy. “It’s too cheap. This aroma of burned stuff, they must do it on purpose, to make more money from syrup and milk. Otherwise, why would they do it? ” Many have declared that Starbucks is “in the milk business,” and without a doubt, consumers are willing to pay a huge premium for hot milk — the more of it, the better. “When we at Peet’s finally joined the civilized world and came out with a twenty-ounce cup, that immediately became a third of our business,” Baldwin told me. “Do you know how much milk that is? I mean, one of those has more milk than I drink in a year.” Plus, customers still want to taste the coffee when they order an ounce of espresso in twenty ounces of milk, and nothing punches through better than dark-roasted beans.
Clark, Taylor. Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (pp. 214-215). Hodder & Stoughton. Edición de Kindle.