BiteClub Restaurants Dining and Food

Local Barista competition at three Olivers’ Markets in Sonoma County January 7-17, 2013.

Flying Goat’s Phil Anacker is a legend in the coffee business

Wed., March 25

Jumpin Java, what’s next?

I’ve said plenty of nice things about Costco in the past, and regular readers will have seen my specific product recommendations in the Costco Reports that I post on this blog, but I have no special agenda in support of Costco shareholders, and I don’t pull my punches, so today – as I pour another badly needed but instantly regrettable cup that tastes very distinctly of incinerated carbon- I have to call them out: Dude, your Kirkland coffee really sucks.

Suffice it to say that the taste and smell of a food (for the avoidance of doubt, coffee is closer to the bottom than the top of the Food Pyramid, at least in my kitchen) changes by virtue of the food’s contact with the air we breathe, and most of these changes are not for the better.

I have a Coffee Mea Culpa and it is this: I like bad coffee. Not awful coffee – I care not at all for the taste of two-day-old-and-tasting-of-burnt-gym-socks coffee, of low-grade beans apparently canned sometime during the early days of the Cold War, of Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s drive-through “Cafes” – but coffee that is, in some objective sense, not ideal.