It seems that Starbucks has abandoned its “race together” campaign in which Americans were supposed to talk about race while sipping their $5 coffees. On a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest I found that Starbucks was actually very useful in starting a conversation. A group of us were dining in a high-end restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. One of us asked for espresso after dinner. The waiter told her that they didn’t have an espresso machine, but only served regular coffee. I asked in my brightest and most hopeful voice: “Do you use Starbucks-brand coffee?” It seemed to set the waiter’s brain on fire.
My personal theory is that America’s museums are best suited to continuing the dialog that Starbucks has abandoned for crass commercial reasons. Next to the coat/bag room in each museum they can post a large sign reading “White men: Check your privilege.”
Don’t be silly – you would need an airplane hangar to check the enormous privileges of white men.
BTW, Starbucks has some lighter roasts now but their darker roasts are AWFUL. When Schultz was starting out, he wanted to differentiate Starbucks from your local diner where they would serve you a cup of coffee (with unlimited refills) for a buck. Traditionally American coffee was roasted VERY light – mainly in order to keep the weight up. A lb. of moisture and volatiles that has evaporated from your roaster is a lb. that you can’t sell. And fuel isn’t free. So he decided to make his coffee VERY dark instead so that it would seem exotic and European, specifically Southern Italian and so that he could justify pricing it differently.
In Italy, as you go further south, two things happen: the country gets poorer and the coffee roast gets darker. The two are not unrelated. In the South, in order to provide the market with affordable coffee, Italian roasters sourced very bad cheap coffee beans (the Germans and Scandinavians bought all the good stuff). The only way to disguise the defects in these very cheap beans was to roast the coffee very dark so that all you could taste is the “roasted” flavor. Coffee beans are like wine – each origin tastes different. Dark roasted coffee is like boiled wine – once you have boiled it for a couple of hours, it all tastes the same, because you have cooked away all the subtle flavors.
The ideal coffee roast (IMHO and that of many coffee experts) is something called a “full city” or medium which is balanced in between the two extremes (full city because in American big city markets they didn’t need to skimp on the roasting to save a few pennies). This is also the kind of roast found in Northern Italy. In the Starbucks line, this would correspond to something like their Pike Place roast. These beans are a mahogany brown and not a slick oily black.