So this blonde walks into a Starbucks.....

Okay it's not the lead-in to a bad joke, but like pretty much every other new product announcement out of Starbucks in the past couple of years it does read like one. Utterly lacking in a sense of humor (as Starbucks in general and Howard Schultz in particular are), their gift for unintentional humor continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

The latest bit of mirth is the announcement of the introduction of Starbucks Blonde Roast. Here's the story from the Seattle Times and one from the company (make sure to watch the hilariously self-congratulatory video):

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016540546_sbux19.html

http://blogs.starbucks.com/blogs/customer/archive/2011/10/18/introducing-starbucks-174-blonde-roast.aspx

Now as someone who's been a customer of the company for 35 years and who roasted coffee there back when they had only 9 stores this latest bit of marketing-driven mediocrity is full of ironies. The first thing that comes to mind is here is yet another example of how you don't do well what you're dragged kicking and screaming into doing. This supposedly "light" roast, according to the company blog piece, is arrested during second pop - so it's a full city+ or light Vienna roast, still quite dark. I get the sense that roasting at Starbucks has consisted of pushing a button on a Scolari video console for so long now that any visceral understanding of the actual roast process has long since left the building.

Another layer of irony is that back in 1993 Starbucks bought the best supplier of moderately-roasted coffees in the country, Boston's Coffee Connection, and had every opportunity (as well as the explicitly stated intention) to offer their exquisite full-flavor roasted single origin coffees to the sizable number of consumers with more interest in the taste of terroir than charcoal. As a peace offering at the time of that acquisition there was a trial run of Starbucks drip coffees being offered as a choice in Coffee Connection stores in Boston and vice versa, and predictably the Starbucks customers enthusiastically embraced the taste of real coffee while the dark roasts in the CC stores bombed. Perhaps that was the moment they decided to kill the brand and wonderfully rich culture they'd bought, which of course happened in short order.

Going back further the great rivalry in Seattle in the early days was between Starbucks and Stewart Brothers/The Wet Whisker (aka Seattle's Best Coffee or SBC). When I was learning how to roast the Starbucks way in the early 80's, I was warned to always err on the dark side, lest I inflict upon the world a sour, cereal-like SBC roast. I have fond memories of paying an anonymous visit to the Stewart Brothers store in Seattle's University District in the company of ace roaster Michael Dice, who innocently asked the employee behind the bar what he thought of Starbucks as he was paying for his SBC Costa Rican. "Oh, they just buy cheap coffees and burn them," was the reply, and Michael, thinking of the warehouse full of Costa Rica Bella Vista and Guatemala Antigua San Sebastian he worked in memorably replied, "actually we buy very expensive coffees and roast them just right."

For those coffee professionals reading this I'll mention that Starbucks was one of the first specialty coffee roasters to acquire an Agtron roast measurement meter, and the acceptable range (these are all ground coffee numbers) was 33-35 for Full City (what the marketing geniuses at Starbucks later re-named The Starbucks Roast), 30-32 for espresso, 25 for Italian Roast and below 20 (18 or lower ideal!) for French Roast. Now that's a narrow - and dark - range for sure, but bear in mind that in the minds of a lot of people at Starbucks back then the gold standard was Peet's, where the entire product line at the time was in a range from 18-25 on the Agtron scale. For comparison's sake, when I became coffee buyer at Allegro in '93 and had free reign the roast spectrum ranged from 18 for French Roast to 72-73 for the most delicate Ethiopian Yergacheffe, with single origin new crop Centrals all above 60. (Parenthetically Carl Staub at Agtron calls 45 on the scale "the death of fruit" and for any brewing method other than espresso I think that's very accurate).

In the interests of fairness I should point out that across the board these were pretty exquisite coffees being roasted within an inch of their lives, and in many cases were of a quality that hardly exists anymore. I'm thinking in particular of Kenyans and other washed East Africans. One of the wonderful guys who taught me roasting at Starbucks said that the hallmark of a great Kenya was that is should be bursting with blackcurrant fruit and acidity even when roasted to espresso - and that was undeniably the case almost all of the time, not only with small auction lots but with the high-end Dorman blends that were always available. Today that kind of fruit has become elusive in even the most costly Kenyan auction lots, and to have any hope of capturing it when it is present the roast must be far lighter - in the city to light full city range at most.

I should also mention that this roast style, at both Starbucks and Peets, could only have been developed in symbiosis with two other factors: naturally soft water in both company's hometowns and a preference for pressurized brewing methods. Soft water makes the slight acidity left in such deeply-roasted coffee perceptible, and drinking what you're roasting through nothing but French Presses and, especially, espresso machines, highlights the acidity that does remain just as surely as hard water and/or paper filter drip blunts acidity and calls for far lighter roasting for balanced flavor in the finished cup.

During my years at Starbucks I often - unsuccessfully - campaigned for much more tasting of our coffees in the cupping room on commercial and residential drip machines and formulation of our roasts and blends for that real world consumer reality. I finally realized what a lost cause this was when one of the founders of Starbucks mentioned that he'd only drunk our single origin coffees as straight shots out of the La Marzocco espresso machine in his kitchen for the past year, and as a result of that steady diet was finding our roasts pretty darn acidic!

Getting back to the original news item, Starbucks Blonde Roast is just the latest airheaded (sorry) idea from a company that is clearly completely adrift when it comes to any sense of competitive differentiation, let alone pride or respect for its own history. What made Starbucks and Peets (and for that matter The Coffee Connection and so many others from that era) great was a clearly defined style and a completely unwillingness to compromise it. It's almost impossible to believe that this is the same company that insisted on delivering just-roasted coffees three days a week to its stores and mandated that every bean be sold in a week, or that conducted a year-long blind taste comparison of just roasted and valve-bagged coffees among  its tasters and store management in order to establish freshness standards for packaged beans. A company that dismissed light roasts, flavored coffee, Kona and Jamaican Blue mountain as the provenance of the First Colonies and Superior Coffees of the great unwashed in the Midwest. A company so concerned with integrity and authenticity that it offered Revolutionary Mocca Java ("what's revolutionary is we tell you what's in it") during frequent periods of ICO and US trade embargos with Yemen that kept us from offering the authentic item. From that to a corporation that clumsily attempts to have something for everyone while standing for nothing, in only a few short years.

If there is a method to the Blonde Roast madness maybe it's that someone at Starbucks has read the global warming writing on the wall and realizes that the dense, high-acid coffees that were the foundation of the old roast style are well on their way to becoming a thing of the past. "Our roast requires our coffees and our coffees require our roast," was an oft-repeated internal mantra back in the day. As the cycle comes full circle I guess the green coffees available require the roast style of Stewart Brothers - or The Coffee Connection? - but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that particular second coming.