Why doesn’t anyone go for the good stuff anymore?
I’M NOT A morning person. The only way I won’t sleep through my alarm is if I smell a pot of freshly brewed coffee just begging to be consumed—and I’m not alone. According to the Coffee Association of Canada (CAC), 63 per cent of Canadian adults drink coffee on a regular basis and that number jumps to 81 per cent when you include those who enjoy the occassional cup. But just because you can’t get out of bed without a cup of java doesn’t mean you drink the good stuff.
The CAC reports only six per cent of all coffee drinkers enjoy a specialty coffee on a daily basis. Specialty coffee is high quality, usually hand-picked, and grown in specific geographic locations, giving it a unique taste—you know, the premium stuff you get at specialty coffee shops.
Starbucks is one of the largest specialty coffee shops in the world, serving made-to-order espresso drinks like a real coffee shop should. Recently, however, fast food joints in North America have been trying to break into the specialty coffee market by offering seemingly speciality espresso-based drinks. While these cheap alternatives may seem as good as anything Starbucks or Second Cup offers, they are just cheap replicas.
Places like Tim Hortons and McDonald’s now carry espresso-based drinks, advertising some as “premium-roast coffees” and using other overly flattering terms to describe machine-made coffee brewed from beans of unknown origins. It’s these new products that have me losing faith in the specialty coffee culture.
I know coffee is often used solely to load up on energy, but that doesn’t mean we have to endure the horrors of a watered-down double-double or day-old McDonald’s coffee.
Bad coffee is everywhere; it has even made its way into consumers’ homes. So-called coffee-pod machines that pack concentrated and ground-up coffee into plastic airtight containers have grown in popularity over the past few years. Some of these machines are better than others, depending on the brand, but I remain extremely skeptical of the pods—what’s actually in those things?
The problem is we tend to sacrifice quality in the face of convenience. Most premium coffee is only slightly more expensive than mass-produced cheap imitations, but it’s not as widely available. Even I have consumed old Mac’s coffee because I didn’t want to walk in the cold to a Second Cup.
But as soon as I take a sip, I remember why I like the good stuff. It has a full body, a distinct flavour, and no funny aftertaste. All in all, a good cup of coffee is worth the effort. Besides, if it’s energy you want, it probably has more caffeine than a watered-down fast-food coffee too.
—Jane Lytvynenko
