Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

July 17 2006

Big Business Wins (almost) Every Time

Yesterday, on a segment of the CBS "Sunday Morning" show (a rebroadcast from 2005) entitled Coffee 101, they cupped a variety of coffees, and then sampled them after brewing them in some sort of little one cup drip toys. I couldn't see what those samples were brewed in. They then went to a mall and had folks do blind taste tests between super market ground coffee, and specialty coffees. There was no hint as to how the coffee was roasted, when it was roasted, or how it was ground.

Surprise surprise, they made it seem like specialty coffees are a marketing ploy, with nothing really to recommend them.

The "expert" was Ted Ersky from McHenry County College outside of Chicago. He seemed to understand coffee "shtuff" but the piece was designed to prove him wrong. The reporter was Steve Hartman.

Call me a nutjob, but I think it is all part of the overall plan to get us to settle for mediocrity in our day-today lives.

I'm particularly enamoured with coffee, but, this is not just a coffee phenomenon. We accept, without question, major appliances that irretrievably and inevitably break down after ten years. We toss out smaller ones every couple of years, because they are not worth repairing. Much of our food has been processed into bland nothingness. In restaurants, we accept poor service as de rigueur, and tip handsomely, as a matter of course, even when we can't get our water glasses refilled.

Returning to the coffee angle, I found out yesterday that the Presto Scandinavian, one of the few coffee pots designed to brew at the right temperature, and disperse the hot water in the right way, is being discontinued. It seems that the things that made this coffee pot both good and, at about $40 US, a real bargain, just couldn't be explained to the general public, and stores were not willing to give it shelf space. The average shopper, raised on Maxwell House or Folgers brewed in a Mr. Coffee, never learned that these things make a difference. More than that, they have come to believe that charred beans a la Starbucks represent good coffee, so the concept of looking for (much less expecting) subtlety in their cup never even occurs to them.

Score another one for big business.