Reminder: you need good people behind the bar
This is a gentle reminder to local coffee shop owners: unless you like losing business, do not hire teenagers to pull shots without adequate training. I’m not going to name the shop, but let’s say that they appeared with a fairly glowing review sometime within the last 10 or 15 posts on this blog. Over the weekend we got two different coffees from the same under-trained teenager and both were godawfully horrible. So horrible I didn’t take another sip after my first and went to another coffee shop to replace my awful coffee. I will absolutely go back to that shop, but I hope most owners don’t want to take the gamble that most customers will come back after bad coffee drinks.
Owners: train your people!! Pulling shots is an art. Yes, at times we’ve gone on and on about the different roasters in town, but we realize that personnel is probably more important than roast in the quality of the outcome. Don’t have rookies working alone behind your bar if you want to keep your customers coming back. They need to know about timing the shot, pulling thin, how to know in advance if it’s going to be a bad shot, etc. Every quality shop in the downtown core (Goat, Cup, Sidney’s, Amante) has baristas that know before the shot is done whether it’s going to be good or not, and will trash it immediately if it’s going to be bad. Hopefully that kind of attention to detail will spread.
Best of Boulder? Um, yea….no
Once again the popularity contests come out and distort reality. And we love reality. We don’t love gimmicked phone-tree (email tree?) influenced “popularity” polls. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the Best of Boulder 2008 has — who else? — Vic’s as the best coffee shop in Boulder. Ug.
Vic’s, people? Can you possibly be serious? The only thing this proves is that Vic’s is the best at getting their friends, neighbors and relatives to vote. What does it take, an email address? Yeah, I’ve got five, and my uncle in Michigan has ten. Yeah, we just won best coffee shop blog.
The real deal with Vic’s is that they serve some of the worst coffee in Boulder (it is Allegro, also served by numerous other shops) and the flagship shop is dark, crowded and otherwise laid out in almost unworkable way. The socialite crowd needed a nearby see-and-be-seen hang and Vic’s was all the neighborhood has to offer, so it became so by default. It decidedly did not become so because it is a good coffee shop. So Vic’s won “best coffee shop.” It ain’t the coffee, it ain’t because it’s the best shop, it’s because somehow the 30-somethings single ants collect there looking for honey.
More out of Boulder experiences…
Indulge your caffeine craving
“In a review of 21 studies published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, caffeinated exercisers had significantly lower rate of perceived exertion (RPE) during cardio workouts. As a result, they were able to swim, bike, and row longer, farther, and faster.” -Shape, June 2007
the women’s petition against coffee
As seen in Newsweek’s 23-Apr cover story in an inset on page 66:
1674: An anonymous writer in England published The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, complaining that men were spending all day in coffeehouses [ya think?]. “We find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour,” it said, “due to the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called Coffee.”
Welcome
You know who you are. Even if your company possesses an ultra-hip office space you loath to inhabit it. After fifteen continuous minutes bathed in that unbearable office quiet you start to long for the aroma of coffee, the casual din of lightly employed patrons, some sublime musical ambiance…the clock slows and your mind tunnels into your next excuse to escape to… ahh, the perfect environment for creative productivity…
Some of us have cast off the chains of pretense and no longer suffer the expense, guilt and banality of offices, we have gone completely nomadic.
