Alas –as if I needed yet one more reason to order my coffee from Coffee Kind

Alas –as if I needed yet one more reason to order my coffee from Coffee Kind.  If I did I found one.  There are not many good coffee shops within an hour of my house.  There are a few that are not terrible, but none that make me want to go there because they serve something better than what I can make at home.  There was one shop that was comparable from brewed coffee though.  They served Counter Culture Coffee and made good brewed coffee.  Because they were staffed with college kids who were just in it to pay bills their espresso was not exceptional and not as good as it should have been given the quality of the beans, but it was fine.

I probably should have gone there more often to support them even though their coffee was not better than what I could make at home (using, for example, the same beans), but I am cheap and so paying more for coffee than I have to when it tastes the same is something that I do not tend to do.


I did, however, go there the other day because I thought it would be good to support them and I had a free moment.  I went in and asked them what they were pulling for espresso – salivating at the chance to have afficianado or perhaps rustic, etc.  I was shocked when the barista said “I don’t even know any more.”  This did not sound like the kind of training I was used to out of a Counter Culture shop.  

Sure enough they no longer were one.  They had been bought out by another local chain that does not have particularly good coffee.  When my face fell they saw it and replied that they were devastated, too, because they used to serve great coffee and they do not any more.  

I do not know if this should be discouraging that their coffee went down hill, or encouraging that they showed that by serving good coffee that you be profitable enough to make sharks swoop in and buy your shop hoping to emulate your bottom line (even if they do not realize that profits are not just driven by location, but also by quality).   

In retrospect it cracks me up that the baristas volunteered how bad their coffee had become before I said a word about how much worse the new coffee was.  


I confess that I left without buying a cup when I found out that the new coffee was not so good.