Starbucks

This location I constantly hit because I shop the Alameda Safeway. There are more employee lights to this candle than management candle.

You can get a manager here who is only interested in shoving mediocre made coffee down customer's throats and employees who are willing to grow, work with discipline and create what beautiful dimensions in coffee actually exist.

Two baristas now work at this location who have chosen to heed my Socratic pourover tutelage and one who simply can't listen. That constitutes the majority of the staff at this small location inside Safeway.

But, it's like film director Bob Zemeckis told me once when I was just an ice cream scooper and an improv student, "You're here now."

At least two of these staff baristas, as opposed to the manager, who is great in her managerial ways but not so much in customer service ways, if you are to evaluate above the turnstile standard, as all baristas should be evaluated as.

For just a few tweaks in how you handle the bean after months of careful farming and storage/maturing/mellowing and craftsman/artisan levels of roasting prevents you from ruining months of work and care of other people.

Those few weeks take a little more time, and corporate coffee has determined its profit model not to be inclusive of the finer touches that damage profit curves.

Kinda like yield curves, you know? Well actually, just like them.

I will raise the review on this establishment when they earn it, and all of you followers who patronize this location, tell them to make you a pourover, and rinse well the paper filter and bloom the grounds properly.

Otherwise, you're going to be missing at least a half and probably more like two thirds of the flavor experience fresh coffee making (as opposed to stored coffee flavor - that's what made all these billions, but yielded no flavor blessing to the fleeced public) offers.

Remember, folks, the day of the coffee bean is here, and it is time to take the peppermint, chocolate and fat out of your beverage and find what has always been there but was always missing by design, by making your barista, wherever you get your bean on, do the right thing and make the bean get up, sing, dance and thrill like it was meant to.

The LC

This location I constantly hit because I shop the Alameda Safeway. There are more employee lights to this candle than management candle.

But, it's like film director Bob Zemeckis told me once when I was just an ice cream scooper and an improv student, "You're here now."

Those few weeks take a little more time, and corporate coffee has determined its profit model not to be inclusive of the finer touches that damage profit curves.

Kinda like yield curves, you know? Well actually, just like them.

The LC