Friday 29 January 2010

Bad Coffee

We haven’t talked about the badness of some coffees recently so here is a reminder of the league table of shame some far,

1) TGI’s, Tower Park, Poole
2) Wetherspoons, Dorchester
3) Service Station somewhere in the North that I can’t remember the name of
4) Toni and Guy, Dorhester

Well the good (or bad, depending on your out look) news is that we have a new entry.

We were shopping in Bournemouth on Sunday, Significant Other did well (lots of really nice clothes) and I bought 2 new albums. I got Mumford and Son and the new Eels albums (they are both fantastic). We decided to pop into the Slug and Lettuce for lunch. Ok so it is not the world’s finest catering establishment but never the less you expect some standards.
I asked for a double espresso because a single is never enough, although it was in this case.
The problems started when I saw how much coffee was in the cup. It is supposed to be a small cup, that’s sort of the point, the concentration of flavours, but this, in comparison to a normal espresso cup, was a veritable bucket. Please take note at this point oh high street purveyors of caffeinated beverages, the amount of liquid that we get is not the important thing, it should taste nice! Or in the case of some of the larger chains of coffee shops, it should taste of something!
Of course, if you dilute something quite a lot you get less of the thing that you started with and this does not make it more potent (quick dig at homeopaths there. The 10:23 mass overdose is tomorrow, 30/1/10, by the way.) and so the flavour was almost non-existent.
I am not a coffee snob, I drink instant sometimes and I only have a cheapish espresso machine, but I do like coffee and it’s not that hard to make well. This is all I ask for and I don’t think that it’s too much; if you sell coffee then it should be nice coffee.

So here is the revised table, I think that the Slug and Lettuce go in at number 5,

1) TGI’s, Tower Park, Poole
2) Wetherspoons, Dorchester
3) Service Station somewhere in the North that I can’t remember the name of
4) Toni and Guy, Dorchester
5) Slug and Lettuce, Bournemouth.

1 comment:

  1. My mum is a total coffee snob. She's a trained Barista who worked with Matthew Algi for a while and so works to their standards (which are high!) Whenever we go somewhere with Matthew Algi equipment she always judges them.

    I do find though that a lot of high street places burn their coffee which is just hideous.

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