Trip Report: Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea @ Millennium Park (Chicago, IL)
Posted by TheShot on 01 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
If Peet’s Coffee & Tea has been a slow-growth contrast to Starbucks‘ cancerous proliferation in recent years, Intelligentsia’s expansion has been deliberately glacial. And why not? You get big, you get less selective about your coffee growers and suppliers. You start accepting employees with fewer skills and less passion about truly good coffee. And how’s a budding barista champion supposed to develop in that environment?
Intelligentsia’s Millennium Park location in Chicago is just their fourth installment; they now have three in Chicago and one in Los Angeles. Inside, there’s a bit of space — it’s a modern space compared with their other locations. But little of the floorspace is dedicated to seating: it’s mostly a wall display of colorful bags of roasted coffee, a few tables along one edge of the floor plan, and a relatively generous-sized serving area for those preparing coffee.
Using dueling orange, three-group La Marzocco FB70s, they pull short espresso shots with a richly textured, medium-to-dark brown crema of modest thickness. It has an intensely robust aroma, with a sweet flavor of molasses and almost syrup-like qualities. Definitely lives up to the Intelligentsia standard. And yes, they also have a Clover and feature the roasted single origin varietals for it.
Read the review of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea at Millennium Park.
5 Comments »
on 03 Jan 2008 at 11:32 pm -06:00T 1.Man Seeking Coffee said …
I love this location and went there every day I stayed downtown a while back. I know that The Shot goes for the espresso, but something particularly pleasing at Intelligentsia is that they’ll serve any of their restaurant blends on the clover. I found this a particularly pleasing waste to capture a bit of the many of the higher end restaurants around Chicago at a single sitting.
on 04 Jan 2008 at 4:04 pm -06:00T 2.TheShot said …
Ah, the Clover. Thanks for catching that oversight.
on 04 Jan 2008 at 6:44 pm -06:00T 3.javajohn said …
“You get big, you get less selective about your coffee growers and suppliers.”
That’s actually funny. I’m sure you didn’t mean for it to come across that way, but it is. You think Starbucks [or even Peet's] is in the coffee business because they’re passionate about coffee? They’re passionate about stock options, bonuses and making a bundle before the ‘next thing’ comes along and suddenly this java boom goes to bust and it’s all over. These guys are in it for the money - and don’t ever kid yourself that they’re not. Sure, they love a good cup of coffee and play the ‘quality’ game because it sells coffee, beans, drinks, cd’s and whatever - but in the end, Howard Schultz + Company want to make as many billions as they can.
on 05 Jan 2008 at 12:34 am -06:00T 4.TheShot said …
It is unfair to criticize a business simply because it is trying to make a profit. Whether you are a coffee roaster or a maker of airline parts, it’s not feasible for most people to run their living as a charity.
And running a viable business that keeps shareholders happy and thus keeps your employees in decent jobs is an endeavor full of headaches. People are often too quick to hold companies to standards that they would never hold for themselves.
That said, my reference was most certainly a reference to some of your names, and Starbucks in particular. The challenge of growth at all costs is that your quality standards have to drop — to find suppliers large enough to offer a semi-consistent cup at your countless stores, for the level of skill in the volume of employees that you have to hire on a daily basis, etc.
In Starbucks’ case, there are pockets of people who are still passionate about coffee. But they are finding themselves more and more in the minority. There are very few jobs at Starbucks anymore that would attract anyone who is really passionate about good quality coffee.
on 05 Jan 2008 at 11:04 pm -06:00T 5.Skip said …
This place looks awesome, forwarding the info to a friend in Chicago.