Trip Report: Verve Coffee Roasters (downtown Santa Cruz, CA)
Posted by TheShot on 03 Jun 2012 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Roasting
Opening around Thanksgiving of 2011, this downtown location of Verve clearly ups the design aesthetics and sends a signal across the street of the venerable Lulu Carpenters. If only the coffee service could live up to everything else promised by visual pageantry here.
It’s a beautiful, open space with a prime location. A former curiosity shop (fruit baskets, etc.) called “Best of Everything Santa Cruz”, this space remained vacant for a number of years prior to Verve’s move-in. There’s a lot of exposed, unfinished wood integrated in its interior design (though less wood than, say, Sightglass) and bare, decorative hanging lightbulbs.
It’s an airy space with seating concentrated at stools and window counters along Pacific Ave. and Front St. There’s also larger wooden tables with affixed, movable seating that suggests a strange cross between a McDonald’s and a German biergarten. There’s a wall of merchandising, which includes a variety of freshly roasted coffees. And not that we’re big fans of marketing literature, but they oddly offer nothing for potential consumers to discriminate their different coffees. This becomes particularly perplexing when they offer roasts from four different El Salvador farms as when we visited. (For the record, we tried some of their El Salvador La Benedición, which we randomly purchased and recommend after some home trials.)
They showcase two gleaming three-group La Marzocco Strada machines, each accompanied by three Mazzer grinders featuring three different bean stocks. It’s not like their service counter doesn’t take the appropriate time — waits for an espresso shot can be 5-10 minutes even at 3pm on a Saturday. But the resulting shot, using their Sermon blend, had a tepid serving temperature, a thin medium brown crema with some limited texture, and a watered-down body that tastes of wet tobacco leaves. Served in notNeutral cups with a side of sparkling water.
It is surprisingly disappointing, given the quality at their mothership location, although not inconsistent with most places that opt to showcase modern pressure-control machines like the Strada or Slayer. (Too often we find that new toys or aesthetics can matter more than a good end product.) It certainly could be an off barista or one that refused to sink shot when they should have. But the overall experience leaves you with the impression that the emphasis and expense here are focused on the wrong, superficial things.
A setup like this with the results they produce are as wastefully aggrevating as the guy with the $60,000 Porsche roadster driving 55mph in a 65mph zone along US 101 — using the passing lane instead as a retirement lane to mentally check-out and avoid making any driving decisions. We will take a storebought roast with a cheap, used La Spaziale machine and a barista obsessive about perfecting his/her shot — and who knows how to use the equipment properly — over this puffed-up experience anyday. It may cost a mere $2.75, but when you can get comparable quality shots for $1.25, Verve is letting their standards and their customers down. Verve is clearly capable of much better, so a revisit is mandatory.
Read the review of Verve Coffee Roasters in downtown Santa Cruz.
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