For the better part of a year, a running gag from the casual coffee lovers who know me is to ask, “So have you tried McDonald’s espresso yet? How does it rate?” Mostly they ask as a curious, sick joke — knowing that I subject myself to the worst kinds of coffee punishment. But now that I have donated my taste buds to science once again, it may be surprising to many of them that I’ve definitely had a lot worse.

Which isn’t saying a whole lot. But this is McDonald’s we’re talking about — one of the world’s most vilified entities in the fights against worldwide obesity, factory farming, and environmental atrocities. Up until recently, we’ve long remarked how visiting the McDonald’s Web site was like viewing an inner city billboard advertising cigarettes: nowhere was there a mention of anything so much as a hamburger, but there were plenty of glossy lifestyle photos of ethnic-friendly families and friends — enraptured in open-mouthed, white-toothed laughter — frolicking about at hillside picnics and poolside parties. By branding themselves like cigarettes, how was that not like a McDonald’s admission of guilt?

We suppose the good news today is that the company with the audacity to create the “Shamrock Shake” now proudly announces the new “Third Pounder” on their Web site. (Because we apparently don’t feel we’re getting fat fast enough on a diet of Quarter Pounders? The Three Pounder can only be around the corner.) But the McCafé concept is heavily promoted on the site as well.

The 16-year-old McCafé concept

And McDonald’s has invested heavily in the U.S. rollout of the McCafé concept. Although much of McDonald’s PR campaign in the States tries to brand the McCafé as “new!”, it is anything but. The McCafé was first spawned in 1993 in Australia, infiltrated some countries in Europe, and it was first introduced to the U.S. in 2001. Since its U.S. introduction, McDonald’s has opened and quickly shuttered various McCafés across the country — such as the one that opened in Mountain View in December 2003 and shut down just 14 months later.

The first generation of U.S. McCafés were dedicated, separate chain stores. McDonald’s latest move has been to integrate the McCafé as a workstation within existing McDonald’s — first starting with suburban McDonald’s chains with more real estate and less coffee competition. The McCafé has arrived in San Francisco, however, and we chose a downtown location for our first experiment.

The tepid and stock flavors of McCafé

The branding for McCafé was laid on thick and heavy. And not uncommon to McDonald’s in expensive commercial real estate districts, this is a tight spot with mirrored walls trying to make the place seem less like a closet. In front is an ever-present refugee-from-a-methadone-clinic as your doorman. (For tips, of course.) In part, the attraction for voluntary doormen is due to the heavy tourist traffic that flows through here — a lot of it from Asia for some odd reason. And at one corner of their serving station is the McCafé setup.

The McCafé signs even provide an espresso-drink-ordering procedure as follows:

1. Size
2. Drink
3. Milk
4. Syrup

Naturally, for us it was only steps #1 & #2, and they use dueling superautomatic Franke machines to pull shots with a large pour size and a blonde, even crema. The existence of any crema thickness was actually a little surprising, given the machines and staff skills, even if its color is way off. Served in a large, insulated McCafé-branded paper cup, it has a tepid flavor of cedar and some pepper. While it isn’t ashy, like some Starbucks and their blackened coffees, it is one-dimensional but not entirely unpleasant. Their ads may call out “the bold and rich flavors of McCafé,” but we find that statement to be accurate only if you’ve been mostly nursed on Maxwell House.

Their coffee is supplied by three main roasters — Distant Lands, Gaviña, and S&D Coffee. And just as McDonald’s buys food staples from multiple suppliers in huge lots to blend out the flavor profile to a single, consistent stew spread across entire nations, their coffee is little different. Although their supply chain for coffee appears to be a lot more thoughtful than the one for, say, beef, another difference is that McDonald’s makes bigger, nameless vats of “mutt” coffee from multiple suppliers who each produce vast nameless lots of “mutt” coffee.

When McDonald’s can make espresso this mediocre, who needs Starbucks? Or Nespresso?

But as we mentioned up top, the espresso here may not be good, but it isn’t outright awful. And therein lies the marketing foolishness of Starbucks: years of dumbing down their product to fill an ever-expanding armada of cafés has made it rather push-button and brain-dead. So much so, that any fast food chain with an ounce of ambition, such as McDonald’s, can make a relatively legitimate quality play for their customers. Slap on a recession and a cheaper price tag, and Starbucks is suddenly dog-paddling to stay afloat in the deep, rapid waters of fast food competition.

McDonald’s espresso quality also depreciates the value of many superautomatic home espresso machines, such as the Nespresso. Why should consumers spend hundreds of dollars on a home machine, plus a subscription of premium-priced coffee capsules, to essentially achieve McDonald’s quality at a similar price point? That just doesn’t cut it.

In a way, this all makes us commend McDonald’s espresso for helping to draw back the curtain on the “Great Oz” of Starbucks — or superautomated home machines such as the Nespresso system. When you are charging a premium for your product, or if you are promoting it as some premium espresso experience, you had better set your standards above McDonald’s (for crying out loud) to be taken seriously.

While we would never go to a McDonald’s McCafé for the espresso unless we were extremely desperate, we like the McCafé if for nothing other than shining some humbling truth behind the many hot-air claims of “luxury” mass-produced espresso out on the market today.

Read the review of McDonald’s at 609 Market St. in San Francisco.

Last week, the Contra Costa Times published an article announcing the Bay Area arrival of McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks: McDonald’s new coffee drinks ignite breakfast wars – ContraCostaTimes.com. Of course, none of this info is really new, so we’re a bit perplexed over how someone can “ignite” something with a two-year-long fuse. But the article cites some local coffee lovers who didn’t find McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks up to the task.

Is anyone surprised? We already have the McDonald’s of specialty coffee: it’s called Starbucks.

The article also highlighted one of the more ridiculous aspects of the consumer marketing industry: the art of packaging everything as a “solution”. Quoting Matthew Ramerman, principal of HL2, a Seattle-based advertising agency that focuses on restaurant chains: “Consumers have been saying ‘I’m looking for a breakfast solution.’” Huh?!

Perhaps CoffeeRatings.com has missed this all along: all we’re really looking for is an espresso solution. It reminds me of an old joke I used to tell my marketing friends: “It’s not a chair, it’s a seating solution.”

The reporter also interviewed Michaele Weissman, author of a forthcoming book called God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. Which, curiously enough, sounds a lot like like last month’s release of Instaurator’s The Espresso Quest, proving just how difficult it is to come up with an original idea.

We received our copy of The Espresso Quest in the mail from Australia a couple weeks back and are still well behind posting a book review here any time soon. But stay tuned… Miracles can happen.

What a strange newsweek it’s been in the coffee world. The best way to characterize it?: What’s old is suddenly new again.

Tuesday we had Starbucks’ latest cry for attention/help/suicide prevention with their mysterious “04.08.08″-on-a-lame-paper-cup campaign. Essentially, the publicity stunt announced the launch of their “new” Pike Place Roast and a “new” return to the old brown-and-white mermaid branding. Yet Starbucks’ Pike Place Roast is something that at least Seattle-area residents have been familiar with for years already, and their “new” branding campaign just underscores the delusions CEO Howard Schultz is having about turning back the clock — making him coffee’s Norma Desmond. (A much better Starbucks post this week also came from the past: the opening of the first Starbucks.)

Then in London on Wednesday, the ever-tiresome kopi luwak story again reared it’s ugly, old head, and hundreds of newspaper editors and bloggers fawned and giggled over it like they just discovered flatulence. What kind of a rock do you have to be living under to miss the first 37,000 times the story of this “new” coffee novelty gag was exhumed over the past ten years on the Internet? Odds are that it hasn’t yet dawned on these people that the 41st and the 43rd American presidents are actually different George Bushes who invaded Iraq. But we can almost forgive these waves of sophomoric, scatological snickers when compared with David Cooper at Peter Jones, who decided to brew Jamaican Blue Mountain as an espresso — which is a bit like driving a Lamborghini in an off-road 4×4 rally.

Not to be outdone, today McDonald’s announced “free latte Fridays” in Western Washington state. After nearly seven years of unqualified U.S. failures, McDonald’s is still trying to convince us that their McCafé concept is “new” and going to rock the world of “unsnobby” espresso lovers across the country.

Putting the “new” back in “news,” or: “Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1991″

So what to post this week that wasn’t some gimmick or publicity stunt retread? How about something truly new to discuss: the coffee scene in Kiev, Ukraine: UNIAN – ”Coffee mania” floods Kyiv.

The article, from the Ukrainian UNIAN news agency, notes the burgeoning coffee scene in the capital city — where coffee shops in the city center are now as little as 30 meters apart. But reading through their list and description of area coffee shops, we had flashbacks to the coffee house reviews in San Francisco from the late 1980s/early 1990s. Back then, it was enough just to mention that a café offered coffee — the rest was some rant about ambiance, where you could read Kant, and what food was on the menu.

But we suppose even that is cultural progress in a nation’s appreciation for good coffee; things could be a lot worse. Take Vietnam, for example. Today Vietnam’s leading coffee producer and exporter, Vinacafe Bien Hoa, announced that they have made the world’s largest cup of coffee: Vietnam makes world’s largest cup of coffee _English_Xinhua. Said “cup” apparently holds some 3,613 liters of coffee — or the equivalent of one horribly overextracted doppio shot of Vietnamese robusta espresso.

No word yet on whether Howard Schultz, not to be outdone, has purchased this massive cup of coffee for Starbucks’ next publicity stunt.

UPDATE: Nov. 25, 2008
In the unclear-on-the-concept category, next month Bien Hoa Vinacoffee will once again pull the “largest cup of coffee in the world” publicity stunt: World’s largest coffee cup comes back for a refill – Vietnam Business Finance. But bizarrely, the cited article quotes the following:

In showing the world its largest cup of coffee, Vinacoffee wants to send a message about the quality and position of Vietnamese coffee, said Nguyen Thanh Tung, the marketing manager of Bien Hoa Vinacoffee.

So Bien Hoa Vinacoffee’s logic here is that they convey a message of “quality” through an obscenely large swimming pool full of coffee. Perhaps the only way to top that is to make it “to-go” in a paper cup.

One of the worst-kept secrets of the past few years is that McDonald’s has been trying to get into the espresso business. Today, news services such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that McDonald’s plans to launch coffee bars with the new employee position of “barista”: McDonald’s coffee bars to take on Starbucks: report | Reuters.

Undoubtedly, McDonald’s will hire or convert thousands minimum wage employees who couldn’t tell a robusta from a McSkillet, give them about two hours of training, and place them behind boxy, push-button, superautomated espresso machines producing paper cups full of a rather watered-down, ashy brew that barely resembles espresso. In turn, some of them will then master the art of “dishwater” milk frothing and graduate to making cappuccinos and lattes. In other words, McDonald’s is going to follow in Starbucks‘ footsteps.

Well, more power to the clown. Even if we still think McDonald’s is misguided in trying to refashion Ronald into a Happy-Meal-peddling pusher of lowest common denominator espresso. Starbucks, who in the past has verbally invited the McDonald’s challenge, will now truly discover how far their espresso quality — and ability to differentiate their product — has fallen after years of massive tradeoffs made to support their insanely ambitious expansion plans. Maybe not enough to shake off Starbucks’ most loyal customers, but enough to keep them bleeding. (Though if McDonald’s adds Wi-Fi at their Playlands, who knows?)

The downside is that we’re not looking forward to having to sample a few of McDonald’s offerings — the sacrifice required for the sake of research and completeness of our database of comparative espresso reviews. Well, that and paper-hatted employees with bad acne telling us in their pubescent cracking voices, “Would you like four pumps of vanilla and caramel syrup with that?”

UPDATE: 4:15pm PST
Now that Jim Donald got the axe as Starbucks CEO, with chairman Howard Schultz to replace him, this just got more interesting: Starbucks Founder Returns as Chief – New York Times. Starbucks shareholders are pinning their hopes that Schultz is the coffee industry’s equivalent to Steve Jobs.

Now just because their national holiday ad campaign has ended, don’t think that Starbucks has given up their Pass The Cheer spirit. They will Pay It Forward on Mr. Donald’s golden parachute for some time to come.

Power to the espressophiles in New Zealand. A story in today’s news from New Zealand supports our longtime lament that cups really do matter when it comes to coffee quality: Burger King burned over coffee advertisement – New Zealand, world, sport, business & entertainment news on Stuff.co.nz.

A New Zealand consumer, B Hay, recently complained that advertising posters within (and company brochures from) New Zealand’s various Burger King outlets prominently featured their offering of “Illy Branded Coffee” — picturing the coffee in an Illy-branded porcelain cup and saucer. Mr. Hay noted that the coffee ordered was served in a “horrible” paper cup, and thus the advertisements were misleading. Burger King claimed that the coffee was only available in paper cups and that they were required to use the image of the demitasse under an Illy licensing agreement.

Mr. Hay was clearly being a pain in the ass about issue. However, the New Zealand Complaints Board upheld Mr. Hay’s complaint, saying that “the serving vessel was an integral part of the enjoyment of certain beverages such as coffee, wine and tea, and drinking any of these from a paper or plastic vessel would be likely to diminish the experience considerably.” The Complaints Board thus found Burger King “in breach of Rule 2 of the Code of Ethics, relating to truthful presentation.”

To which CoffeeRatings.com can only reply, “My (burger) kingdom for an adult cup!”

Starbucks executives bristle at the suggestion that their corporation represents the fast food of coffee. (This despite lamenting memos from the chairman to the contrary.) But when was the last time Starbucks made a corporate decision that favored quality over quantity?

Case and point … the new chocolate partnership Starbucks announced this week: Starbucks, Hershey to offer coffee-flavored chocolate products in the U.S. – International Herald Tribune. Starbucks claims this deal will help them better pursue customers “looking for indulgence”. But indulgence from Hershey’s? Those “artisans” of assembly-line milk chocolate, who brought us the ubiquitous mega packs of fun size candy bars given away for free every Halloween? Well, perhaps if by “indulgence” they mean a Triple Whopper with cheese…

(OK, some of you chocolate aficionados will cite Hershey’s 2005 purchase of Scharffen Berger, but buying quality doesn’t count. Just look at what Starbucks did with the acquisition of Torrefazione Italia. Scharffen Berger fans are still dismayed by the sell-out.)

Starbucks acts as if they’re on a relentless mission to erode the quality promise their brand established over a decade ago — from weaker and weaker coffee standards, to drive-thru outlets found in gas stations, to downmarket partnering with America’s greatest purveyor of quantity-over-quality chocolate. If Starbucks brushes off the threat of coffee competitors in the fast food industry, why do they seem hell bent on becoming indistinguishable from their fast food “non-competitors”? (Archrivals storm Starbucks – BusinessWeek Online – MSNBC.com.)

Meanwhile in the news, financial analysts suspect that Starbucks will need to raise their prices once again to improve their flagging operating margins (and stagnant stock price): Price of your caffeine fix at Starbucks could be headed higher. These are rough times to be a Starbucks shareholder. Perhaps their only hope now is for Verismo to make a superautomatic espresso machine with a giant clown head that will take your double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato order.

UPDATE: July 24, 2007
Sure enough, Starbucks announced yesterday that it plans to raise prices 9 cents this month: Starbucks raises beverage prices 9 cents – USATODAY.com. Operating profit margins and same store sales must definitely be hurting at the company.

Here’s a nominee for the 2007 Unclear on the Concept Award. In a reactive move to competitors who have successfully upgraded their coffee service (such as McDonald’s), the Wendy’s fast food chain has proudly announced an agreement to serve Folgers coffee to expand their breakfast offerings: Wendy’s to Begin Brewing Folgers Coffee ((BKC), McDonald’s Corp. (MCD), Wendy’s International Inc. (WEN), (US580135)) | SmartMoney.com. Yes, you read that right: Folgers.

If you’re going upmarket to appeal to customers’ newfound tastes for better coffee, why would you choose a brand that consumers most commonly identify as something your cat-food-eating Great Aunt Agnes makes from a $10, 39-oz can she bought in 1993? This should have been a Folgers’ press release, not one from Wendy’s.

I’ve lamented the bizarre insistence on paper-cups-only service by so many espresso retailers in America. Adding insult to injury, according to yesterday’s Deutsche Welle, now even the McDonald’s in Germany are breaking out the porcelain cups: McDonald’s Jazzes Up Restaurants Amid Anti-Union Accusations | Business | Deutsche Welle | 11.04.2007.

The news of Starbucks‘ death has been greatly exaggerated.

That’s all I could think of when reading the media and blogosphere response over the past week to an executive memo written by Starbucks’ founder and corporate chairman, Howard Schultz (as reported here on Feb. 24). In the memo, the founder lamented the loss of Starbucks’ “romance” for the sake of rampant, metastasis-like growth — citing the infiltration of superautomatic Verismo machines, bagged coffee, and cookie-cutter store designs. The memo was leaked as a sort of PR stunt; Starbucks first floated it out, leaving it up to public interpretation to see if it had the desired effect, and only afterwards did the corporation verify the memo’s authenticity.

But why was this suddenly breaking news to everyone?! Are people so mindless before their morning cup of caffeine that they’ve walked into Starbucks like automatons for the past dozen years — not noticing Starbucks’ relentless execution on their massive growth plan at the expense of quality?

“Yo! This is Mars Blackmon and I’m chilling with my main man, Howard Schultz!
Yo, Howard, what makes Starbucks the biggest coffeehouse in the universe?”

While some see this as reason to start sifting through the Starbucks ashes (kind of like drinking their coffee, in fact), I am not about to feel sorry for Starbucks making money hand-over-fist. It’s not like this “news” has halted any of their plans to double their growth plans to over 40,000 cafés. But for the marketing wonks who try to justify every business success as a deliberate brand strategy, the memo did not sit well with them — there are things to be fixed and professions to justify. (Meanwhile, shareholders keep counting the money.)

Sure, there are those who lament the watering down of the Mercedes-Benz brand when their automotive offerings started going downmarket to entice new customers. But that has hardly hurt their pocketbooks. An elitist brand is worthless without a profitable base of mass consumer appeal. As in The Big Night, while Primo lamented the rape of cuisine going on at a rival Italian restaurant, consumers were passing on the risotto and opening their wallets for spaghetti & meatballs.

“Is it the machines?!” “No, Mars.”

Among these lamenting marketing wonks is a pair of former Starbucks marketing guys who surprisingly knew very little about what made Starbucks successful. They’ve gone so far as to ridiculously suggest that Starbucks replace their Verismo machines with the return of their old La Marzocco lines (“Starbucks should put the Verisimo automated espresso machines in higher-volume stores and put the La Marzocco manual machines in lower-volume stores”).

The genie is already out of the bottle, folks. Starbucks “going back” is akin to asking Gorbachev to roll back Perestroika (Gorbachev being my favorite Starbucks analogy) because too many of Putin’s critics are ending up dead and glowing. Today Starbucks has some 140,000 employees. Can you imagine the complete chaos, and expense, if even just 20,000 of their low-wage, push-button employees were suddenly asked to operate sophisticated machinery? May as well give every bicycle commuter in Ho Chi Minh City a Volvo and tell them to drive to work tomorrow.

“Is it the baristas?! It’s gotta be the baristas!” ” “No, Mars…it’s not the baristas.”

Some of the branding recommendations even include showcasing some of Starbucks’ best baristas (“Starbucks must give permission to store partners to showcase their flair and personality while on the bar”). Really — only a few of us coffee geeks, an unprofitable minority, even care about these things. To the rest of the world, a “barista” is hardly an elevated profession. Due to the likes of Starbucks, the barista has become a modern symbol of downscale jobs, skills, and wages; coffee’s version of the minimum wage McDonald’s fry cook.

More to the point, there just aren’t enough quality baristas to go around — particularly for the volume that a massive chain like Starbucks would need. The best ones wouldn’t be caught dead in a behemoth such as Starbucks … and would work elsewhere for better tips and appreciation.

The other marketing wonk proposal is that Starbucks differentiate between their retail stores. But that would just create a bizarre Starbucks caste system — defeating many of the business goals of their ubiquity. Launch “Starbucks Select” (gag, cough, spew), and the Starbucks brand becomes a liability at the high end of the market. Take a page from The Gap and differentiate between your Banana Republic’s and Old Navy’s (e.g., call it “Howard’s Grand Café”), and these quality efforts become completely dissociated with their flagship brand and add nothing to its eroding value.

“Money, it’s gotta be differentiation!” “No, Mars.”

So Starbucks is naturally under attack from the likes of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts; that’s to be expected. You’re making a boatload of money, and others are following suit to ride your commercial coattails. You’re going to attract imitators, but that’s the price of success. “Romance” has nothing to do with it. I would argue that if Starbucks didn’t take the low road of mass production and commercialization, their company would have been run roughshod by today’s upstarts who run quality circles around them at the high end of the market.

So here’s my advice, Howard. Forget us coffee elitists. You clearly abandoned all hope of keeping us engaged many years ago, and it’s hardly hurt your bottom line. We fled your brand with no intention of ever turning back. (No hard feelings — we just agreed to part ways a long time ago.)

And the superautomatic machines? So what! — just keep the drinks coming fast and in a “clown-free” environment. Keep on cranking out the double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiatos and your broad array of coffee-flavored beverages. Note that I did not say “coffee” — as your profits are in coffee-flavored milkshakes, not in single shots of espresso. As I mentioned before, most people really don’t like coffee anyway. A key ingredient to your success has been convincing your customers that they do like coffee — just your version of it.

Stay true to these facts and you’ll be nicknamed “Money” for many years to come.

(Apologies to Mars Blackmon for the preceeding subheads — taken from recent conversations with Howard Schultz about what makes Starbucks what it is today.)

Some say the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. By that standard, McDonald’s executives should be fitted for straight-jackets and kept away from the plastic knives and forks in their fast-food restaurants.

Despite repeated failures of McDonald’s McCafé in America since 2001, bull-headed McDonald’s execs are doing their best to outdo Sony’s Mini-Disc fiasco-that-wouldn’t-die: McDonald’s to expand espresso service across U.S. | Reuters. This time, McDonald’s excuse to try reanimating the corpse again is their financial and taste-test success of their premium drip coffee.

A Dow Jones Industrial Average blue chip stock must continue to find growth for their shareholders from somewhere, especially when same-store sales go dead in the water. This is what got GE into the unplugged businesses of trailer rentals and leasing contracts. Here McDonald’s Corporation seems bent on turning their fast-food restaurants into entire shopping mall food courts, even if consumers aren’t interested.

UPDATE: July 14, 2007
OK, so maybe McCafé has been a multi-time failure in the U.S.. But the Japanese don’t know any better and can perhaps save the egos of some of our McDonald’s execs!: McDonald’s to Convert Some Japan Locations Into Cafes (Update1) – Bloomberg.com: Worldwide.