I wrote an article a while ago about my 4 favorite Starbucks coffee beans and why I enjoy each of them so much.
Starbucks isn’t my favorite coffee, but as we all know, it’s pretty popular.
I guess when you see a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks they’re doing something right!?
There are at least 12 kinds of Starbucks coffee beans, excluding the holiday blends and other specialty ones that come around, so we have a pretty wide selection when we’re purchasing from the coffee giant.
For this article, I thought I’d share with you 4 kinds of Starbucks coffees to avoid! This is just based on my personal taste, but I’ll do my best to explain to you why these are less than delicious in my opinion 🙂
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Usually I like talking about things that I love, but I’ll try to help you out here and save you 10 or 15 bucks on sour, burnt, or otherwise dull or bad coffee!
Let’s jump right in…
#1 – Veranda
This ever-so-popular and overly promoted Starbucks coffee is labeled as a blonde roast.
In technical terms, this basically means it’s under-roasted and is probably slightly lacking in flavor.
Ok just kidding. But seriously, Starbucks really, really promotes Veranda.
When I look on the shelves for whole beans at Starbucks, usually this gloriously inglorious coffee usually occupies two rows instead of one, like the rest of the coffees.
It’s also the first coffee listed on their ‘Whole Bean Coffees’ page… Can someone explain this to me? Because I still can’t figure out what’s so great about it!
I’m not a fan of Veranda because it’s a very light roast. It feels slightly tasteless. Also, because it’s a very light roast… it’s also quite acidic.
So it has more of a sour taste and it can be hard on your stomach if you’re prone to that.
This coffee is seriously overrated. The flavor is way too mellow for my taste. It might be Starbucks trying to cater more to people who think that their coffees are too smokey or “burnt”…
#2 – Pike Place
Here’s another popular one with Starbucks.
The famous Pike Place Roast is always flowing freely on tap if you buy a brewed coffee at a Starbucks location.
In my opinion, they could make a better choice for their coffee of the day, but they’re just wild about Pike Place I guess!
I’m not quite so wild about it. It’s a pretty ok coffee as far as coffee goes, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not great in my opinion. I’d say it’s mediocre at best.
In my other article where I mention my 4 favorite Starbucks flavors, most of them are dark roasts. I think Starbucks does great with dark roast coffees generally.
Pike place is a medium roast that has a pretty nice mouthfeel and body, but again the flavor is lacking a bit.
It has some smokey flavor, and Starbucks says in their description that it’s a well-balanced coffee. But when I taste it, I feel like the flavors are pretty muddled.
Nothing really seems to stand out too much with this coffee. As I said, it’s not horrible, but if you are buying a bag of Starbucks coffee to brew at home there are much better coffees to get!
They brew enough of it in the stores anyway…
#3 – Breakfast Blend
Yet another one that Starbucks tries to proudly tout to its customers.
And again, my song for this one is similar to the other ones!
It has an ok toasty flavor, it also has an ok citrusy tang and finish.
But yet again, the flavor just doesn’t do it for me. It might be that Starbucks tries hard to get a well-balanced or complex flavor with these coffees, or something like that.
But with breakfast blend, there is a zest to it, but there’s something missing.
It’s another coffee that has some ok flavor notes to it, but it still feels hollow overall. There are some great choices to go with for a morning pick me up, but in my opinion Breakfast Blend doesn’t cut it.
Like I said, it’s yet again a matter of a muddled flavor that doesn’t really shine or sing to me…
#4 – French Roast
Yes, a dark roast coffee made it to my list!
If you know me, you know that I love a good dark roast coffee.
And Starbucks has some great dark roasts! Komodo Dragon, Italian Roast, Sumatra, Caffe Verona, these are some excellent coffees.
French Roast is about the darkest roast of coffee you can get. The thing about French Roast is that… sometimes I really like having a good strong cup of French Roast coffee.
But, when I have bought it and brewed it day after day for almost every cup of coffee I was having, it very quickly became way too much!
I love a nice smoky coffee, but the bottom line is that French Roast has a little bit too much smokiness, to put it lightly. It’s actually the only flavor that I can even notice when I drink it, just SMOKY.
It’s so smoky it’ll make you cough! Ok it’s just a joke, but who knows maybe it really will!
I would call French Roast a ‘once in a while’ type of coffee….
There Are Better Coffees
Again, if you take a look at my article about my top 4 Starbucks recommendations for whole bean coffee, you can find some great ones there.
I often don’t just go with trends and passing fads, and I feel like that’s the case with Starbucks coffee too!
The coffees that Starbucks really puts out there are the main ones that I don’t particularly enjoy. I think overall Starbucks coffee can be hit or miss. But I hope that this article helps you.
My question for you is, what’s your favorite Starbucks coffee?
I always enjoy hearing from you. If you have any questions or comments, or if you disagree with me, I would love to hear from you! We’re all on this coffee journey together, friends.
Thanks for reading, coffee cheers!
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