Greetings to the mystarbucksidea.com Community,
My name is Major and I’m lucky to have the unique opportunity to work in Global Coffee & Tea Education along with a small handful of other partners. Gauging from the votes and comments, there’s a strong desire to learn more about coffee. Luckily, that’s easy!
Your local store is a fantastic resource. All of our baristas are knowledgeable about a variety of coffees, and while we don’t have a set coffee class program in our stores, you can arrange to have our baristas take you through a guided tasting and help you in your personal coffee journey.
We do coffee tastings regularly here, and I thought I’d share one of my most recent and memorable experiences with you:
My colleague, Christian and I were invited to present a coffee education and tasting session for a group of 200 Foodservice Educators in North Las Vegas. We arranged for 30 local Starbucks baristas to help us.
We wanted to serve three different coffees all freshly made in coffee presses (clearly we needed as much help as we could get!) And the hotel chefs created special food pairings for each coffee—Organic Shade Grown Mexico was paired with a delicious lemon curd tart to enhance the coffee’s citrus notes, new Starbucks® Chocolates matched nicely with Caffé Verona® and mascarpone cheese matched the earthy elements in Sumatra.
Many, many coffee presses were prepared at exactly seven minutes prior to the tasting and three minutes remained to pour 600 samples, ensuring that the coffee was absolutely as fresh as possible. Everyone was set and ready to go.
Anticipating a grand entrance, we all hid behind the doors of the meeting room waiting for the precise moment to start serving. At the perfect moment, the doors flew open and the room was infused with an amazing coffee aroma while waves of green-aproned partners passed the coffee.
It was quite a rush of adrenaline be able to engage with so many people at once over a coffee tasting. For the next half hour we talked about the coffee attributes; how they smelled, how they felt when we sipped them and how they tasted with each food. It was magical and the excitement was contagious.
This may seem like a grandiose way to engage and learn about the geographical coffee flavor nuances, but all over the world, every day, baristas in our stores share this enthusiasm. So ask them. In your next visit, ask what pairs with your favorite coffee and what unique flavor notes to look for. You can even learn how to have your own coffee tasting at home (over brunch with friends) or at the office (as a team meeting ice breaker).
The key is to continue to share your passion and curiosity. Let me know through my mystarbucksidea.com if you have more ideas about classes or tastings and please keep me posted when you have some great experiences with our store partners.
Cheers…..major