As part of opening a coffee house, one key bit of research is to visit other area coffee houses and determine what they do well/poorly. Here in my town, we have about sixty houses from local mom-and-pops to the Big Green Mermaid. I’ve visited them all.
Today I started to revisit the shops I visited back when I knew nothing of coffee. What a difference two years makes.
While I’m still not to the level I’d like to be, my palate has certainly trained itself to distinguish good coffee from bad coffee. Today’s coffee was bad. Stale and lifeless, the beans had obviously been ground for some time; easily a few days. It tasted the same today as it did two years ago. To my palate two years ago, though, it tasted like any other coffee.
The moral? Continuously drink better coffee; today’s brew becomes tomorrow’s swill.