starbucks iced tea
starbucks has plenty of problems, and it's trendy to piss on the trendy green giant, but since they threw that economics-ignorant "fair trade" coffee on the back burner, i don't have overriding complaints. starbucks management has also backed me in my endless fight with cops over late night WiFi'ng, telling one complaining cop (who called them the next day pursuing a "loitering" charge or whatever his dumb ass could concoct) that as a paying WiFi customer i was welcome to use their parking lot anytime; the signal's always on.anyway... i write this post to praise something starbucks gets right when many others fail: iced tea.
they call it shaken iced tea, and it usually is shaken (nice and bubbly on the top), but the great part from my experience is that it's never rotten. they pour dangerously hot water over tea bags at concentrated strength, keep it at room temperature (no more than 12 hours), and dilute it at delivery time. as i've written before (linked above), it's the brewing temperature that drives the nasties chain. some claim immediate refrigeration and crazy clean sanitation's the thing, but i disagree. IMO, and starbucks's record appears to bear it out, zapping with heat the inevitable bacteria and fungi in tea takes care of it well enough, especially if you're brewing in the storage container. according to the starbucks lady i interviewed (also a tea freak), the official crime syndicate limits restaurant room temp tea storage to 12 hours, but i've routinely done two days and more when brewing properly.
so if you, like me, are sick of rotten restaurant tea, drop by starbucks and see what sort of large iced tea you get for just over two bucks. as i recall, standard sweetener (simple syrup) for a large ("venti") is 6 pumps, so i usually order none or a 1-pump. if you want to try mine say, "venti black iced tea, 1-pump". refills are cheap or free, depending on if you register a starbucks card.
BTW, starbucks has quietly — in some locations noisily — become the largest ambassador of real jazz in the goonited states. they play some damned good, off the wall, stuff. decades ago i said that my ideal radio station would go from one crazy extreme to another, all over the place, with some room for pop music and whatever. starbucks routinely does this, albeit in block form. little too much repetition now and then (e.g., they were pushing sinatra last month), but mostly they are playing things i'm shocked the "partners" tolerate — hours and hours of chunky, sometimes outside, acoustic combo jazz from the old school heavies.
Labels: food
posted by saltypig @ 15:49
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