"Folgers, Maxwell House, and Starbucks are America's best-selling ground coffees. But all three were iced by Eight O'Clock Colombian coffee in our taste tests. As for Starbucks, it didn't even place among the top regular coffees and trailed among decafs … Our tests of 19 coffees also show that some of the best cost the least. At about $6 per pound, Eight O'Clock costs less than half the price of Gloria Jean's, Peet's, and other more expensive brands."

Source: ConsumerReports.org ...

I am an unabashed fan of Starbucks coffee. I like it so much that I gladly pay their admittedly ludicrous prices; and I'm the Grand Poobah of cheapskates - just ask anybody! It makes me crazy when I hear people describe Starbucks coffee as bitter. News flash: That "bitter" taste you detect is what actual coffee tastes like. That stuff you THINK is coffee is really just coffee-colored hot water.

Consumer Reports is a great source of generic information about a lot of products, especially electronics and appliances. They're fantastic when it comes to things that can be objectively measured, such as the suction power of a vacuum cleaner. Too often, however, they try to evaluate subjective criteria like the taste of coffee. Nowhere is this more evident than in CR's automotive evaluations - inarguably the main focus of their entire business. I figured out years ago that CR was never going to give a favorable review to a pick-up truck because they couldn't find one that had the ride and handling characteristics of a Lincoln Town Car. Now, any true pick-up truck has a rail on frame suspension. This type of suspension is well suited for load carrying work vehicles, but will never deliver the smooth ride of a unibody suspension, despite the best efforts of automotive engineers. Any idiot that has ever walked down the aisle of a Home Depot understands this, and yet the writers at Consumer Reports have historically dissed the pick-up truck because of its uncomfortable ride characteristics.

(And for those of you who would take me to task for referring to CR as a business in the previous paragraph: Yes, I understand that they are a non-profit. But they're still a business in the sense that they make money to keep their staff employed and grow their organization. I know this is true because I get just as much junk mail from CR as my wife gets from Pottery Barn.)

Anybody that thinks 8 O'Clock Coffee is better than Starbucks knows as much about coffee beans as I know about astrophysics. CR's conclusions about coffee simply defy rational thinking.

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