On March 9th, Starbucks is dramatically changing the way they serve traditional brewed coffee in every company owned and licensed concept store in North America. During the afternoons, Starbucks baristas will shut down their automatic drip coffee makers brew decaf  and bold coffees on demand, utilizing new manual pour-over bars. It’s a move that will drastically decrease coffee waste. The Starbucks mucky-mucks are taking careful steps to ensure a smooth roll-out, courting the press and coffee schmuck doofus bloggers like your trusty Sprudge.com editors.

We were cordially invited to attend a special Pour Over Demonstration at a Starbucks outlet in West Seattle. We were greeted by a handful of  personable Starbucks representatives and generously given samples of the Pour Over product from Zachary, the store’s resident Coffee Master. Our editorial impressions:

1. The pour-over bar frame looks great. It looks strikingly similar to the TruBru system and Espresso Part’s Drip Station.

2. The pour-over device is made of diaphanous plastic. When asked if they’d considered using ceramic they gave us a stock response about how it’d take extra steps to “pre-heat the ceramic”. The focus here is on speed, as opposed to, say, taking a little bit more time to ensure that you aren’t tasting estrogen compounds from Bisphenol A.

3. The extraction is fast, but is it too fast? The bloom looked stunted, implying that the CO2 release that normally characterizes a pour-over is being sublimated in the name of speed and efficiency.

4. The coffee is pre-ground in air-tight canisters. Again, speed of service trumps all else.

5. They won’t be putting their pour-over systems on display. When asked why they plan to hide their stands behind the counter, they responded that the “theater” of pour-over display was best left to shops like 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea and Roy Street Coffee. This pretty clearly differentiates what Starbucks is going for with their pour-over system (speed, reduced waste) with what Melissa Allison refers to as the “slow coffee” application of pour-overs in specialty coffee houses.

6. The pour-overs at Starbucks taste noticeably better than what they’re serving in their BUNN urns, particularly when comparing a fresh pour-over with urn coffee at the end of its half hour “freshness cycle”.

7. The baristas will not be pre-wetting their Miletta filters. It doesn’t take a Mark Prince to tell you this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Our overall impression? It’s like a custom tailored monogrammed menswear shirt from Old Navy. It’s nice, sure, but it’s still kind of a piece of shit.

Full disclosure: In the course of researching this aricle, your Sprudge.com editors received promotional gift bags from the Starbucks Corporation. We spent our gift cards on beer at 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea and thus far we’ve enjoyed the fabulous samba compilation.

The post Pour Over and Over and Over: Coming to 11,000 Starbucks Near You appeared first on Sprudge.com.