For the Sixth Coffee of Christmas my barista made for me…

I also put today’s review on Yelp: Starbucks @ Yelp

The Coffee: Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha

The Shop: Starbucks located at 1240 University Avenue, San Diego, CA 92103

The Espresso Shots: Um, yeah. Well at least I gave them a try right? A for effort … on my part that is. The espresso shots, and I’m truly not being a hater here by saying this … abysmal, utterly and totally abysmal. So sad and weak & watery. These shots only get a 1 out of 5 stars.

Where has the art of coffee gone from Starbucks? Everything is done in the name of speed. Even steaming the milk … cause that’s all they do, stick it up on the counter and let the wand make it hot … come on, really? The attendant, err, I mean “barista”, even threw in the extra shot and I was really shocked by how watery it still all was.

The Drink: On to the Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha, as far as taste and holiday spirit, 3 stars … and only because it really did taste like a candy cane stuck into a hot chocolate and it’s really hard to say that’s a bad thing. I did of course have to add my left over shots that I was going to just toss out into the drink to make it have a hint of a coffee taste.

All in all, while the staff was definitely efficient & “polite” (not very friendly though), and I did enjoy the Holiday Coffee Special I’d ordered … I will never get straight shots from Starbucks again and probably no other espresso-based drinks either, unfortunately.

My personal palette does tend to lean towards smooth and mellow, yet earthy with a hint of smoky … meaning I usually love Indonesian coffee, Sumatra in particular and so that should be taken into account when reading my reviews.

MCP Ratings

About MyCoffeePro

My Coffee Pro offers consulting, design and marketing services for the coffee industry.

Our mission is to expand the coffee professionals knowledge base through education, experience and real-world examples extracted from diverse specialty coffee aficionados.