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we have five different cups of coffee here from five different supplies you're smelling them all when you're smelling them is there anything you're noticing just from smelling them yeah like um so one of the things I can assess pretty quickly is how darkly the coffee has been roasted when you have uh the longer you leave coffee and a roasting machine the darker the color of the beans will be and for a long time I think people associated darker roasts with better coffee. Oilier beans looked kind of fancier, whereas it's swung the other way and lighter roasts now are considered better or more expensive because they kind of preserve more of the inherent qualities of the raw materials. Um, so these are all reasonably dark roasts just from smell, so I can kind of gauge the smells I'm coming off there. There are more in the kind of heavier, not burnt smells. Well, some of them actually smell a little bit burnt and kind of uh, harsh, but nothing's particularly fruity or floral smelling. So it's just for me a kind of gauge of where things are going to be, so there's going to be an expectation with that of bitterness.
In perfume shops they give us sometimes coffee beans to smell to kind of try and wash out our, yeah, nasal senses, I guess. Does that work? Yeah, it totally does. We are, it's why dog sniff really fast, that you're looking for change. Your sense of smell works quite well on change. And so yes, you will get what's called suppression: if you smell the same kind of smells over and over, they become less and less intense. It's why people end up wearing too much of the same perfume they've worn for 20 years, because they can't literally smell it anymore. We can't, and it's also evidenced when you go for a run and then, because you can smell yourself, you have to ask your friend if you smell. So, Dave, do I stink? Do I? Yeah. Because your brain, your nose, I guess, is habituated to the smell.
There's a good hack if you ever want to break apart how something like Coca-Cola smells. If you take a component smell of Coca-Cola, like lime, right, because Coke just tastes like Coke to people, but it's actually lime, neroli, cinnamon, orange, nutmeg, and if you smell a bunch of cinnamon and then smell Coke, it smells weird because you've deleted cinnamon from Coca-Cola's aroma profile. You can do that with, say, lime and smell, and it's like, whoa, I've thrown the balance out by deleting and suppressing that. It's a dull but fun kind of trick.
The interesting thing with talking about Coca-Cola there is, I remember those Coke and Pepsi studies from back in the day where people would rate Pepsi as tasting better unless they had it in a Coke can. So when they could see the brand of the Coca-Cola, they rated it better, but when they could see it in a plastic cup, they rated Pepsi better. And I wonder here as well, because you don't know what these coffees are, you don't know what brands they are. Neither do I. Yeah, um, what the results are going to be.
So coffee number one. Yes, have a taste and a smell. So that's to me a pretty standard kind of commercial coffee taste. There's not a lot going on there, relatively high in bitterness to me. I'd say that's a fairly bitter cup of coffee, and that's coming, I would say, mostly from the roast. If something's good or bad, it can be bad because it wasn't made that well that day, it could be bad because it was not great raw materials, and finding why is sometimes tricky. I wouldn't say it's a particularly expensive cup of coffee. No, it didn't taste particularly, you can say that. I like that. You can say yeah, I'm going to lead you into saying terrible things, and I'll say nothing. Yeah, yeah, that's it. It tasted like it came out of a vending machine or something to me. Yeah, I'd be surprised if that was expensive. I'd be a little bit outraged if that was expensive. What would you rate that one out of ten? Let's do ten. Um, for me, and what coffee can be, I'd say that's like a two. I would say that was a five out of ten. Yeah, I think it's kind of fair. I probably should be fair and call it a four out of ten, because I've tasted way worse than that. Okay, let's go for number two now.
This one would be a little bit more divisive for a lot of people, because it's got a little bit more acidity in it. It's a little bit, almost like it's a little zingy tasting. Generally acidity is associated with quality in coffee, which is a real sticking point for a lot of people. It's down to the fact that when you grow coffee, the higher you grow it, the slower it grows, and the sweeter it will ultimately be, but you do get more acidity in higher-grown coffees. Some people don't want that in their coffee, they really don't want sour coffee. So that tastes like it's got better raw materials in there for me than this one. Roast a little bit lighter, a little bit better. I'd like it to be a less kind of sour thing. It's a little bit old, obviously, it's sat around for a while, but I would say for me it's a better cup than this one. It's got a little characteristic to it, like it tastes of something that's a little bit fruity in there. Yeah, it's got more of a personality, hasn't it? The aftertaste is a little bit something going on there. Mhm. And what would you rate that out of ten in your preference? There's things I'd like to change about it, so like six, seven, somewhere there. But it has, I think, better raw materials in it, and that does appeal to me. Okay, I'm going to say six as well.
Okay, I can reveal number one. Yes, was McDonald's coffee. That's not surprising, that's kind of what I would have expected McDonald's to taste like. And that cup of coffee cost us £1.30, so probably the cheapest thing here. I feel like McDonald's are aiming at the cheaper end. Okay, your assessment there was probably fair, you did originally give it a two out of ten. I feel not bad about that, but it's fine. There you go. So, number two. You talked about there being sort of a bitterness to it and, like, a little bit more acidity. This tastes like the raw materials are of a higher quality. Certainly the number one, that is an independent local coffee shop, and that cup of coffee is double the price of the McDonald's one, at about £3 per cup. Let's move on to number three.
Okay, very different taste for me. It's more akin to number one than anything else. It's again a darker roast, it's got a bit more body to it, feels a bit fuller, a bit richer, a bit earthy at the same time. For me, it's fuller, isn't it? It is a little bit full, and the first one was quite watery to me. Yeah, and that's in part going to be how it's made, in part how it's roasted, in part where it's from. Price-wise, I wouldn't expect it to be much more than the McDonald's, if I'm honest. That tastes again like a reasonably commercial-grade coffee. I wouldn't say it tastes bad. Roast a little dark. Yeah, it's another kind of, yeah, 3.4, actually. This is something about the, there's a sort of earthiness that I don't enjoy in coffee. Some people really like earthy flavors, I really don't, and that's just a preference thing. So that is Costa Coffee. Interesting. There you go.
Number four. You're doing a swirling. I can see you're doing it for real. I try, I like to slurp usually, do a little aspiration, but damn, a microphone, it's brutal. Okay, so that's probably the darkest roast of all of them. I would say it doesn't taste like the raw materials are particularly bad, and so I could have a guess at who that's from, but it is definitely a darker roast, so more bitterness again, quite full. So my gut says that's a sort of Starbucks-style thing to me. Try the last one as well, then, before we reveal, before I get into trouble. That's kind of weird. It's a little bit vegetal to me, if I'm honest. It's not my favorite. Again, it's within the world of coffee roasting, it's darker, it's not as dark as this one, yeah. I like it probably less than this one here, so I'd probably be back to like a four again.
So number four, which was the one you gave five out of ten, is Pret, is it? Yeah. Wow. And number three, sorry, number five, yes, is Starbucks? Is it? Yeah, there you go. So of the high street chains, then the coffee that you rated highest in our taste test, yeah, was Pret. Yeah. Second was Costa, and then third was Starbucks. But I would say from my point of view, the variance between them is surprisingly small. Yeah. They're not, I don't think, they taste particularly different to each other in a big way. I think the independent stood out a long way from the others. Right, it was clearly different. It has a lot more flavor and character going on, which is good, which is what I like about coffee. But I think the chains, the brand experience may be different, but at the root there's not a huge variance in the coffee experience. I agree. I wouldn't really, I mean, there are, I can taste differences, but it's not as profound a difference as the McDonald's taste, and then the independent taste, which was really full of personality. Yep. And interestingly, the price variance is, the independent cost £3, Pret's £3.20, and Starbucks is £3.60, really. Yeah.
It always blew my mind for years and years. I would work with loads of essentially startup coffee shop owners, and their mindset would be, oh, I need to be the same kind of price as Starbucks, or maybe a little bit more, and you're like, what are you possibly thinking? That you have the same kind of supply chain that they do, that you're going to make, you know, they make great margins. You're not buying 20 million paper cups a week, you know what I mean? Nothing makes sense, but people feel very tied to this idea that the price is set by the chains. I think that's changed now, and people are more comfortable charging above that, but for a long time people were terrified to charge more than the chains, even if the product was noticeably better. And, you know, a real frustration for me, and that's why I'm always going to bat for independence, because it's not like you can spend more, you can get a better product by someone who cares deeply about it. And I think there's a risk in going to an independent if you're traveling. You know, Starbucks, the model is built on: I know where to queue, who to talk to, where to stand after I place an order, what kind of food I can get there. It's very safe. If I dropped you in Moscow and told you to get coffee, you'd go to a chain, because you know how it works and you'd get it done. Independents feel like a risk, but the reward, I think, is often there for sure, and there are more independents than ever now. So I'm very pro independent coffee shops.
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