Cafe in Providence, Rhode Island Serves Free Coffee To Students Who Provide Personal Data; Participants May Receive Info From Cafe's Corporate Sponsors (npr.org)

An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: Shiru Cafe looks like a regular coffee shop. Inside, machines whir, baristas dispense caffeine and customers hammer away on laptops. But all of the customers are students, and there's a reason for that. At Shiru Cafe, no college ID means no caffeine. "We definitely have some people that walk in off the street that are a little confused and a little taken aback when we can't sell them any coffee," said Sarah Ferris, assistant manager at the Shiru Cafe branch in Providence, R.I., located near Brown University. Ferris will turn away customers if they're not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.

To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas. According to Shiru's website: "We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee." The source article additionally explores privacy aspects of the business. The cafe, which is owned by Japanese company Enrission, says it shares general, aggregate data such as student majors and expected graduation years.

Comments

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[hey!]

I grind my own coffee, and at $11.99 / pound for excellent beans the 15 grams I need for a mug of coffee cost me $0.39. I sometimes buy fairly good (but not super-premium) beans at $4.99 a pound, which means a cup of what you'd get at a typical coffee shop sets me back sixteen cents.

That's good, because I drink a *lot* of coffee.

Recently I discovered a programmable tea urn at the local Asian market that'll keep up to 5 liters of water at just the right temperature for for aeropress, which takes about 100 seconds to do a brew. So I can have a far better cup of coffee than I'd get from a Keurig in just about half a minute more time, at less cost. I reckon I drink about the equivalent of 20 k-cups worth of coffee per day, and if I use the pedestrian bulk beans I'd be saving over $2000/year. Most of the time I use higher quality beans, so I'm saving more like $800.

Re:Stopped reading

[hey!]

Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?

Absolutely, but it is certainly easy to obliterate the differences between expensive beans and cheap beans by mishandling them.

It sounds like the coffee you drink is overextracted. Overextraction is common because it's what you get when you economize by using too little coffee and making up for that by brewing too long. The acid flavors extract first, then the sweet ones, then finally the bitter ones. By overextracting dark beans, which are naturally more bitter, you can produce a potent-tasting (although unpleasant) cup of coffee with less coffee. You also get excess bitterness from using water that is at boiling temperatures, beans that are ground too fine or inconsistently, and dirty equipment. It is also possible (although less common) for coffee to be underextracted, which produces a cup which is sour, thin and salty.

I enjoy coffee with cream and even sugar occasionally, but if the only way you can enjoy a pot of coffee is with cream then that coffee was almost certainly mishandled. Coffee is not like tea; certain varities of tea are mean to be consumed with milk and sugars, others not. Any coffee should be enjoyable black.

Making a good cup of coffee isn't rocket science, but it *is* cooking; there's some technique and care involved, and different coffee varieties and roasts require different approaches -- the way you can't really cook fish and steak the same way.