Apartment613

Courtesy of Alisha Hill on flicker

Wakey Juice, Liquid Crack, the Black Ichor Of Life… Coffee by any other name would smell as sweet, especially first thing in the morning. More then just a beverage, coffee is ritual, wake up call, excuse for a break and more to millions of Canadians, not excluding Ottawans. Needless to say, the supreme importance bean juice plays in our daily lives means that the topic of the best brew is a highly personal, and hence contentious, issue.

Luckily, Apartment613 never backs down from a challenge! However, for this particular Best Of we’ve decided to ditch our usual opinion-based approach for the rigors of science. Accordingly, this Sunday we rounded up four highly buzzed individuals - two men and two women - to take part in a blind taste test.

Cups of medium roast black coffee were acquired from six popular venues: Planet Coffee, Ideal Coffee, Bridgehead, Francesco’s, Second Cup and Starbucks. The six were largely chosen on the basis of their proximity to Apartment613 science headquarters in the Glebe, except for Planet Coffee and Ideal which where selected for their popularity and presumed awesomeness. The testers each took part in six rounds of testing, where they ranked the beverages on a scale from 1 to 10. In order to get around a bias for coffees tasted earlier (or later) in the process, in each round the testers were given a different sample. Of course, none of the testers knew which brew they tasted until after all the sipping and slurping was finished.

As a note - this test is intended to test the quality of each establishment’s brewed coffee only, and does not reflect other considerations that might make that particular coffee shop great (i.e. atmosphere, friendly staff, location, fair-trade products, etc.)

And without further ado, from first to last here are the results of our first best brew test!