Campus Coffee Review
To prepare you for finals week, I've compiled a ranking of all the coffee on campus according to a rigorous rubric that was checked and approved by the culinary critics of pillbox, so you can be properly caffeinated for your many upcoming all-nighters. Godspeed and god bless, I hope you all pass your exams.
Note: to keep the rankings fair, I consumed a coffee from each of these locations with one cream and one sugar. I don't drink black coffee because it's nasty.
Entropy (5/10)
Tastes mildly of wood chips. The powdered coffee creamer doesn't seem to dissolve in liquid. I was going to give this a lower ranking before it was pointed out to me that this is the cheapest coffee on campus. It's for times of desperation, and it fulfills its beverage niche well.
Exchange (6/10)
Nothing to rave about, but no complaints either. It's coffee, and by God, it'll wake you up. Solid, dependable, and functional. Beats water.
Wean Prima (10/10)
I don't know what they put in this, but it is glorious. My positive experiences with this may purely be due to the fact that my brain associates this coffee with Sorrels library (my safe space), but it's incredible. The coffee is rich and flavorful, and the little teeny cups are adorable. The baristas are GOATed. Proof that unions work.
Gates Prima (9/10)
Not nearly as good as the coffee from its sister location in Wean somehow. I attribute this to the fact that Gates is a newer building so the water pipes don't impart the earthy, lead taste that makes the Wean water so much richer.
Zebra Cafe (4/10)
Mildly disappointing, it tastes more watery than one would want. However, the coffee urns have a push lever that makes it feel like you're extracting coffee from a subterranean well, which is pretty fun.
Millie's (2/10)
Thin, unpleasant, and under-caffeinated. It tastes like somebody microwaved a cup of bathwater while thinking about a coffee bean. I put in a splash of cream and it immediately turned pale white.
ABP (8/10)
By far the strongest on campus and the most economically efficient way to get a caffeine high. The coffee equivalent of Barton's vodka. Their hazelnut coffee has egregious amounts of artificial flavoring, and I love it.
Schatz (9/10)
This is the white whale of campus coffee. The dispenser is not working half the time, but when it does, the "extra strong" button goes ridiculous. Bonus points because it's right next to the milk dispenser.
De Fer (4/10)
For a place with such incredible beverages, their drip coffee was surprisingly mid. You can only be great at so many things, I guess. There was no sugar, so I had to use Splenda, the most foul concoction devised ever by chemists, which significantly detracted from my experience. It is also the most expensive coffee on this list. Just get their smoothies instead.
Fifth Commons Coffee Machine (3/10):
(Note, the coffee machine in Fifth Commons is the exact same model as the one on Wean 2, so this review applies to both.)
I was inspecting the liquid as it came out of the machine, and it was completely clear for the first few seconds. The coffee, however, was surprisingly passable for something made by a robot. It tasted vaguely like a popsicle stick, and their definition of "1" cream is perhaps less than I might desire, but my expectations were not terribly high. At no point did a price display on the machine so I have no idea how much I was charged for this.