Pike Place Roast has remained a popular option for the already popular choice of black coffee. That's another reason to credit this roast. Along with its release in 2008, Starbucks changed its rules regarding coffee-making to ensure freshness: It began to require employees to grind the beans immediately before brewing and make a new pot every 30 minutes, according to the company. It's named for the original Seattle location of its first store, inside of the Pike Place farmers market. This last roast is the chain's signature black coffee. Today, you can find several varieties of hot coffee on the Starbucks menu: Blonde Roast, Dark Roast, Decaf, and Pike Place to name a few. From coffee classics and Frappuccinos to multi-ingredient tea lattes, here are the most popular Starbucks drinks, ranked worst to best. It also embraced its complicated drink reputation, and a few of these famous Starbucks beverages have risen above the rest. The company closed over 600 locations during the pandemic, mainly in shopping malls and cities, to focus on suburban drive-thru locations, according to Eat This, Not That. While other shops have taken the place of Starbucks (which has been around for far longer) as the 'fancy' coffee option, the Seattle-based stalwart has persevered through its many changes. For the past 20 years, plenty of consumers have become more comfortable with spending (at least) $4 on a cup of coffee. It signifies chains like Blue Bottle Coffee, Intelligentsia, Stumptown - the types of spots where the cool kids tend to congregate (via Bloomberg). That may be due to the third wave of coffee, which refers to any business opened after 2000 that traffics in high quality java (via Los Angeles Times). But somehow, most of these Starbucks jokes have become a thing of the past.

Blonde vanilla latte