There’s the super convenient Daily Grind at Brody Café and in Mudd Hall to complement your long days spent in the library or in the lab. There’s Alkimia in Gilman for your artsy humanities major doing homework in the Hut. There’s the Chesapeake Bay Roasting Company in Levering, which is the only one that takes dining dollars, other than good old Char Mar that is. And then you’ve got the classic, Starbucks, which has a star-based rewards system to keep you coming back.
Thanks, Hopkins, now we’re all addicted to caffeine, and we can’t decide where to buy our coffee. Do you go for convenience? Price? Taste? Classic coffee or blended beverage? Which coffee shop sells the overall best coffee? That’s what I wanted to know.
I created a survey in order to see which coffee my fellow Hopkins students prefer. I distributed this survey through Facebook, and I received over 100 responses. However, an oversight led me to forget the coffee shop in Levering so I had to remake the survey and discard the initial responses.
My second attempt has garnered me 109 responses with which to work. Before we dive into all of this raw data, you should all be made aware that I have never taken a probability or statistics class in my life. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s figure out what Hopkins students think about their coffee.
Only about 27 percent of students surveyed have tasted coffee from each location, but over half of the surveyed students have tried at least four locations. The data is probably a little skewed based on the people who took the survey, mostly sophomores since I shared the link in the Class of 2018 Facebook group. But I’m sure it’s fine.
By a long shot, Daily Grind is the most-frequented coffee shop, with about 66 percent of students choosing to go there over anywhere else. But does that mean it has the best coffee? No, all this shows is that we go to Hopkins and spend way too much time in the library.
Let’s factor in price now. Daily Grind still came in as the winner for best prices, this time with only 54 percent of students’ responses. However, Char Mar and Chesapeake Bay Roasting Company both rose in the ranks to beat Starbucks, probably on account of the fact that they take dining dollars (although I don’t know this for certain because I didn’t ask that question in my survey).
What if money and convenience isn’t important? What if you just want the best coffee? Which coffee reigns true? In my survey, I asked students to rank each coffee shop from one to five, with five being the absolute best coffee ever and one being little more than water. When averaging these responses, Char Mar came in abysmally last, with a score barely over 2.5. Daily Grind won this contest, too, with a score of 3.8, but Starbucks and Alkimia were close behind. Chesapeake Bay Roasting Company, while performing better than Char Mar, could probably have been excluded from the survey.
So it seems that Daily Grind is our winner. They’ve got the best coffee on campus, at least based on the opinions of 100 some odd survey takers. With two locations on campus, reasonable prices and overall delicious coffee, there wasn’t a chance for the other shops.
This is entirely unrelated, but because I am not an official survey giver, I asked for everyone’s favorite drink and where it comes from. In case you need any suggestions, a common drink of choice is the Dirty Chai from Daily Grind or black coffee from wherever.
Here are some of my favorites, more out of the box, responses: “Pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks — yes I know what you are thinking but it’s great.” “Drip coffee because it’s cheap and I’m poor.” “I’ve actually never had coffee anywhere except from Starbucks.” “Strawberry Smoothie, Bamboo Café.”
I guess I’ll be sending out the survey another time because I seem to have left out the much-frequented coffee shop, the Bamboo Café.
