2022 US Trip – Day 15 (Chicago – Metric Coffee)
On Sunday morning, Scott and Deb started back on their drive back up to Wisconsin and kindly dropped me off at Goose Island where I was going on a brewery tour later on in the day. However, the brewery didn’t open for around an hour and so I went to Metric Coffee as there’s not much else to do in an industrial estate in Chicago. This is very on-trend, impeccably well reviewed and also bloody expensive. They’ve even got little hanging baskets to add decoration and excitement to the whole arrangement.
There was no inside seating area, but there were a couple of outside tables free and so I sat there merrily with my laptop. I must admit to positioning it so that no-one could come by on a bike and pinch it, this felt like a high-risk strategy effectively sitting in the middle of the road with little protection from fly-by motorbike. I’ve never really got the hang of sitting outdoors and have little idea why people do it when there’s the option of a lovely nice indoors with no insects and usually lots of power points. I think they like the sun and nature or something.
I think this coffee cost about £5 which was partly down to the exchange rate I must have complained about 25 times on this blog, as well as being a quality establishment which seemed to have some decadent ways of making the coffee. Although I notice someone else queried the pricing (not me), which let to the coffee shop replying:
“As for your comment about price- if you value (like we do) company sponsored health insurance and a living wage for some of the most passionate and dedicated coffee professionals- even 5 dollars is barely enough to cover our expenses- specially with how expensive the cost of every single line item in the value chain.”
There’s a danger of rating a coffee or beer higher highly because it cost more, that feeling of getting what you pay for. However, this one did have a richness of flavour and depth of taste, and my hour or so here did pass quickly so I felt that the value met my expectations. I rather liked the whole experience and if I come back to Goose Island again, which I hope will happen at some point, then I might pop in once more.
It was a little odd that there were so many people getting a coffee to takeaway when there didn’t seem much else going on in the area, but I think some customers were coming out of their way to visit here such is its reputation. And, what else could be expected given that this coffee shop is near to one of the best breweries in the world, the brewery visit that I had been so much looking forwards to…..
