Is CEFCO gas stations coffee any good? Here’s a review.
Over the past month or so, we’ve been visiting various gas station chains and convenience stores to see which ones serve high-quality coffee. We’ve discovered a lot of good coffee at gas stations like QuikTrip and Racetrac, individually brewed with high-end Swiss grind and brew machines.
I saw a CEFCO store off I-35 in West, Texas, so I pulled over to check out their coffee and try a cup for the first time.
To sum it up in a sentence, CEFCO has basically been left behind in the gas station races to upgrade coffee quality.
They are still just making big canisters of cheap coffee on Bunn commercial machines. There’s nothing wrong with Bunn machines, and they are perfectly capable of making high-quality coffee — if you put high-quality coffee into the machine. If you use cheap, low-quality coffee though, it’s not going to be very good.
The other problem with using big gallon or multiple gallon machines like this is that you have no way of knowing if the gas station brews and throws out the coffee regularly before it gets stale, or if it has been sitting there in the machine most of the day.
As it happened, I asked the person behind the counter when the coffee was made, and she told me that she had just finished making it recently, so it was fresh. And indeed, it did not taste stale and the temperature was very high.
But the problem is that CEFCO must be using very cheap coffee because the flavor and strength of the coffee were low quality. I would describe it as if you’re used to high-quality coffee and then you go over to a friend’s house who buys very cheap coffee and has a low-quality machine. It tastes like the level of coffee you might have expected in the 1990s before Starbucks changed our expectations of what is good enough.
I would recommend driving on to Love’s, QuikTrip, or Racetrac and not buying a coffee at a CEFCO convenience store if you care about how your cup of coffee tastes.