This corner café looks more at home in Tucson than SF: it’s akin to adobe construction. To think this was the former home of the Octavia Lounge piano bar/cabaret.
Past a heavy wooden door and faux totem pole on entry, it has beat up, reddish wooden floors, white stone walls, beat up tables that look like they arrived from a garage sale, and eclectic music — both new and old. There are a few places to sit in this airy space, but the floorspace is limited. They offer a Melitta bar that generally slows down the service (which is mostly a good thing). Besides coffee, they’re pretty big on beer and happy hour, and they attract a rather quiet and studious clientele heavy on the vegans-with-laptops set.
Using a two-group red La Marzocco FB/70, they pull default double shots. It has a reddish crema with blonde streaks and, with the De La Paz roast they were using, was about as sweet as an espresso shot gets before it starts turning bad. (“Peak sweet”?) While there wasn’t any pungency, deep body, or smokiness, it works as a very flavorful, naturally sweet espresso. Served in classic brown ACF cups. The baristas are also quite knowledgeable and can help you navigate through several great coffee options from De La Paz here.
De La Paz has oddly picked up a number of converts from the ever-excellent Ecco Caffè for some reason: the Mojo Bicycle Café, Trouble Coffee. Even so, the unassuming Mercury Cafe provides a suitable “reference coffee” location for De La Paz — not unlike Coffee Bar does for Mr. Espresso.
There’s a lot of gymnastics going on these days in the name of “Third Wave” and even “Fourth Wave” coffee. But all of these supposed revolutionary innovations of the past few years have, in our humble opinion, done little to nothing to improve the quality of the coffee in the cup. They’ve done plenty to generate bombastic press coverage and give bored baristas new toys to play with, but, for example, the best espresso shot we ever reviewed remains one we had in 2003. Water, ground coffee, a filter, and gravity or pressure: coffeemaking really hasn’t changed much at all over the eons.
All the more reason we admire the Mercury. Instead of resorting to the latest coffee gimmick — the latest machine fad or the rarified siphon bar — the Mercury achieves excellence by just doing the basic things right with a great attention to detail.
For those unfamiliar, Caffè Artigiano still represents the best espresso shot we’ve ever had — produced by the hands of barista savant, Sammy Piccolo. Pulled in 2003, years before the Third Wave supposedly even existed, it was an abject lesson for how all the espresso-making automation in the world could never replicate Sammy’s quality control. (He tossed out the first two espresso shots he attempted to make for us — aka, sink shots.)
For the seven years since the Canadian Barista Championship has been in operation, Caffè Artigiano has had a virtual lock on the winners. So you have to figure they generally know what they’re doing. The article interviews Kyle Straw, the current Canadian barista champion and the store manager at Caffè Artigiano’s Hornby location/mothership.
Much like its American counterpart and one-time bean supplier, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Caffè Artigiano has grown to a number of cafés in its Vancouver backyard and now seeks more continental expansion. There are currently rumors of future locations in Toronto, Montreal, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Just don’t expect a Starbucks-like expansion at all costs.
Forget the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games next week. We’d go back for Caffè Artigiano. First the 2006 Winter Games in Torino and now Vancouver? We can only say that Sochi, Russia has a lot of great espresso to live up to for the 2014 Winter Games.
In the headlines today, Consumer Reports continues to explore the merits of ghetto coffee: Lack of excellent coffee blends: Consumer Reports | Reuters. Whereas before they chimed in on the McDonald’s vs. Starbucks debate — something we’ve always likened to a beauty contest between Courtney Love and Joan Rivers — this time their “expert” taste buds were disappointed by 37 different coffee blends available at major supermarket chains.
Our biggest contention with Consumer Reports is that, in recent years, they have over-extended themselves from objective reviewers of consumer appliances towards more subjective arbiters of public taste. It’s one thing to judge a minivan by objectively measurable criteria such as noise levels, cabin space, engine pickup, and fuel economy. It’s an entirely different thing where, to quote the press release:
“Consumer Reports has a rating criteria in which the tasters look for specific characteristics including the flavor and aroma.”
Consumer Reports established itself on unbiased, objective reviews of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and even home espresso machines. But lately they have been trying to become public taste-makers for coffee. This shift towards subjective analysis calls their credentials into question — particularly since we’ve found a number of dubious conclusions from their previous taste tests. It also makes us question what’s next: wine? Restaurants? Single-malt Scotch?
How is Consumer Reports any different than CoffeeRatings.com?
Do we claim to be any more qualified as arbiters of coffee taste? Absolutely not, but that’s kind of the issue. What best appeals to your taste buds or our taste buds does not follow the same kind of analysis that you’d give a child’s car seat.
So who makes the taste judgments, and how they make them, become absolutely critical. Transparency is essential, as this is the know-your-coffee-reviewers problem we wrote about three years ago. And Consumer Reports‘ model for expanding into coffee reviews — which is indistinguishable from their legacy of reviewing dishwashers — offers none of that. It’s one thing to recommend a cordless phone for its range and battery life, but it’s an entirely different thing to recommend one to eat for dinner.
What additionally concerns us is a kind of blind (and undeserved) reverence bestowed on Consumer Reports by most media outlets and consumers — many who seem blissfully unaware of their transition from objective review criteria to subjective taste-making. From another take on this survey (Why America Can’t Get a Great Cup of Coffee – DailyFinance), we also learn:
Tasters looking for “smoothness and complexity, with no off-flavors” and beans “neither under-roasted nor charred” and, of all things, “subtle top notes” were left wanting.
To be useful to consumers on subjective criteria, Consumer Reports must frame their standards of coffee tasting to a profile to which we can each relate. What’s written above is perhaps better than no information at all. But reading this, we’ll be damned if we can figure out how our own taste preferences compare to theirs. Who actively seeks out under-roasted, charred, or off-flavored coffee? This doesn’t describe coffee profiling so much as defect-finding, making Consumer Reports less coffee tasters and more meat inspectors.
Furthermore, Consumer Reports has provided no information about their methodology and standards for evaluation. The freshness of their supplies, how they prepare their coffee, how many samples they try at a given seating — all of these factors can make a huge difference in any side-by-side comparison. (UPDATE: We at least learned they do a swish-and-spit.)
Of course, in today’s quality coffee world where purveyors and consumers are obsessing over single origin roasts, a survey of supermarket coffee blends seems about as retro and down-market as tuna casserole. Not that there isn’t an audience for down-market coffee reviews. After all, there are people who think of Joan Rivers and Courtney Love as beauty queens. We just ask that if you do these reviews, please bother to do them properly.
And with that, we leave you with one of our favorite quotes about public tastes for coffee:
If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you’d say? Every one of you would say “I want a dark, rich, hearty roast.” It’s what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard [Moskowitz], somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want — that “I want a milky, weak coffee.”
Sometimes we simply cannot believe our eyes. Today we were browsing through the coffee industry trade rag, Coffee Talk, and we stumbled across this advertisement from International Paper. Could there be anything more wrong with this photo?
We can only guess that the marketing executives that approved this ad haven’t been any closer to Tuscany than the local Olive Garden — located just 10 miles down Poplar Ave. from International Paper’s Memphis, TN global headquarters. “The rich flavor of Tuscany™”…is a paper cup? Nevermind that no Tuscan would be caught dead drinking their caffè out of a paper cup. Nevermind that the paper cup is the size of the woman’s head.
Of course, if Subway can plug the Tuscan Chicken Melt, should we really be surprised? Those poor residents of Tuscany. They may have given us Dante Alighieri and the birth of the modern Italian language, but they also gave us a name defiled by every industrial fast food producer in Western Civilization. We always thought the regional food in Italy was better in Emilia-Romagna or Piemonte, but both lack the cheesy corporate marketing tie-in credentials to prove it.
Since Mr. Freeman is not likely making an appearance on American Idol anytime soon — and since there’s still no word on the pilot for Clarineting With the Stars — the Bay Area coffee world fortunately can still celebrate him as one of our own talents. Of course, New York City has supposedly been calling for a while now, and the article claims James still holds some Gotham interest.
Sitting in James’ Blue Bottle Cafe this afternoon with visiting Hawaii coffee author and consultant, Shawn Steiman, we discussed Hawaii’s laggard status at quality retail coffee despite its notable coffee growing credentials. The conversation then turned to New York City’s laggard quality coffee status and how much its quality coffee culture had to be imported from places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — including a number of coffee professionals who hail from these towns.
We previously knew of New York City’s challenges in establishing local roasters — given its commercial real estate environment and zoning laws. But what we didn’t know, and learned from Shawn today, was something he once heard from Gimme! in Ithaca, NY: that Manhattan has no roasters because the island has insufficient gas pressure to support them.
Today’s Times piece also exhumed the old $20,000 figure on Mr. Freeman’s Japanese siphon bar. Whenever journalists turn to price tags for coffee headlines, it reminds us of the old Oscar Wilde quote about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. $11,000 Clovers, $18,000Slayer machines included. (Do they expect commercial coffee-brewing equipment to cost about as much as their $200 Krups home espresso machine?)
Yes, pour-over coffee: essentially the same process prosthelytized by Philz’ Coffee for the better part of the past decade — and available in Bay Area outposts as remote as Monterey’s Plumes Coffee House since the previous decade. They obviously need a James Freeman in New York City fast, because at this rate Japanese siphon bars should arrive there around the year 2018.
Recently I was approached by a writer exploring ideas for an article to be published by Wired in the UK. (This wouldn’t be the first time.) The subject line of his e-mail? “The Future of Coffee.” His goal was to put together a piece about the “vanguard of the coffee industry,” featuring “new and disruptive technology or methodology to do something entirely new.”
This is hardly an uncommon theme these days. Problem is that there is little “there” there (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on her hometown of Oakland). For a Wired audience nurtured on futurism bombast, there is more bleeding-edge innovation going on with sous-vide cooking than the much more ancient art of coffee per se. However, coffee is far more universal and something many can relate to on a daily basis, so it naturally garners more readership.
What we have now is a critical mass of consumers who have “rediscovered” good coffee in recent years — even if good coffee has been around for a long time. Just that it used to be that much harder to find. In the six years since we started this Web site, the best shots we’ve ever had have not improved. But places that serve very good shots have become much more common.
But when people experience what seems like a sudden eye-opening discovery or awakening — such as the realization that there’s more to coffee than mass-produced fodder — there’s a tendency to mentally project some hockey-stick-like growth in coffee innovation for what has essentially been pretty much the same process since the 1800s. Once opened up to new possibilities, that this process of discovery and awakening doesn’t continue on some trajectory just seems too boring and mundane to accept.
Parallels between coffee and the Web?
In fact, I’ve come to liken what’s going on with coffee consumers to my experiences with the genesis of the World Wide Web — even if the Web has actually innovated while coffee has much less so.
Back in 1991, I was working among particle physicists with gravity-defying hairstyles who spoke in triple integrals at SLAC, home to the first Web site in the U.S. So I got to witness it all from the beginning — from the advent of image support in Web browsers to finally distinguish the Web from Gopher…to the 1996 psychotic rush to anoint push technology as the Web’s next revolution (Twitter 0.1?)…to the 1997 predictions by marketing wonks that we would all be shopping online at 3-D storefronts employing VRML that Christmas (shades of 3-D TV?). We even have Third Wave coffee, which I find jokingly analogous to the trite and nonsensical Web 2.0.
Coffee or the Web, the sense of experiencing an innovative rush begets more demand of, and expectations for, the same. Just read the sloganeering on the Slayer espresso machine Web site:
If Slayer was a Wired-friendly dot-com circa 1999, it would have been ridiculed for buzzword/hyperbole overload before finishing that sentence. And yes, Cup of Excellence competitions are clearly more recent constructs for coffee advancement. But for each legitimate advancement, there are dozens of examples such as the Japanese siphon brewer: a modern spit-shine on manufacturing design applied to 1830s coffee extraction technology.
Coffee punk’d
Even if most “future of coffee” claims are vapor, what’s the harm in a little excitement, right? Well, things have gotten so ridiculous, and consumers have been so duped into thinking things are changing too fast for them to keep up with, that we have things like this video published a few days ago: How to brew a good cup of coffee Boing Boing.
From the post on BoingBoing.net:
Simple steps for brewing a right proper cup o’ joe. It’s really the “handsorting” step that trips up the less sophisticated coffee drinkers, but then, failure to prime one’s coffee filters is also a common mistake
Huh?! And then looking at the comments on these pages (and other online references to the same video), the great majority suggest that viewers took this video quite seriously … that they were completely oblivious to how much they were being punk’d into believing anything about innovative coffee technique and technology. Here’s the direct video as published by Ben Helfen, who works at Octane in Atlanta, GA:
Not long after posting this, Ben later had to add a disclaimer on the video’s Vimeo page, worried that people would take it seriously and make themselves horribly sick in the process:
DISCLAIMER: This video is meant to be a joke for my coffee industry friends. If you were to actually try this, it would taste nasty and probably make you sick.
Former US Barista Champion, Kyle Glanville, was obviously in on the joke with his excessive use of exclamation points in his Twitter feed. But despite its great humor, unfortunately the joke went over most people’s heads. That merely reflects how bad false expectations about coffee innovation have become today — and it is clearly what Ben Helfen was exploiting.
UPDATE: Feb. 4, 2010
“Fourth Wave Coffee” or Third Wave Hyperbole? The New York City arrival of the Slayer has brought out more bombast (as if we had a shortage): Baristas Test The Slayer, the New $18,000 Espresso Machine | Serious Eats. We still wonder how serious “Serious Eats” can be if it follows the crutch of the clueless: referring to new espresso machines by their MSRP price tags in its headlines.
The Boston Globe published an article today (OK, technically tomorrow) about making great espresso with cheap home equipment: High-quality espresso from low-end machines – The Boston Globe. The author experimented by buying cheaper, used home espresso machines, and he claims to have achieved decent results. The key to his results were a good grind, good beans, and good portafilter packing.
Given some of the wretched espresso we’ve subjected ourselves to from the supposed “professionals,” how bad could it really be? While we haven’t tried going ghetto with home machines, we agree with the writer’s advice: grinders are often where home espresso first goes wrong, and you need a high-end one to produce a decent espresso grind. That’s a nice change from the endless supply of home espresso machine pushers who criminally neglect the importance of a good burr grinder.
The writer also found that having beans ground for him at a local coffee shop never produced espresso as good as the canned stuff — which may surprise many (including us). That says something about the reliability of local coffee shop coffee grinding, the freshness of their coffee, or both.
Of the pre-packaged variety, he tested eleven different brands and suggested that Era Ora and Sant’Eustachio came out on top.
The Mission is one of SF’s best neighborhoods. We don’t necessarily mean Mission Street, however: home to BART’s Plasticuffs Station and a decent assortment of angry heroin addicts. We’re talking about 24th Street — a working class neighborhood with a strong immigrant community, but without many of Mission Street’s rougher edges.
Decent coffee is now on the list of this neighborhood’s amenities. Along 24th Street, east of Mission St., a series of independent cafés opened in recent years — Sugarlump, nearby Mission Pie, Sundance, Dynamo Donuts, and also Haus. (We’re deliberately excluding the coffee atrocities down at L’s Caffé.) These may not be coffee destinations in their own right, but they offer several options for a decent shot, or cup, among these few city blocks.
Not being big fans of the coffee in Germany, the Haus name doesn’t carry much appeal for us. This fortunately doesn’t apply to the coffee here. The former El Mexicano Restaurant converted over to this airy espresso bar in May 2009. There are concrete floors, a tall ceiling, unfinished wood chairs and tables, and a lot of sunlight through the large glass panes in front and back. In back there’s also patio seating among several tables.
They use Ritual Coffee for espresso (their Evil Twin Brasil blend for our visit) and De La Paz for their filter coffee — and there’s a lot of varieties stacked up on the shelves behind the service area. They were also playing France Gall when we first came in, which immediately signals, “this isn’t your average coffee shop.” (And it scored points for good esoteric tastes.)
Btw, Kanye, this is one of the best videos of all time — France Gall’s “J’ai retrouvé mon chien”:
Using a three-group La Marzocco GB/5, they pull shots with a medium brown, even crema of decent thickness. It’s a smooth-bodied shot with strong characteristics of the underlying coffee blend: sweetness, brightness, and the sharp potency of lemon peel. It’s a solid, flavorful cup — but it may vary based on your favorite flavor profiles. Served in classic brown Nuova Point cups.
These citrus shots — aka, brightness bombs — seem to be a highly popular flavor profile for new espresso bars these days. And it’s not just this and our last SF café review. While we like the experience of a brightness bomb now and then, we hope that this doesn’t become more and more routine. Sameness is already a very real issue in the flavor profiles among some of the Bay Area’s best espresso purveyors.
As Stumptown exemplified with their Hairbender shots, espresso doesn’t have to have a smooth, rounded flavor profile to achieve lofty heights. That was a good thing and a break from what might be called a more traditional Italian espresso. But these days it seems more and more shots from new, notable cafés target just that narrow range of the flavor spectrum — whether through medium-roasted single origin Central American shots or simple blends that make an all-out assault on acidity. Coffee simply does not advance by replacing one monotone flavor profile for a different one.
The former One World Cafe needed a serious upgrade, and this is it. Gone are the beat-up furniture and odd house plants that made this space look like a medical marijuana co-op in aging neglect. The place now looks more like a sushi bar, with clean, angular lines, dark and solid colors, nicer wood floors, and a half-dozen bar stools and a few café tables.
They also added wine to their menu here, but the coffee is the real attraction — as noted by the pretty two-group Slayer machine as you enter the space. Yes, it is the legendary, silly-named Slayer machine — espoused by many a barista who can actually say the word “’spro” without spraying microfoam out of their nose in uncontrollable laughter. We know we can’t pull it off. (Perhaps Slayer’s next-generation machine will be called the Slaughter? … That’s “laughter” with an ‘S’.)
Matching Half uses Verve Coffee from Santa Cruz and sell it retail at the register. This additionally makes this café a real asset to this neighborhood.
They pull shots with a medium brown, moderate layer of crema. It is a pretty solid, albeit not exceptional, cup. But be warned: this is a citrus-driven brightness bomb, which isn’t to everyone’s espresso taste. It’s one of the few espresso shots we’ve ever rated with a true dominant citrus brightness to it. Served in a classic dark brown ACF cup.
This Sausalito location of a two-café chain in Marin (the other location is in San Rafael) looks almost identical to the Caffé Trieste that once stood at this exact same location before the ownership changed. Any ownership change seems to have come from an insider to Caffé Trieste, as it’s more than just the outdoor signage that looks like someone painted over the “Trieste” name: inside the décor, the roasted coffee, and the espresso served here reminds us heavily of the former tenant.
Italian tourists seem to like it here as well — so even the vibe here reminds us a little of Caffé Trieste. Inside there are a number of wooden tables packed in a rectangular space with a number of outdoor café tables lining the street corner sidewalks.
While they are heavy on the food service here, their slogan is “The Best Coffee and Pasta in Marin“. Like virtually all businesses that outwardly make a regional, self-aggrandizing superiority claim, they do not live up to it. But that doesn’t mean Taste of Rome isn’t worth a visit.
They roast their own, and using a three-group Conti at the bar they pull shots with a swirling medium brown crema. The shot is a little large, but the resulting cup is smooth and not lacking any potency. It even tastes of that classic Caffé-Trieste-like edge of smooth tobacco and smokiness. Served in a chipped Tuxton espresso cup with saucer.
While the espresso seems that much better at nearby Cibo, that place is a bit of a mortuary compared to the energy among the seats here.
