When the fourth wave can’t come fast enough…
Posted by TheShot on 04 Jun 2006 | Tagged as: CoffeeRatings.com, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew
Oh, the twist of fate. The utter irony of it. PF.net’s Nick Cho must either be pulling his hair out or laughing his pehookies off with this one.
The Lowell Sun, of Lowell, MA, published an article today on a new “third wave” (gag, cough, spew) coffee house that’s moved into town: Lowell Sun Online - Better coffee, made slower Former Starbucks managers embark on ‘third wave’ of java revolution. The amusing part? The article cites this very Web site for its information defining “third wave” coffee.
A little background for the uninitiated. A couple months ago, I posted a rather dismissive article on the contept of third wave coffee that resulted in a bit of discussion among coffee aficionados and, in particular, advocates of the term. Also in particular, Nick Cho and I exchanged a few e-mails in debate over what “third wave” means … and I noted how it is being cited and misused in ways never intended by those who were among the original proponents of the concept.
On the one hand, being cited by the Lowell Sun proves the point I’ve tried to make with Nick all along: once the genie is out of the bottle with a pretentious term like “third wave”, public use is going to mutate it into whatever it wants it to be. But on the other hand, this validation is more than just a little maddening, because I’m now being cited as an “authority” on a concept I would like to see go away.
You can’t make stuff up this good… or bad. Though I suppose if I really had half a brain, I wouldn’t be bringing “third wave” coffee up again here. At least in the hope of letting it die a swift and silent death.
3 Comments »
on 05 Jun 2006 at 3:02 am -05:00T 1.Panini Guy said …
It is amusing you are now the authority. I’m guessing Nick sees the humor in that as well.
It’s even more amusing that the shop owners are planning to open with 20 varities of beans. Even though they’re going to use a quality roaster like Zoka, with that wide a selection they must be planning several hundred cups daily to keep the inventory fresh (not to mention every shipment of those beans will be travelling cross country for three or four days). This is Lowell we’re talking about, not Cambridge or Beacon Hill. Or even Newburyport.
And a “Chandler” couch… gag.
Hey, don’t miss Wayne Brady. Tickets on sale now.
on 13 Sep 2006 at 12:28 am -05:00T 2.TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Espresso’s New Wave Hits Town said …
[...] New York City — that backwater of quality espresso that has long proven, if I may paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “If you can make good espresso there, you can make it anywhere” — has reportedly been hit by a “wave” (here we go again) of better coffee. Or so says today’s New York Times: Espresso’s New Wave Hits Town - New York Times. [...]
on 08 May 2007 at 9:05 am -05:00T 3.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Good coffee just might earn your restaurant that extra Michelin star said …
[...] The article pays some garbled homage to that third wave nonsense, but most interesting was its reference to chef Marco Pierre White — cited as the first “rock-star chef” and credited with putting London on the culinary map. Tomorrow Chef White is making a sold-out, $190-a-plate guest chef appearance at SF’s Incanto — coinciding with the recent release of his new book, The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness and the Making of a Great Chef. [...]