Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today the Malaysian National News Agency posted an article on a national specialty known as white coffee, associated with the city of Ipoh: Ipoh’s White Coffee, A Temptation Hard To Resist – Malaysian National News Agency :: BERNAMA. No, it’s not like the Thai or Vietnamese coffee made with condensed milk. Rather, it’s called “white coffee” because the beans have a lighter color and are roasted in margarine.

The article essentially announces that Ipoh’s white coffee has made the big time by its inclusion in Wikipedia. But as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, that’s not exactly saying much.

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Thanks to a regular reader for recently tipping me off to this place.

This unusual café is unique for serving single estate coffees from Venezuela. They obtain their beans from their Arabica Coffee Company in Caracas (not to be confused with the American outfit) and run cafés here and in Beverly Hills. They have a restaurant-sized café space — with large patio seating in front, seating in the back before a fireplace and under a glass skylight, and inside seating along the main service area decorated with black & white photos of Venezuelan coffee estates.

They sell Venezuelan chocolates, lunch items, and plenty of coffee. They even offer a ristretto on the menu (reviewed here). Using a three-group UNIC Zi, they pull a shot with a mild aroma and a medium brown crema of lighter thickness with some striping. There’s a sharp pungency to the flavor that you would expect from a single estate espresso, but it’s not terribly potent for a ristretto. They are fairly good milk frothing as well — it tends to be dry, yet a strong coffee flavor comes through in their cappuccino (you can taste the coffee instead of just milk).

Read the review of Coupa Café (Palo Alto).

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According to yesterday’s Contra Costa Times, the Benecia City Council is still seeking limits on the number of chain stores allowed to invade this small town on the outskirts of the Bay Area: ContraCostaTimes.com | 02/21/2007 | Benicia looks at limiting Starbucks. Most notably, the issue is Starbucks. This after a proposal to declare a moratorium on coffee-pitching chain stores in the town failed to pass.

Starbucks’ smarmy and cloying corporate do-gooderness act is about as annoying as they come in my book. But facts are facts — most local mom and pop cafés make awful espresso and need the competition to shape up their acts and step out of the 1970s. A town without a Starbucks can be a tragic thing.

Of course, customers also play a role in supporting the good places and avoiding the bad. Because the market forces of chain store drones are so disproportionate (popularity rarely equates with quality). In some way, local communities get the businesses they often deserve, and it’s the minority of people who care or can tell the difference who suffer the most.

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Today’s The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) posted an article on home coffee roasting: Coffee fans toast what they roast | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA. What I particularly liked was that they use the term I do for fresh roasted coffee: fresh baked bread.

Too often, restaurants, cafés, stores, and, well, coffee drinkers treat roasted coffee as if it were imported wine rather than fresh baked bread. (Another reason why I don’t like coffee’s wine analogy.) Nobody would think twice about buying wine shipped in from Italy, sitting on a shipping pallet for a month while it crossed multiple oceans. But their bread? Be serious. (Illy or Lavazza, anyone?)

And it matters. Most of the stuff on store shelves, even the packages in major chain cafés, has been oxidizing for weeks since it was first roasted — having its flavor leeched off over time. (And I’m just talking about whole beans. You can forget pre-ground!) I cannot forget my first home espresso making experience when I ground beans from a local roaster instead of something pre-packaged from a high-quality chain café. The crema just gushed out by comparison.

The primary reason I roast my own at home is because espresso is particularly sensitive to the age of the roast — it goes flat in just several days. I personally don’t go through enough coffee each week to warrant a full pound from a local roaster. (And as this site might suggest, I have been known to have espresso out once in a while.) Thus home roasting is ideal for frequent, small batches (and if you’re blending: the smaller the batches, the better). But there’s a good reason why a local roaster such as Blue Bottle Coffee gets all the praise: anyone who sells coffee that fresh and has the daring to print a roasting date on the package deserves what they get.

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Today the Courier News published an article on the evolving art and science of pairing food and drink: The Courier News :: Courier News :: No coupling too unusual for pairing food and drink. Pairing wine was just the beginning — now there are people pairing chocolate, coffee, etc., to their meals.

Which is all fine and good — even if some wines are best enjoyed by themselves while others are better when paired with food. Naturally, the part of the article that struck me most was this paragraph:

“The espresso just blew everything away with the bitterness,” says Liz Thorpe, managing director of Murray’s Cheese. “I felt like I was sucking on aluminum foil every time I tasted something.”

Of course, I wouldn’t pair an espresso with anything other than water, grappa (as a café corretto or even a resinti), or a handful of desserts. (Sorry, barista championship contenders.) But here we have a professional foodie of sorts — a director of a highly taste-conscious cheese shop — and what does she expect from a standard espresso? Bitterness. Lovely. Has she ever tasted a proper espresso shot in her life? Not likely.

Bitter espresso doesn’t pair with anything, Liz. My advice?: send it back to the barista to make properly, or demand yourself a refund.

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The bizarrely misplaced food freak-out continues, as we have people overlooking the environmental, energy consumption, and dietary/health horrors of the processed foods that make up 80% of today’s American diet — focusing instead on caffeine as the root of all evil. Today, TV station KERO in Bakersfield, CA reported that a coffee-drinking New York city councilman, Simcha Felder, “plans to introduce a resolution calling on the federal government to require that food and beverages contain labels revealing caffeine content”: Food Labels Need Caffeine Count, Some Say – Health.

Isn’t that a bit like labelling how much alcohol is in your beer? I thought the main point of food labelling — generally a good thing, mind you — was to make you aware of invisible or insidious things that weren’t necessarily obvious on the surface. What is the value of such a proposal, and the value of our federal government’s time and attention, when whether someone is either over-caffeinated or under-caffeinated isn’t exactly a mystery or black art?

As long as nutritionism remains the rule for America’s eating habits, people will continue to equate their health to the presence or absence of single molecules. A healthy diet or lifestyle isn’t built upon the line-item veto, nor can its foundation be found in binge eating omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, and/or phytochemicals.

UPDATE: February 21, 2007
The New York Press also published an article on this topic: Caffeine vs. Trans Fat: The Smackdown, as did “Good Morning America”: ABC News: Feel a Buzz? There Might Be Caffeine in That. Coca-Cola plans to start labelling in May, according to the AP: Coke To Show Caffeine Content On Labels – Health.

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Most people have their favorite local getaways. Mine, among many other Bay Area locals, happens to be the Monterey Peninsula — i.e., the Pacific Grove/Carmel/Monterey region. It’s a great place to kick back for a relaxing weekend, along the sea, away from the S.F. crowds, near the natural splendor of Big Sur and the protected Pacific coastline…and yet with a healthy number of “big city” amenities (important for those rainy winter days).

One of the necessary amenities, of course, is a good espresso. While the Monterey Peninsula manages to have a few halfway decent options, despite not being overrun with Starbucks yet, you don’t go for the espresso. And that’s particularly true for the quaint and touristy town of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Carmel-by-the-Sea, aka “Carmel”, conjures up images of aging, bejeweled locals driving around in their luxury cars from art dealer to art dealer — that is, when they’re not putting in nine holes at Pebble Beach. Clint Eastwood may no longer be mayor, but Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt still own homes here. The hardest work in Carmel, however, seems focused on keeping its small town feel amist the corporate commercialization of downtowns everywhere — which includes zoning the exclusion of cancerous chains like Starbucks. This has created a commercial/social experiment of sorts: what happens to local espresso when insulated from the influence of a big chain like Starbucks?

The results of this experiment are generally poor. For one, the local boutique roasters and cafés — the very thing Carmel’s zoning model intends to support — are of inferior quality and seem to flounder, not thrive, in the absence of a large corporate competitor to raise their standards.

Case and point: take Caffe Cardinale Coffee Roasting Company, just off Ocean Ave., which has long professed a claim to the best coffee in Carmel. On the surface, they have a few of the makings of a good coffee shop: on-site roasting, a popular location, a good flow of customers, and many marketing relationships with nearby hotels (including some luxury hotels) and B&Bs. But the execution here has gone horribly wrong.

Of the thousands of cafés I’ve reviewed all over the world, their espresso drinks are among the most overextracted I’ve experienced (i.e., bitter, watered down, and of immense size). And up until a couple years ago, their menu offered something they literally called “the two-hour mug” — basically, coffee that was sold in such obscenely copious volumes that they sold it by the amount of time it took you to drink it all (regardless of how good a two-hour-old pot of coffee tastes). Two-hour steak, anyone?

Another phenomenon in Carmel is the mock Starbucks (Starmocks?) — a classic example being Ocean Ave.’s Carmel Bakery. Carmel’s commercial zoning laws prevent both large chains and large signage. Carmel Bakery, while a decent bakery in its own right, takes advantage of these exclusions by placing “We proudly serve Starbucks coffee” signs in its display window alongside Starbucks-branded coffee mugs. The effect oddly comes off like a medical marijuana shop, beckoning tourists with a contraband fix of their Starbucks’ double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.

But go inside to try a shot, and you will be wishing for even the most offensively branded Starbucks chain outlet down on the corner of downtown Carmel. If nothing else, at least to hold up the low end of the local standards bar.

If there is a coffee chain that’s allowed to exist here, it’s the small, family-owned, Carmel-based roaster, Carmel Valley Coffee Roasting Company. With five cafés in Carmel-by-the-Sea and the surrounding Carmel area (including one in a mall under the name of the Carmel Coffee & Cocoa Bar), the chain has earned something of a loyal following among the locals. However, the espresso is rather lackluster, and they frequently default to paper cups in some of its outlets.

So where are some of the best options in town? The Buon Giorno Bakery Cafe, on Junipero Ave. between 5th & 6th Aves., for one. It has expanded its business operations to include more of a traditional restaurant service for dinner. Which brings me to another interesting observation of espresso in Carmel-by-the-Sea: unlike most of the country, the restaurants here actually serve some of the best espresso available in town. Il Fornaio, and its separate café in particular, is case and point. Oddly, the espresso at the Carmel Il Fornaio is even better than at its S.F. counterpart.

While the restaurant espresso in Carmel is encouraging, this is clearly a town where the espresso standards are languishing without a Starbucks around to raise the bar. As the general manager of a major coffee roasting equipment and sales operation told me recently, “We don’t go into an area unless there’s a Starbucks within a mile or so. We like the ‘Pepsi Challenge’.” Starbucks’ presence provides competitors with validation of an area’s coffee market potential while leaving plenty of profit room for their operations to exceed Starbucks’ modest standards. But in Carmel, the biggest challenger to the local espresso is often the option to skip it altogether.

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A local, homespun, philosophical yarn in today’s Gulf Breeze News (Gulf Breeze, FL … why do all the crackpots seem to come from Florida?) noted how our approach to life can failingly be like concentrating on the cup and not the coffee within it: The coffee, not the cup that holds it, is what matters. It’s a nice, trite, Prarie-Home-Companion-way of looking at life. The author even relates this analogy to the untimely death of Anna Nicole Smith (huh?!?). The only problem with the author’s analogy is that it’s an ignorant and delusional pack of lies.

Cups do matter when it comes to coffee. Unfortunately, most cafés have no concept of this, and most coffee drinkers are far too intent on drinking their coffee like runners at a marathon refreshment station to notice. As the Espresso Italiano Tasting manual puts it…

The design of the cup affects:

• the appearance of the coffee and thus our appreciation of its creamy head (or crema),
• our olfactive appreciation by dispersing or concentrating the aroma,
• the taste because of its contact with our lips,
• the sensation of heat, and
• the quantity of coffee allowed into the mouth.

There’s a reason quality restaurants present their food on warmed china instead of paper plates. If drinking vessels truly didn’t matter, we’d all be sipping fine wines out of disposable plastic beer cups. And if I’m shelling out $2 a cup for beans that cost less than $2 per pound as greens, you had better believe I expect to be treated as if I’m at something other than a three-year-old’s birthday party.

Maybe Chuck Randle likes to brew his morning coffee through his grandson’s old gym socks, but coffee drinking shouldn’t taste of paper. It’s enough when I have to lick envelopes. Chuck, if you’re going to pick on something as “superfluous,” why couldn’t you have instead chosen something like bloggers and columnists in Podunk local weeklies?

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Today’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that “iced coffee is a hot commodity, surveys show”: Some like it iced. According to studies from the SCAA and NCA, iced coffee consumption is on the rise — accounting for 6 percent of weekly U.S. coffee consumers, as compared with 4 percent five years ago. The article also attributes the increased popularity of iced coffee with warmer temperatures and younger coffee drinkers.

Of course, if I was a voice-cracking, acne magnet of a teenager hanging out at the mall in Sarasota, FL at one of these cheesier new “me too” coffee chains, I’d skip the coffee and pour liquid nitrogen down my shorts for that matter.

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Has TheShot been taken over by “splogs” (spam blogs)?!

For anyone who has run a blog, I don’t mean the regular stream of bogus insurance adverts and “great post – I had never thought of that” comments. I mean all those splogs out there that have disguised themselves as online “lifestyle magazines” — i.e., shorthand for “all commercial posts, no content”. Product placement to the extreme. Bloggers who are even more guilty of “rip-and-read” journalism than those regurgitating corporate press releases in traditional media.

Last December I came across a pretty nifty coffee accessory worth writing about. Now if I had to choose a “coffee accessory of the year”, every year, undoubtedly it would have to be the pair of group head main cylinder gasket seals I regularly replace on my home espresso machine. There is no single accessory more responsible for my espresso enjoyment in any given year.

If had to choose a second from last year, I’d have to pick the French press travel mug from Barefoot Coffee Roasters. I’ve developed a habit of bringing it to the office most days (I also get plenty of comments on it). I grind some fresh beans into it before leaving for work in the morning — storing some extra grinds in the hidden compartment at the bottom. It makes truly good coffee quite convenient and portable.

And why buy from Barefoot? They are always spreading the love around, and I can hardly think of a nearby coffee outfit more deserving of a little return love themselves. And the French press travel mug comes in a variety of colors … including cornflower blue, for those Fight Club fanatics who need to stay awake through those Monday morning presentations about “cybernetting your office.”

UPDATE: June 12, 2007
In case you wanted to pick up one of these in person, I recently discovered they are available for purchase at Cafe Bello.


UPDATE: Jan. 31, 2008
After a solid year of use, we finally found our first true defect with this device. The welding that connects to the handle to the thermal cylinder weakened until, just recently, it pretty much came off. However, the mug is still very functional even without the handle.

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