Blue Bottle ups the brewed coffee ante: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee
Posted by TheShot on 23 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues, Starbucks
Today’s New York Times revealed the “very special machine” to be showcased at Blue Bottle Coffee’s Mint Plaza grand opening today: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee - New York Times. One-upping the now-blasé Clover, it’s a $20,000 siphon bar for brewed (i.e., not espresso) coffee, imported from Japan via the Ueshima Coffee Company. Yes, UCC — the aforementioned, Kobe-based king of Japanese canned coffee who sports the barista-T-shirt-ready slogan, translated to English: “Good Coffee Smile”.
So what is more amusing? The trumping escalation of high-end commercial coffeemaker prices, or the media obsession with these prices? It’s as if to suggest a Times headline for the brand new Mercedes-Benz CL Class: “At Last, a $118,127 tank of gas.” (Either that or this reporter must think the siphon bar is disposable after a single use.) You can always tell when a reporter is in way over his head when the only vocabulary they have to describe the qualities of an item is its price tag.
Yet the article rightfully ponders whether “the age of brewed coffee” has arrived. To a degree, it has. We’re not ones to take away from the luxury of a great espresso (something that the great majority of cafés still flounder at, and even the best get a little wrong now and then). However, espresso is just one limited method of showcasing the complexity and wide variety of flavor profiles that the world’s coffees have to offer. Now that we’re in an era of coffee quality exploration — with the rise of single origin and Cup of Excellence coffees — it makes complete sense to introduce brewing methods that best highlight those nuances.
Have the Coffee Wars Moved on to Good Old Brewed Coffee?
It doesn’t mean we stop enjoying a little quality washed Indian robusta in our favorite espresso blend — or that we are calling for the death of the quality blend. But tasting a delicate island coffee, like a Kona peaberry or a St. Helena, in a vacuum pot can make a world of difference, and improvement, over forcing it through an espresso preparation.
If anyone should be freaking out over this turn of events, it shouldn’t be the eyes-rolling, look-at-what-those-rich-geeks-are-paying-now-for-coffee reporters. It should be Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. With all his lip service about getting the insanely expanded Starbucks to reclaim it’s spot at the zenith of the consumer coffee world, they cannot afford to participate in this new brewed coffee arena. Because you can not only forget capably training 99% of their 150,000 low-wage employees on how to properly work a siphon bar — you can’t even trust many of them after-hours in the same room with this equipment. And without a strategy for quality brewed coffee, Mr. Schultz is merely fighting the last decade’s coffee war.
In the meantime, San Franciscans should be proud that the likes of the New York Times are spending a lot more time these days reporting on the coffee revolution that’s playing out in our very own backyard.
2 Comments »
on 23 Jan 2008 at 10:09 pm -05:00T 1.Paul Bostwick said …
There is a YouTube film of the machine in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjH1hzl-Iq0
The ability to brew, at the same time, a variety of, um, well varieties and to do it in a proper vac pot is neat. Plus the look is sharp. But it could be sharper I think. And with a qualified staffer it might be just as well to use gas or electric burners and timers and spend the savings on other stuff (like a bunch of stuff $20K? I suspect they are counting lots of stuff in that cost just to get the number “story worthy”). For those unfamiliar with vac brewing The stirring stuff in the story is mostly hokum, IMHO. A single cup brew with a nice tall funnel like that should, with a simple stir get the job done nicely. Touching the sides? Maybe it gets irritating as the day progresses to hear all that tinkling but otherwise… extra magical hokum that is not needed. Vac pots deserve a renascence in the coffee bar world: this just has some inevitable hype attached.
color me on the way to check it out.
on 11 Feb 2008 at 8:05 am -05:00T 2.TheShot said …
Btw, it’s sometimes easy to forget what we write around here. Here’s a post from June 2006 that foreshadowed the arrival of the Blue Bottle Cafe siphon bar:
http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2006/05/filter-drip-coffee/