Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today the SF Chronicle posted an impressively long article on the state of quality coffee roasting in the Bay Area: ROAST WITH THE MOST / A new generation of Bay Area coffee roasters pushes the perfect cup to the next level. It’s a remarkable piece, given its breadth. It lightly touches on everything from the roasting process, roasting trends, more meticulate coffee sourcing, and restaurants taking notice in better quality coffee. It also includes interviews with a good number of quality coffee luminaries in the area — and not just the usual, overexposed suspects.

On the topic of overexposure, it’s also good to see focus on advancements in the quality of the coffee — and not just an emphasis on machinery (and their escalating price tags), which has been something of a media trend of late. Equipment advances such as the Clover brewer would be amount to little more than a curiously expensive robotics grad student project if not for the improvements in coffee sourcing, roasting, and freshness.

Today’s geography lesson: Rome is not a U.S. city

As much as Coffeeratings.com was born five years ago out of frustration with the lack of quality standards and their awareness in the Bay Area specialty coffee scene, we actually take a bit of exception with some of the suggestions in the article — for example, “While the Bay Area is considered the birthplace of premium coffee, many say the quality of its coffee has lagged behind that of other U.S. cities in the past 10 or 15 years.”

In the past few years the Bay Area has arguably established itself as a national coffee leader, second only to perhaps Portland and Seattle. (And even at that, Seattle and Portland — like SF — are equally rife with median-quality coffeehouses that make poor espresso.) But go back a decade ago, and the coffee quality in the great majority of other U.S. cities was hurting far worse than SF.

Only hipster dufuses who use the word “’spro” need apply

The article also unfortunately feeds this terrible misconception going around that better coffee can only come from a “new generation” of coffee professionals — an attitude that if you haven’t been making coffee for less than three years, you are irrelevant to good quality coffee today. Call it specialty coffee’s take on Jerry Rubin’s “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” (It’s also one of many reasons why we ridicule the term “Third Wave.” Although the phrase’s originators coined it more to describe coffee consumption rather than coffee purveyors, today it is most commonly used to describe the latter.)

But the media will always focus on the new. And what’s old often becomes new again. (See: siphon coffee.) We read stories that suggest single origin coffees will bring about the (greatly exaggerated) death of the blend, or that lighter roasts will universally trump all those “horrible, traditional darker roasts.” But we see each of these as consumer fads that are merely highlighting the less explored dimensions of the overall coffee enjoyment experience. When the novelty of the new wears off, single origin or blend, light or dark roast, there will always be something to be enjoyed in the full variety of experiences coffee has to offer.

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Starbucks Coffee has spent the last decade squandering away whatever market leadership they had in the world of quality coffee, and it’s no secret that they are now trying to regain some of these losses. But to do so in recent months, Starbucks has bizarrely looked to McDonald’s for inspiration: introducing $1 “daily coffee”, free refills, and their Pike Place Blend (the latter of which has become a source of disingenuous product marketing).

But even if you can forgive them for that McMisstep towards regaining some coffee leadership, turning to the likes of 7-Eleven and their fortified coffee drinks is even more bewildering: Energy Examiner - Starbucks to increase their caffeine content in coffee shops - Examiner.com (also, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Starbucks hopes new drinks can lift profits).

Yes, Starbucks’ desperation has now led them to co-opting 7-Eleven’s coffee strategy, which is about the lowest common coffee denominator you can get. Starting this week, Starbucks has begun selling “+Energy as a special ingredient in their coffee drinks,” which includes “extra B-vitamins, guarana and ginseng” — all things 7-Eleven promoted in their Fusion Energy Coffee over a year ago. By stooping to “healthy coffee” pandering pioneered by the “sophisticated” Super Big Gulp® purveyor, Starbucks is only further debasing their brand as just another commodity. Can Starbucks-branded Slim Jims be far behind?

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The truth is out. What do die hard coffee drinkers in coffee-obsessed Australia really order?: Caffeine connoisseurs say lattes are the cream of the crop | Herald Sun. Yes, it’s the boorish latte. (And written by a boorish reporter: “Caffeine connoisseurs”?!? It’s been a while since we’ve seen the tiresome caffeine riff.)

Of course we’re being a bit facetious. But Australians are often cited as some of the greatest espresso connoisseurs in the world. And we at CoffeeRatings.com have heard a lot of smack talk from visiting Aussies, lamenting our national disregard for latte art and the inability to find a proper flat white (assuming anyone actually knows what one is).

The fact is — they’re right. Coffee standards are terrible in this country; they are one of the prime motivators that gave birth to CoffeeRatings.com five years ago this month. We generally serve over-extracted, bitter, watery dreck that is only made fit for human consumption after drowning it in gallons of milk and flavoring it with three kinds of syrup.

Even if that’s the rule, there are exceptions — and more exceptions thankfully appear around the nation every month. And while those exceptions are, say, easier to come by in towns like Seattle (which, as a rule of the masses, has generally terrible coffee standards as well), Australia has a coffee history and national obsession that makes these exceptions more commonplace.

But now we also know the “dirty truth”: behind every person who can drink a decent quality espresso in Australia, there are seven Aussies swigging down skinny/soy/chai lattes. Has the Australian coffee palate evolved much at all beyond our double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato? After reading this story, you’d be hard-pressed to say so.

So we asked our guest correspondent in Perth…

To get another perspective on this story and the “research” behind it, we asked Michael ‘Grendel’ Carroll what he thought about the Herald Sun’s claims. Michael runs Cafe Grendel — a coffee review blog out of Perth, Australia. Granted, Perth is half a continent away from the Herald Sun’s Melbourne, but at least they use the same currency.

Mr. Carroll first noted that the online poll associated with this Herald Sun story should be taken with a grain of salt. Given that the article mentions The Deck, better known as a restaurant, it calls the specialty coffee/cafe credibility of the Herald Sun into question. Mr. Carroll also noted, “It sounds to me as if (to use an Aussie slang) the owner [of The Deck] was ‘having a bit of a lend of himself,’ which is another way of suggesting he sounds a bit pretentious.”

And coffee pretentiousness is something of a problem Down Under, just as it is in very limited circles in the States. “While verbose descriptions of the various flavours and aromas have their place I think we may have taken it a little too far over here at times, and our coffee snobbery drifts to ridiculous levels,” said Mr. Carroll. “So much so that I and some fellow coffee snobs have a running ‘elderberry’ joke whenever we do a cupping.” Did Counter Culture Coffee recently open an office in Perth?

As in the U.S. as Australia, consumer knowledge and awareness of specialty coffee is spreading rapidly, raising consumer expectations for the coffee they drink. This in itself is a huge accomplishment. However, knowledge often inevitably leads to a rise in pretentiousness (see: the ever-popular wine analogy) — which can undermine more populist demands for better coffee. To counter this, Mr. Carroll wrote, “We will one day stop making rules for people, I hope, and allow them to enjoy coffee as coffee without placing too many subjective demands on the experience.” We could not agree more.

French coffee cuppers seem displeased with the San Ignacio Juana Mamami Huanca from Bolivia — or maybe they’re just being French.

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We’re more than a bit late with the news here, but a hearty and well-deserved congratulations to Kyle Glanville of LA’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea for winning the 2008 U.S. Barista Championship (USBC): 2008 US Barista Champion « The Official 2008 SCAA Conference Blog.

Proving the West is Best, and giving us some minor trash-talking rights, five of the six finalists all hailed from our own backyard Western Regional Barista Competition. Booyah.

Could we get any further away from Minneapolis? Please?

We weren’t exactly glued to our monitors for the blow-by-blow updates of the USBC as some have. Part of that is being in India, where everything is 12½-hours ahead of Pacific Time (yes, there is an extra 30 minutes in there). But a bigger part reflects the forced spectacle of barista competitions in addition to the overall SCAA conference spectacle itself.

The redeeming qualities of the SCAA conference include a number of interesting presentations and topics of discussion, elements the USBC, and the Roasters Guild Coffee of the Year Competition. But there are also big sponsorships by the irrelevant likes of Krups and Da Vinci Gourmet syrups (never trust a product that has “gourmet” in its name), soapbox political causes that have been uniquely attracted to coffee like flies to a bug lamp, and featured or “award-winning” irrelevant products — such as java jackets (just say no to paper cups), the 2008 PR onslaught of the Handpresso (wow, now we can drink crap pod coffee on the go!), and the exhumed resurgence of a PR onslaught for “Red Espresso” (which is no more “espresso” than if I put orange pulp in my espresso machine and called it “Orange Espresso”) after a two year hiatus.

In short: many of the things about the coffee industry I really don’t like and wish would go away. If this is the promise of the so-called “Third Wave” as advertised on the SCAA conference Web site, please drown me now in the undertow.

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As we hinted in a previous post, San Francisco magazine just published Josh Sens’ story on the more recent evolution of San Francisco’s local coffee scene in its most recent issue: A new buzz | San Francisco online. (There’s even an article featuring CoffeeRatings.com: The coffee bard | San Francisco online.)

The article features Coffee Bar, Blue Bottle Cafe, Ritual Coffee Roasters (including some great quotes from one of our favorite area baristas and coffee writers, Gabe Boscana), and Trouble Coffee. A couple of interesting points Mr. Sens raises in his article include:

• “It’s just coffee” — Running a business that really cares about the details involved with good coffee often requires a thick skin — especially in the face of the many knee-jerk reactionaries who ridicule what they see as coffee elitism. (I.e., “Folgers’ Crystals was good enough for my parents, and it should be good enough for you too.”)
• The Caffeine Factor — Trouble Coffee’s Giulietta Carrelli directly addressed the role caffeine plays in good coffee, which Mr. Sens found unorthodox and refreshing. In many ways, we appreciate the decaffeinated coffee drinker as a sort of “true” lover of coffee, independent of its psycho-chemical effects (i.e., its about “enjoyment” rather than “usage”). But there’s a reason why Duncan Hines is the #3 consumer of purified caffeine: the caffeine enhances the “mouth-watering taste” (OK, that’s a bit subjective) of their brownie mixes.

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Last week, the Contra Costa Times published an article announcing the Bay Area arrival of McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks: McDonald’s new coffee drinks ignite breakfast wars - ContraCostaTimes.com. Of course, none of this info is really new, so we’re a bit perplexed over how someone can “ignite” something with a two-year-long fuse. But the article cites some local coffee lovers who didn’t find McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks up to the task.

Is anyone surprised? We already have the McDonald’s of specialty coffee: it’s called Starbucks.

The article also highlighted one of the more ridiculous aspects of the consumer marketing industry: the art of packaging everything as a “solution”. Quoting Matthew Ramerman, principal of HL2, a Seattle-based advertising agency that focuses on restaurant chains: “Consumers have been saying ‘I’m looking for a breakfast solution.’” Huh?!

Perhaps CoffeeRatings.com has missed this all along: all we’re really looking for is an espresso solution. It reminds me of an old joke I used to tell my marketing friends: “It’s not a chair, it’s a seating solution.”

The reporter also interviewed Michaele Weissman, author of a forthcoming book called God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. Which, curiously enough, sounds a lot like like last month’s release of Instaurator’s The Espresso Quest, proving just how difficult it is to come up with an original idea.

We received our copy of The Espresso Quest in the mail from Australia a couple weeks back and are still well behind posting a book review here any time soon. But stay tuned… Miracles can happen.

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While I’ll be checking out Barista Coffee in India, Minneapolis will be hosting this year’s U.S. Barista Championship during the SCAA conference this weekend.

Yesterday, the host city’s hometown paper, the Star Tribune, published a rather lengthy article on the event: The great barista battle is brewing. It’s a story that’s been covered dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. But besides the usual descriptions of contestants’ “espresso cocktails” (specialty drinks), they touched on an interesting point for the industry:

“Caribou, after Starbucks the nation’s second-largest purveyor of coffee in terms of number of stores, is a major sponsor of the conference, yet has no baristas entered in the competition. Why don’t titans like Starbucks and Caribou participate?”

It’s a great question. The article quotes the new SCAA president, Mark Inman, who suggests that the barista championship is an underground cult and that the big, deep-pocketed coffee pushers are casing out the event before getting more involved. But that’s as much a load of crap as the self-serving “Third Wave” platitudes on the conference Web site.

Starbucks’ and Caribou’s Public Humiliation Championship 2008 — presented by Krups

Sure, according to Mr. Inman, Starbucks and Caribou should “have the resources to hire and train the best talent in the industry and sweep the competitions.” But it’s not because “they choose not to expose themselves to this arena”. What big corporation doesn’t want free PR and employees who can boast national awards? Particularly Starbucks these days, who are desperate to claim some kind of coffee quality relevance after selling their souls and taking the highway to fast-food hell.

Mr. Inman is being rather disingenuous — he knows better than that. Krups is once again sponsoring the competition, afterall — a company that profited for decades selling an armada of landfill-bound home espresso machines. The reason Starbucks and Caribou don’t participate is because they are incapable of participating and they are afraid of the embarrassment when that fact publicly comes to light.

The No Espresso Left Behind Act

The best baristas in the country are not lured to work for the big chains to prefect their craft and their love of coffee. And even if they were, Starbucks’ espresso delivery system™ would put their baristas behind equipment and supplies that place them at an extreme competitive disadvantage: no barista trained on a push-button Verismo or Mastrena machine, using pre-packaged beans purchased in bulk supply for chain consistency, would have a chance against the competition.

The truth is that Starbucks and Caribou don’t want an event to prove to the public how woefully inadequate their coffee standards are — especially when compared to the level of competition that comes to these championships. If millions of their customers realized how much coffee quality they were being cheated out of at $4 a pop, it would be a boon for many independent coffeeshops and it would scuttle corporate coffee with long-lasting damage.

Big corporate coffee may not be that great, but they’re not so stupid as to give away their dirty secrets. The coffee quality strategy of major chains like Starbucks and Caribou isn’t at the high end of the scale — i.e., to provide the best coffee possible served by their most talented staff. Instead, their strategies are focused at the low end — i.e., how to best elevate the worst coffee made among all their chain stores using the least-skilled staff available to them.

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When it comes to coffeehouses in San Francisco, few are worth writing home about. This isn’t one of them. But then the Castro Cheesery exemplifies what you most commonly find in the city’s murky midrange of espresso bars.

Contrary to its name, cheese plays second fiddle to the vast array of roasted coffee available for purchase in this tiny storefront — not to mention the coffee makers, filters, and related accessories. This dark, tiny place has no seating for customers, however.

They serve and sell Caffen coffee from Naples (i.e., Napes, Italy — and not that abomination in Florida that goes by the same name, even if the latter has adequate landfills for garbage collection). Using an older two-group Rancilio at the back (it used to be a La Pavoni), they serve espresso with a thin, pale crema and an average body. It has a woody, mostly herbal flavor that borders on ashy and bitter without jumping over the line too strongly.

With no seating area, everything is “to go” — which means paper cup purgatory.

Read the updated review of The Castro Cheesery.

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