Coffee’s cutting edge … or just carnival barking?
Posted by TheShot on 18 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: Barista, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
This week we came across a curious video published by Voice of America:
VOA News – Seattle: Capital of Coffee Houses. If you wonder why something called “Voice of America” produces video, you’ll question that even more after viewing this parody of a 1980′s corporate training video. But the video is essentially a review of Seattle’s notable contributions to American coffee culture: from the good (David Schomer and Espresso Vivace) to the bad (lukewarm customer responses to Starbucks) to the bikini-clad barista.
But one point from the video really stood out for us. It came from an interview with Tatiana Becker — a UC Berkeley grad, 2008 USBC competitor, and co-owner of Seattle’s Trabant Coffee & Chai (voted “Best Coffee 2008” in the Seattle CitySearch.com reader’s poll — now three years running). In the video, Ms. Becker bridges her previous high-tech career to her new role of coffee shop owner, saying, “There’s always new advances being made as far as equipment and techniques go. So it’s really challenging to stay on the cutting edge of coffee.”
The “cutting edge” of coffee?!?
Why do people make futile attempts to convince us that they’ve reinvented good coffee? Good coffee is good coffee, and what makes good coffee really hasn’t changed all that much in over a century.
Sure, many more professionals have become much better at it — leaving it much less up to chance or accident. But the idea that coffee has a “cutting edge” smacks of all the consumer marketing gimmicks for “new” coffee, such as blending it with ginseng or yerba mate and every other attempt to fashion coffee as some sort of nuevo energy drink. If your coffee has multiple ingredients, or worse — if it needs a recipe, it’s not coffee. (This is the main reason why we find the specialty beverage portion of barista competitions to be the most creative but also the most irrelevant.)
And if you visit the Trabant Coffee & Chai Web site, you’ll find it littered with references to the term “spro” (short for “espresso”). Use of the faux-word spro is yet another contrived attempt to create something new out of what is essentially old and traditional. (That and it comes off like your dad trying to speak to you in hip-hop rhymes to feign street cred.)
A Clover is only as good as the beans you put in it
As for coffee equipment and techniques, look no further than the Clover brewer B-roll in Ms. Becker’s video segment. How much of the Clover is truly a coffee innovation, and how much of it is just mere kitchen gadgetry? A $300 Williams-Sonoma electronic garlic peeler might seem revolutionary, but it holds little merit when you can still produce the same results with the broad side of a chef’s knife. More often, an innovation in gadgetry is really just an innovation in spending opportunities. Is it any wonder why the Clover is known more for its cited $11,000 price tag than for any of the coffee you can produce with it?
We even argue that a Clover doesn’t produce coffee any better than an 1840′s-technology vacuum pot. What’s largely been lost among all the Clover brewer talk is that they are pointless without the appropriate bean sourcing: a Clover is only as good as the beans you put in it. And if you can’t taste it in the end product, we argue that it’s rather superfluous to the cause of good coffee.
You can call it cutting edge or Third Wave, you can call it spro, you can showcase a Clover brewer, and, in Ms. Becker’s case, you can even break out the halter tops at barista competitions for your sorority girl routine. But all of that does nothing to convince us that your coffee is somehow brand new or innovative. None of that is even about the coffee. Instead, these are all more akin to carnival barking — as if to convince us that Aunt Flo’s menopause makes her the Bearded Lady worthy of a $10 admission.
If coffee has a cutting edge, it couldn’t slice butter on a hot summer’s day.
6 Comments »
While I have never done it, my friends (who are tried and true coffee lovers and actually introduced me to its wonders) have brewed coffee with yerba mate. Both of them said that, after drinking the resulting brew, they felt like they were going to die (and kind of wanted to, too) and vowed never to do it again. But there they were, the very next day, doing the same thing. It took them about a week each to realize that it was a stupid idea and finally call off the practice entirely.
I really have no interest in doing the same thing, although I probably will. After the NLDS this year, wanting to die doesn’t really seem like that novel of a thing.
As an avowed traditionalist in the culinary world, and a person who hates gadgets more than most 23-year-olds, so much of the “cutting edge” seems completely ridiculous. A great espresso machine is one thing, going back to a completely revolutionary method for extracting the essence of beans in a short time invented 100 years ago. “Spro” is like the Gillette Mach 5 Turbo; I’m not really sure how to respond to it, but I’m certainly not going to use it.
Of course, this tendency towards the new is not confined to coffee. It exposes itself throughout the culinary world and much of the “molecular gastronomy” movement, which has replaced the Fusion movement, has its basis in invention for invention’s sake. While I applaud modern gastronomes for bringing back offal, why do we need foams? Or peaches which look and feel like foie gras? Trompe-l’oeil can only be used so much until it becomes expected and therefore irrelevant.
Besides, my greatest enjoyment, whether it be coffee or food, has always come from the traditionalists. A cappuccino at Metropolis last winter was infinitely more pleasing than any vanilla frappuccino could ever even hope to be. A bistro or diner meal will always make me happier than $500 at Alinea. I would rather have three $1.50 tacos than a $90 tasting menu any day.
Great post! And my apologies for any rantiness which consumed my response.
Fantastic comment, Matt. It’s a top contender for the best reader comment we’ve seen all year here.
Over dinner tonight, I had a very similar conversation with my wife regarding the ridiculous notion that “new equals better” when it comes to the culinary world in general.
Unfortunately, the entire food marketing economy has long since learned that promoting fresh fruits or vegetables (for example) is a losing battle; it’s a lot more effective to reformulate them as part of some heavily processed, utterly vile convenience food with “new and improved” slapped on the label. In part because of this, the simple, whole foods our grandmothers used out of poverty and a lack of alternatives — seasonal, local, organic produce and the like — have been branded as “elitist” in modern society.
And the human
conditionsickness that seeks a “cutting edge” and confuses that with quality is surely a motivator behind today’s molecular gastronomy. Of course, virtually all the chefs who espouse molecular gastronomy clearly state it’s not an “everyday” thing. And while they do get us to rethink food, and that said “food” has its place and can sometimes achieve great qualities, its foams and flavored paper are the result of taking science to an extreme conclusion — leaving us with food devoid of any comfort nor soul. Lasers and liquid nitrogen may relieve some boredom in the chef’s kitchen, but they offer little fulfillment.Brilliant post, and a potent antidote against the hype and uber-tech that, unfortunately, overshoots many a coffee customer. If only more people would skip the Clover and ask for a simple press pot …
I will say this in defense of Becker: Her competition routine was a sorely needed, if woefully off-target, diversion for an event that seemed kinda cool to me at first. But now it looks more like a pointless, Pacific Northwest cool-kids circle jerk. Is it about latte art? Theatrics? Did the rosetta reveal a nuance in your “competition” blend that you’ve no plan to brew back home for your CUSTOMERS? Snappy sous-chef suits?
Enough.
Call me a snob, but I really believe the best coffee these days is being pressed or poured-over.
Good points, Chris. Despite our criticism of Ms. Becker’s focus relative to quality coffee, we honestly applaud her efforts to shake up what is essentially a staid, insular, and contrived competition.
Is the competition, in its current format, better than nothing at all? Certainly. But there are an untold number of great baristas (many whom I argue could win it all if they actually cared enough) who see no real purpose in participating. Participation is most often determined by whom a given coffee professional socializes with in the industry. Hence we think one of the competition’s greatest challenges is inclusivity.
More to the original post, I can’t help but think of the Piccolo brothers and their creation of Vancouver’s Caffè Artigiano, a small café chain that we felt, under their tenure, was one of the world’s greatest. (For those not in the know, the Piccolo brothers have since sold their interests and are now behind the much-lauded 49th Parallel Roasters in Vancouver.)
Even its name, “artisan coffee” in Italian, suggested excellent coffee built on the foundations of tradition — and not on faddish gimmickry, nor the youthful, naïve beliefs of professionals with three years of industry experience who think they can revolutionize a product where generations before them have failed.
Sort of off topic, but what are your thoughts on the forced double shot everywhere these days – 4 barrel, Blue Bottle, barefoot and i’m sure many others. I’m consistently told that pulling a double brings more favors from the beans? I don’t think the espresso at Ritual suffers from the lack of a double pull. I know I can obviously drink half a cup if I wanted, but I enjoy the pureness of the single.
Our choice to standardize our ratings on the single shot is a actually a little bit of an anomaly among high-quality espresso shops in the U.S.
A great number of Stateside purists will tell you that everything in retail espresso preparation is measured and designed around the double portafilter basket — about a 3 fl oz vs. a 1.5 fl oz shot. Dealing in volume sales, most retail places don’t even bother with a single-sized basket (often identified by single spout portafilters). Instead, they often fudge matters to make a single by splitting the twin spouts of the pour and either reusing, consuming, or even discarding the pour from the other spout. Between this and the oddity of the single shot portafilter basket, single shots are often given second class status at barista stations.
While the single espresso is the standard unit in most of Europe, and few even think twice about it, we standardized on it to keep our primary unit of measure as “atomic” as possible. At least without throwing in the “ristretto” monkeywrench.
As for how we feel about it, we’d like to believe that America’s Super Big Gulp culture didn’t automatically upgrade the de facto size of our espresso shots. That said, whenever we’re at a restaurant or coffee bar, we frequently trust the staff to know what’s good and not-so-good there. So if they tell us the chef recommends “medium rare” or the barista recommends a doppio, we often heed their advice.