Disparaging the Third Wave, Part 2: Single-Origins, Medium Roasts, and Cuppings
Posted by TheShot on 20 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues, Roasting
For the second of our three-part installment on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we examine some of coffee’s biggest qualitative fads going today:
- Single-origin coffees
- Medium roasts
- The heavy-handed use of cuppings
We’ll examine a little of why we must get past these fads for accessible quality coffee to continue to evolve — with more details in our last post of this series.
Death by Single-Origin
Quality coffee is currently mired in industry fads that, in due time, will seem as quaint as the non-functional garnish (NFG) — once a staple of restaurant plating in the 80s and 90s, symbolized by the sprig of curly parsley, that has since gone extinct.
Those curls of lemon rind served on an espresso saucer? NFG. Need we say more?
But let’s invoke another restaurant parallel: the molten chocolate cake. A once-ubiquitous staple on early 1990s dessert menus, today you can’t even find any kind of cake in most restaurants. The single-origin espresso made from medium-roast beans could ultimately suffer a similar fate. But what makes us think that?
People such as Nick Cho and Trish Skeie may have originally conceived a Third Wave to be about the appreciation of coffee for its own sake. (Curiously enough, we wrote this part before Nick’s comment on part one.) Yet one of the greatest overriding characteristics of coffee appreciation today is an intense focus on experimentation over a more learned enjoyment. This experimentation is often expressed through a dizzying array of coffee varietals, a deliberate campaign to proliferate public cupping, and more diverse brewing methods and equipment.
Two unfortunate side effects of this include:
- a presumption that the coffee consumer is in a constant state of ignorance
- the inadvertent devaluation of coffee consumption that lacks educational goals
These drivers helped fuel the explosion of single-origin coffees available commercially, but it has also done so at the expense of many quality blends — the very thing with which espresso excels. Because blends are rather opaque to most palate-developing exercises employed by “Third Wave” experimentation, they have fallen out of favor. And in the process, the current wave has at least limited these experiences in the world of coffee enjoyment.
Which brings us to a Third Wave paradox: in the name of providing coffee consumers with more options, it has also limited some choices. Dark roasts being another example.
Medium Röaster Cult
Common with generational waves and the naïvité of youth is a rejection of many things and practices of the past. It’s revolutionary/counter-revolutionary logic — also known as rebelling against your parents. Some motivations are forward-looking; others look backwards — simply going the opposite route to be different for different’s sake. The Third Wave glorification of medium roasts, and its fear of the second crack, falls into this category.
It’s not hard to see why. Not long ago, a lot of quality sourced and processed coffee beans were roasted into third-degree burn victims. But the reaction to this has been to introduce a new kind of narrow conformity so that even beans that excel at darker roast levels — such as Indonesian coffees with great body characteristics — sometimes never see the other side of Full City. By doing this, we’ve simply replaced one thoughtless, conformist monotony for another.
We were acutely reminded of this in our recent trip report at Rodger’s Coffee & Tea: experiencing a single origin bean freshly roasted into the second crack (not charcoal) seemed as alien as a genetically reanimated mastodon.
Public Cuppings, and Worshiping at the Cupping Altar
Among the tools and techniques behind the Third Wave’s emphasis on experimentation, coffee cuppings top the list. Cuppings have been around for decades, but under the Third Wave they’ve proliferated like childhood peanut allergies. Among professionals, cuppings have been exalted as the high watermark of coffee education. Worse, these same techniques are being heavily marketed to consumers as well.
As a result, many in the industry have overtly relied upon cupping as the ultimate test of a coffee — even if the experience of cupped coffee is once or twice removed from what the end customer actually purchases and consumes.
Recently, in response to some less-than-glowing opinions of their roasting operations, a notable Bay Area roaster invited us to cup their roasts. Of course, CoffeeRatings.com is not CuppingRatings.com. We deliberately focus on what coffee consumers experience. So while it was a generous and thoughtful offer, the roaster suggested it almost as an automatic retort. As a reactionary response, it reflected the insular thinking of a trained coffee industry insider — someone who very briefly mistook cupping for the final say on consumer experience.
In reality, cupping is merely a surrogate to what consumers experience out of a French press, a filter process, or portafilter handle. One characteristic we’ve noted among many Third Wave professionals is that they sometimes lose sight of their goal to produce good coffee, not just good cuppings.
Tune in next time…
For the last post in our series, we’ll cover the impact of some of the Third Wave’s major social fads and how these, too, are holding back quality coffee’s evolution. We promise it’s going to be controversial, but then we like that. The two major topics?:
- The focus on baristas
- The role of coffee geeks
Links to other parts of the series:
7 Comments »
It’s all rather specious Greg. Single origins should die because blends are better for espresso? Assuming that is true, not that I agree it always is, what about other brew methods?
I’m also not certain what “at the expense of many quality blends” means. As far as I can see there are plenty of options for high quality espresso blends, in fact I would argue that the majority of espresso offerings remain blends.
I probably didn’t make myself very clear here. I am not advocating the demise of single origin roasts. But what we are experiencing is a faddish experimentation with all things single origin — so much so that blends are pretty much shoved to the wayside.
For concrete examples to illustrate this point, I saw it when I walked into Four Barrel recently to find some of the most beautiful espresso machines in America — and a shelf of retail roasted coffee consisting of five or six different single origins and not a single blend. Or in the brief, well-written piece Stephen Leighton wrote for Barista Magazine a little over a year ago: “Death of the Blend”. Or when you visit most any café that offers a choice of coffee for espresso: inevitably, at most one of them is a blend, and the remainder are single origins.
But you illustrate another good point with you comment that I did not mention. I cannot think of a single Clover bar I visited that served a single blend.
I think the rise in Single Origin espresso has coincided with an increased availability of great lots of green coffee.
The art and craft of blending arose from a variety of demands – consistency, pricing, complexity, flavour combination as a few examples.
Single lots of green coffee haven’t been this good. Ever. Historically they would have been unable to offer the level of complexity they do now so one of the reasons to blend (er… complexity) has been partially negated. I think our increased control over the espresso process, which in turn has created a greater level of flavour feedback to the roast profile, has helped progress the cup quality of a single origin espresso too.
I love blending coffees, and learning a great deal doing so. I love drinking a single lot of coffee, and I am happy that I can finally use an espresso machine to brew them up along with my press, chemex or aeropress.
As for avoiding dark roasts – there are still plenty of places roasting darker out there. However I think it would be a crying shame to take an interesting coffee and roast it into 2nd crack where (from a chemical standpoint, as much as a subjective one, you lose a lot of what makes that coffee unique.)
There are some single origin espresso shots I’ve had that are incredibly complex and well-, though not perfectly, rounded. And if someone is blending for consistency or to cover for defects, that’s a good reason to no longer blend.
However, I like both blends and single origins — depending on what I’m making, or my mood. The world of scotch whisky (being official without the ‘e’ here
) mirrors this pretty well. Single malts have become all the rage relative to even the Johnnie Walker Blues. But once you’ve been clubbed over the head enough times with pure peat-smoke or salty spiciness by a given regional single malt, I can appreciate the labor of a master blender who effectively paints a more rounded flavor palate.
And to beat that wine analogy dead horse further, I love some of the single varietal, single vineyard wines you can get from, say, a Nickle & Nickle. But what’s wrong with a classic Bordeaux blend once in a while?
Some coffees are a waste at the second crack. But that’s also where some other coffees shine. It’s like we replaced one hard-fast, one-size-fits-all roasting rule for another, and different coffees have different characteristics that come out at different roast levels.
With regards to cupping I think you’ve only addressed half the equation here. From my knowledge of the two roasters that use it (both reputable australian ones) they’ve used it as one of the processes to help find new beans to play with, to help consistency between roasts and last but not least, to share the process with the public.
Yes, it’s an old technique that has been rebadged for consumer education but the thing that you miss out on is the communal process in doing it, the fun involved and last but not least, the happy feelings that we get when something that we know about gets passed onto the customer, that light pops up above their heads and that mutual understanding occurs. It’s the same feeling that you get when you make a great coffee for someone and they thank you for it the next day.
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