New York Times thinks robusta detractors set the espresso blend standards for everybody
Posted by TheShot on 23 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Robusta
Just when we write about the stifling conformity among roasters and coffee professionals of this modern era, today’s New York Times blog reports on the use of robusta beans in espresso blends: Robusta Economy – Times Topics Blog – NYTimes.com.
Although there’s nothing in the post we haven’t heard before, it’s the tone of the post that we find a little sad and almost incredulous. To read the author, Oliver Schwaner-Albright, you’d think measured use of robusta beans in espresso blends were akin to the medicinal practice of bloodletting — and that those who continued to use a little robusta in their espresso blends were akin to underground disciples of Falun Gong in modern China.
We may not seek out robusta beans any more than necessary. (Ain’t that the truth.) But the apparent belief that there is a singular, conformist voice about what definitively does and does not make good coffee today smacks of a “taste totalitarianism” — not to mention a historical and factual revisionism.
3 Comments »
Interesting take. I actually read the article a bit differently. I think Mr. Albright (to borrow the Time’s formal style) was fairly portraying the bias that does exist in the (North American?) coffee world against robusta and explaining why people loathe it so. He then goes on to report (and not opine) the way in which several roasters are bucking this trend. I think his portrayal of anti robusta sentiment in the industry is pretty accurate. It may be a pretty recent bias that’s ill informed from a myopic view of history but if so, that’s the coffee industry’s myopia and not Mr. Albright’s.
Interesting take back at you. Clearly, there is a large segment of coffee pros (with representatives among both, ahem, shall we say, second and third waves) that loathe robusta. I almost loathe it alone for what the Big Four and Vietnam did with it to virtually create crop collapse.
But where I differ is that Mr. Albright reveals those bucking the trend as if it were a recent phenomenon. That people like James Freeman woke up one morning and decided to make measured amounts of robusta in espresso blends acceptable again. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
The perfect counterexample was right in his own article with Tom Owen. Tom’s been making Vietnamese “disgusta” beans available for “scientific purposes only” on the Sweet Maria’s Web site for years. And yet many of his pre-roast espresso blends never strayed from robusta all that time.
I can’t believe we are still having this routine. The whole marketing that specialty coffee is Arabica and ‘supermarket’ or ‘filler’ coffee is Robusta is just too goofy. When and if coffee folks really get out into the world and see the varieties of coffee out there, they might just learn that even a hipster who swears by Intelligentsia will prefer a lot of good robustas to the myriad bad arabicas.
At poster number 1: the NYT is accurately serving as the propaganda organ of the hipster coffee scene. That is all.