Trip Report: Chill
Posted by TheShot on 21 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew
This modern glass storefront, built in 2008 on the site of the former, 70-year-old Brooks Camera, offers a modern, culturally diverse dessert café. The long internal space is characterized by a long bench on one side with simple-but-modern tables and modern, colorful acrylic chairs.
They offer frozen yogurt, crêpes, Vietnamese sandwiches, and a coffee bar featuring Four Barrel Coffee. Four Barrel’s new elephant-logo branding is printed out on photocopies throughout the store and out front on the sidewalk sign. But as progressive as this location tries to be, its espresso is a bit regressive.
The staff here originally lead us to believe that they used Four Barrel Coffee for both their filter coffee and their espresso (this is not as uncommon as it sounds). But thankfully someone in the comments below, and offline, helped identify and correct some of the misrepresentation: they use Peter James Coffee for espresso.
Chill has a two-group La Spaziale, but they favor a single-group, superautomatic Schaerer Ambiente machine to produce shots of espresso with a thin, pale crema with extremely large and erratic bubbles. It looks a mess. Fortunately it tastes a little better than it looks, but not by much: a mellow flavor of spices with enough body to the large shots to prevent it from being mistaken for filter coffee. As for filter coffee, the posted signs indicated they were serving Four Barrel’s Idido Misty Valley yirgacheffe (Ethiopia).
Read the review of Chill.
4 Comments »
The Chill Cafe serves Four Barrel DRIP coffee only. This is clearly displayed in the menu.
Espresso based drinks are organic. Again this is clearly displayed in the menu.
And if you know Four Barrel Coffee, they do not serve organic coffee.
Therefore, the espresso based drinks are not Four Barrel Coffee and thus the quality of the drip is never compromised.
We don’t randomly associate coffee roasters without asking the staff what they use for espresso. That’s what they told us. We don’t put them through lie detector tests, so we take them at their word unless they seem uncertain or intentionally misleading — and we point out those situations where possible.
So, for what it’s worth, it sounds like your employees don’t know and are misrepresenting your business. If so, what are you using for your espresso then? We’ll be happy to correct if someone from Chill can provide us with correct information.
Thank you for inquiring. We use Peter James coffee from the East Bay; they have been roasting coffee for over 20 years now. The owner of The Chill Cafe worked personally and directly with both owners of the roasters (Four Barrel and Peter James) to ensure the most appropriate bean selection for the cafe needs.
Thanks. We will definitely correct this, as what you indicate certainly makes more sense from what we were told. These things happen, as past experience shows.