Revenge of the Knoxville (Coffee) Nerds
Posted by TheShot on 15 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
Today’s Metro Pulse (Knoxville, TN) published a lengthy-but-interesting piece on Knoxville’s budding local coffee scene: Revenge of the Knoxville (Coffee) Nerds » Metro Pulse.
The article includes plenty of common themes we’ve seen many times before — pour-over bars, direct trade, the wine analogy. However, the article succeeds by being non-judgmental while going beyond the usual coffee platitudes. For example, we learn that coffee isn’t actually the second most valuable commodity traded in the world, behind petroleum, and that 18th-century London slang once compared coffeehouses to a method of birth control.
3 Comments »
Since he references “a Jamaican bean called Sulawesi”, I think he must have missed a couple of things. But he admitted that much.
I caught that too and managed to hold in my snob reflex.
A) I’m not a he.
B) The BARISTA told me, when I asked where the Sulawesi coffee was from, that it was from Jamaica. It did not occur to me to fact-check her, since I assumed she knew much more about coffee than me.