Coffee’s Slow Dance, or Pop Will Repeat Itself
Posted by TheShot on 12 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Consumer Trends
The New York Times published an article this week (due in the NY Times Magazine tomorrow) from its coffee beat regular, Oliver Strand: Japan’s Pour-Over Coffee Wins Converts – NYTimes.com. It’s a relatively effective trend piece — dealing more with pop culture and a sort of social anthropology than anything it says about coffee. But coffee’s story over the past decade is primarily about an evolution of pop culture rather than any evolution in coffee itself.
The article introduces the notion of national coffee cultures and how Japan has finally earned some long overdue recognition. Giving credit to Japan’s long history of quality coffee is a refreshing change from the usual mainstream media take, as coffee reporting is rife with historical revisionism.
Just last week, the San Jose Mercury News reported that “there’s a new DIY trend afoot in the world of coffee lovers … they’re roasting their own coffee beans — at home.” This despite a good decade of noticeable decline in activity on home roasting newsgroups, online forums, and mailing lists — in response to the increasing consumer availability of high quality, fresh-roasted, date-stamped coffees.
Pour-over coffee is new if it’s new to you
But while Mr. Strand does a great job in recognizing that Japanese quality coffee culture wasn’t born yesterday, he isn’t nearly as successful with doing the same for the very old, very un-trendy practice of pour-over coffee brewing. To quote his article:
“…Cooking isn’t stuck in 1990, or we would still be sitting down to menus with honey-mustard glaze and sun-dried tomatoes. Why should coffee be any different? ”
And yet the article goes on to discuss pour-over coffee. Except that pour-over is a holdover from the 1990s, with coffee shops such as Oakland’s Cole Coffee (née Royal Coffee) and Monterey’s Plumes offering handmade, individual serving pour-over coffee since the halcyon days of car phone antennas and rollerblading along the Embarcadero. Long before Phil Jabar, of Philz Coffee fame, even thought about coffee.
But even 1990 doesn’t go far back enough. Monmouth Coffee in London has been offering individual pour-over coffee since 1978 — the days of the very fondue sets that Mr. Strand mentions in his article. And yet we have food blog posts announcing those “high-tech Chemex brewers” that were actually invented in the 1930s, and the original Melitta pour-over filter design was patented around the last time the Chicago Cubs won a World Series (1908).
Is it any wonder why we roll our eyes whenever someone brings up the popular (and misused) form of the “Third Wave” tag — as if nobody had thought of making quality coffee until they just invented it three years ago? Even the Japanese Hario dripper kettle Mr. Strand cites in the article represents a simple modification of the hot water pot — i.e., hardly something revolutionary. Consumer toaster manufacturers change their designs every couple of years, introducing new features like bagel settings, and yet nobody speaks of toast experiencing a “Third Wave” or radical quality revolution.
Understanding the need for (perceived) speed
Which all makes us wonder why coffee has a tendency to put a new coat of paint on the Vatican and tell us it’s new and revolutionary architecture. Perhaps we all innately need to believe that we live in accelerated and interesting times to get us out of bed in the morning. A cultural environment that promotes a kind of faux anxiety is probably good for jobs, good for product marketing, good for filling conference seats, and even good for book authors, newspaper columnists, and, well, blog posters.
However you look at it, hand-pour coffee is old. Japanese coffee culture is even older. But the Western recognition of and appreciation for pour-over coffee and Japanese coffee culture is definitely new. Or at least new to enough of us to warrant a worthy trend piece in the Times.
7 Comments »
You’re about half-right in this post, with the main point being valid: these “new methods” aren’t new.
I’ll skip parsing your post for the factual errors, but I will make this counterpoint: You’re getting hung up on the fact that some of these methods have been around, but the surging trend is still notable.
However, I have my own “issues” with the specific Japanese products that have become popular; more about the actual usefulness as coffee-brewing tools than anything.
Kinda like video game. People who were born at the late 90s and early two thousands never experience the era when 8, 16 and 32 bit video game consoles are popular. When they reach the age where they can do gaming (let’s say 5 years old), they already familiarized themselves with 128 bit and above gaming platforms.
But at some point, some of these kids will stumble themselves on old consoles, whether the real one or via emulator. And some percentage of those kids would get hooked up on that; The “rediscover” the joy of the old consoles. And maybe another percentage of those kids would start making indie video games, retro style.
Do you consider these kids “wrong” at their choice? I don’t think so. But should you tell everyone that retro gaming is the best and you aren’t supposed to own the latest video game console? That’s too extreme…
Same with the coffee “scene” I guess. Some people suddenly found the old ways to be more engaging and more affordable for the general non-espresso drinker. And start promoting them. But leaving espresso altogether isn’t exactly a wise thing to do either.
@Nick: “surging trend” being the operative phrase here. This was a trend piece, and not necessarily a coffee piece. (It’s certainly not intended as a news piece, for example.) The “dance” isn’t so much “coffee’s slow dance,” but more a dance of the people who make and drink the stuff.
Enrico captured some of this above here. And a retro interest in older brewing techniques and methods is a great way to explore old ways applied to, say, new bean sources (CoE cups, etc.).
It’s not wrong by any means. I just wouldn’t throw out intentionally dated comparisons to mustard glaze, sun-dried tomatoes, and fondue sets when you’re talking about things at least as old if not older. Mr. Strand pays respects to Japanese coffee culture, but he steamrolls over decades of pour-over coffee’s Western retail pioneers as if they didn’t exist until 2007. (Coincidentally, that’s the same year that good coffee was apparently “invented” in New York City.)
Isn’t it somewhat true that though these devices have been around for generations, they’re now being used more than ever before to highlight really fantastic coffee? It’s like the combination of well-produced, well-roasted coffee with these older instruments is what’s at the heart of the trend … and makes it worth discussing. I wasn’t into coffee in the 90s so I don’t have too much of a grasp on the evolution of single-cup brewing, but my impression is that “back in the day” pour-over, etc. was used but that the brews being produced were nothing special (though Monmouth and a few others I guess have stood as exceptions).
@Dan: Yep, that’s what I meant by “explore old ways applied to, say, new bean sources”.
The sources have definitely improved and higher quality coffees have become more widely available. But good (though perhaps not as great) coffee supplies were available in shorter supply in the past. Cultural lore about Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, for example, isn’t a product of the 21st century.
It does beg the question of whether the improved coffee sources and a return to old brewing methods would have been possible without improved espresso as a catalyst.
Very good points up there. However I’m not sure if comparing pour over coffee to retro 16 bit video games is accurate. I would rather compare it to, let’s say, slow cooked french cuisine and espresso to fast food such as McDonald’s. I mean espresso is good, real good, and if you’ve tried americanos and espressos made with La Marzocco espresso machines, you’ll be surprised at how smooth and balanced the coffee is.
However, there’s a limit to espressos because you’re using pressure to forcefully extract the coffee; A very quick and effective way to serve coffee indeed. Pour over coffee on the other hand uses gravity to allow a natural extraction of coffee from the beans.
The results? You can taste all the wonderful aspects of the coffee: the fruitiness, body and the distinct flavor that comes from each coffee bean. I’ve had ten people drip the same coffee beans on the spot and each one came out tasting different (but all relatively amazing compared to americanos).
But, it’s a very delicate process and difficult to get right, but it’s an amazing process to do or witness.
If you’ve never tried it, I recommend you to check it out when you have the chance.
@Isaac Lee: I don’t buy the “natural extraction of coffee from the beans” bit. In fact, there is absolutely nothing natural about it.
Coffee cherries have been harvested, they’ve had the pulp separated from the seed by controlled rotting or by chemical washing, they’ve been dried, they’ve been roasted to over 400°F, and they’ve been ground up by metal burrs all before a “natural extraction” occurs with scorching water. What we call drinkable coffee isn’t natural at all — it’s rather a deliberate and freak outcome of a lot of human manipulation and force.
So I’m not willing to call a pour-over coffee its “natural extraction”. At least any more than I’d give a woman who gives birth to sextuplets — after hundreds of thousands of dollars of fertility treatments resulting from billions of dollars of scientific medical research — the credibility to pull the “it’s God’s will” card when she won’t terminate one pregnancy to save the lives of the five others. (I.e., “God’s will” was that you had to adopt to have kids; mankind’s manipulations through science offered otherwise.)
The espresso process produces an emulsion: there’s gas, liquid, and even solid dispersed together, and each of them produce a unique chemistry of flavor components. You cannot say that about filter drip coffee. So I don’t buy that there’s “limit” at play at all with high pressure extraction. Rather, we’re just dealing with different processes for getting a similar outcome.