KQED Forum gives some radio love to Bay Area coffee
Posted by TheShot on 10 Jan 2012 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Barista, Beans, Café Society, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Foreign Brew, Home Brew, Local Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
Yesterday morning, KQED radio aired an hour-long Forum segment featuring a small round-table of SF coffee “luminaries”: SF’s Coffee Innovators: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. The panel included James Freeman, of Blue Bottle Coffee, Eileen Hassi, of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and an unusually quiet Jeremy Tooker, of Four Barrel Coffee.
Much like the title of its associated Web page, the radio program played out like your typical coffee innovator/”third wave“/bleeding-edge routine that we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. While a bit heavy on the Coffee 101 — particularly when callers asked common FAQ-type questions that have been answered on the Internet 20,000 times over already — KQED produced a good program overall.
Some of the more interesting comments included Eileen Hassi stating that “San Francisco has better coffee than any other city in the world” — with the only potential exception being Oslo, Norway. We’d like to think so, and there’s a bit of evidence to back that up.
James Freeman noted Italy’s “industrialized system of near-universal adequacy,” which is a different but accurate way of summing up our long-held beliefs that outstanding coffee in Italy is almost as hard to find as unacceptable coffee. Other covered topics included coffeehouses eliminating WiFi, Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum inventing the latte, the Gibraltar, and even James Freeman designating home roasting as coffee’s “geeky lunatic fringe.”
The rumors of home coffee roasting’s meteoric rise have been greatly exaggerated…
While it’s worth noting that Mr. Freeman started as a home roaster, recent media coverage of home roasting has been a bit bizarre. To read it in the press these days, you’d think home roasting were at its apex rather than continuing its gradual decline towards its nadir. This despite numerous media stories covering it over five years ago as some hot new trend.
At the 2006 WRBC, we were perplexed by the complete lack of home roaster representation among the event’s attendees. (Namely, any home roaster worth his weight in greens would have been giddy over the reappearance of the Maui Moka bean. Nobody there even noticed.) And yet by 2009 we noted a real decline in online home roasting community activity, and we wrote about some of the underlying reasons for it.
South India coffee
Curiously enough, the first caller to the radio program (at 12’12″ in) mentions a recent trip to South India and his interest in South Indian coffee. I’m posting this from South India — Bengaluru (née Bangalore), to be precise. And I have to say, I’ve become quite fond of both South Indian coffee and the South Indian coffee culture.
Sure, they prefer it sweetened and with hot milk (that often has a skin still on it). The coffee is often cut with cheaper chicory and is brewed with a two-chambered cylindrical metal drip brewer — not unlike a Vietnamese brewer or an upside-down version of a Neapolitan flip coffee pot. But damn, if this stuff isn’t good. Even better, there’s a culture of regular coffee breaks that would be familiar to many Mediterraneans.
We’ve reported from India before, but only from the North — which isn’t known for a strong coffee culture beyond young people frequenting chains that emulate the West. Bengaluru is home to the Coffee Board of India, and this weekend I hope to head out across its state of Karnataka to visit origin at the Kodagu district. Also known as Coorg, this district grows a good amount of India’s good coffee. (Yes, they even grow really good robusta there. Just ask Tom Owens of Sweet Maria.) Details certainly to follow…
2 Comments »
Looking forward to more reports of your South Indian adventure. I don’t know if coffee at MTR in Bangalore is as good as it used to be but I definitely enjoyed the coffee experience at that establishment many years ago. I stumbled across your blog as I searched for information about how south Indian housewives roast coffee at home. I understand there is quite a practice of this and would love to know what method they use. Nothing quite like south Indian filter coffee!
Funny that I should first see this comment just when I tried to make my first South Indian brewer of coffee after returning home.
Verdict: it looked and tasted all wrong. Fancy Western single origin coffee (and no chicory) blended with heated non-fat milk. Just awful. This when I need the coffee to be thicker and more syrupy, and the milk probably has to come like milk in India: an unrefrigerated family pot of the stuff sealed by its natural cream on top.
I never made it to MTR, though it is on my list (some other trip). Close enough, perhaps, was Koshy’s.
That South Indian housewives would roast their own wouldn’t surprise me. You can visit coffee stores that are very much of the bean & leaf tradition (i.e., no retail beverages), and it’s not unusual to find a merchant who has some elite lots from Coorg or Chikmagalur.
I hope to post more on it soon. It was an unusual trip, but not the kind that left me with lots of details to write about yet.