Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that.

If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of Four Barrel Coffee, it’s no coincidence. Owners/brothers Jerad and Justin Morrison have years of veteran experience that includes roasting at Blue Bottle Coffee and the opening of Four Barrel Coffee.

You’d miss this space if you weren’t looking for it. We honestly had to duck under a half-open garage door to get in, and the place looked like it was closing up shop. But despite the tiny serving space at a serving cart on wheels, this is just one corner of a vast, 1924-built, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 25-foot ceiling — or about the size of a typical large auto-body shop in the area. Except this place serves coffee … and not much else (if you include the salt caramels).

They have a Chemex brewing station, which is somewhat unique for the area, but the main attraction is their refurbished two-group La Marzocco GS2 espresso machine — straight out of the 1970s, and a sister to the one just installed at Intelligentsia’s fabled Venice Beach location. Replace cheesy 1970s leather with wood, tune up the parts, and they’ve got a pretty serious machine for enthusiasts.

Of course — as with all these Works-In-Progress Cafés, Inc. — it doesn’t stop there. Since the new model of opening notable coffee bars these days is to open stripped-down with many promises to upgrade later, the Morrison brothers soon plan to employ one of those fancy new Slayer espresso machines in the near future — as showcased at the 2009 SCAA conference — putting their Slayer customer ID in the single digits. Will its manual control of brewing pressure blow our minds? Only time will tell, folks. In the meantime, we can’t help but snicker every time we hear the machine’s name — which conjures up images of Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson head-banging while playing air guitar to “Disciple“.

It’s just not the machine that’s slated for an upgrade, either. They currently have access to Verve Coffee Roasters‘ inventory and equipment until the 14-kg Probat roaster is installed and fired up for their own local roasting. As always in this town, the permit process is one of the key roadblocks. Though they hope to have things up and running in September, we wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still waiting in December.

The resulting shot has a dark, healthy crema. It’s a touch thin on body, but it has a potent pungent flavor of cloves, herbs, etc. There isn’t much to the dynamic range of the flavors, but what’s there is handled well. Served in classic brown ACF cups.

Don’t mind the 90% of the floorspace that’s still being prepped for their lonely Probat. This place will need revisits, as so much is bound to change in the future. For now, it’s a good shot with the promise of becoming better down the road.

Read the preliminary review of Sightglass Coffee. In the meantime, here’s a video of Sightglass making a cap in action:

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A couple months ago, we kicked up a bit of dust when we dressed down the Gibraltar, an espresso beverage created by accident when Blue Bottle Coffee Co. was opening their first SF café in 2005. We called it the fool’s cappuccino — essentially the same beverage, but poured in a cheap restaurant supply glass and gushed over by those who questionably valued faddishness and faux exclusivity over beverage quality. Blue Bottle’s follow-up act in the restaurant-supply-glassware-as-drink-name category is the SG-120, and we put it to the CoffeeRatings.com sensory test.

As many a curious customer asks, what is an SG-120? And why does an espresso drink have a name that sounds more like a license plate number, a Soviet rocket launcher, or a brand of synthetic motor oil? Searching for “SG-120″ on Google, we found that it is also the name of a single door steam jacketed gravity sterilizer and a rotation mill for “viscous or sticky products”. More to the point, as with the Gibraltar, the SG-120 is named after a restaurant supply glass the beverage is served in — this time a shotglass from Japanese glass maker, Hairo.

The SG-120 sensory test

Unlike the Gibraltar, Blue Bottle Cafe actually lists the SG-120 on their coffee menu. They typically offer it for about $3.50 from their single origin Bosco machine — along with the options of the less-milk macchiato ($3.25) and a straight double shot ($3).

Blue Bottle Cafe had been producing SG-120s from their Misty Valley Ethiopia beans until their Bosco had to be sent out for repairs. The machine returned from the shop this week — along with their Chapada Diamantina Brasil as the featured single origin coffee (which shares its name with a national park in Brasil’s state of Bahia). On Wednesday they served us an SG-120 with a smooth, integrated, and well-blended emulsion of coffee and frothed milk. Oddly, it was so smooth it almost didn’t taste much like coffee — more akin to a liquid candy bar.

Despite its non-coffee-like qualities, it was an impressive beverage. But given the SG-120 it came in, it begged the obvious question: would we have enjoyed it more if it were served in a demitasse? Our answer was a definitive “absolutely”. The SG-120 detracted from the experience with some poor glass aesthetics: the SG-120 is thin-lipped, much flimsier than the Gibraltar, it felt “cheap” and almost disposable, and its thinness and materials added no real thermal properties. So once again, we were convinced by the beverage — but not the suboptimal serving format.

(As an aside, Ben, an Apple employee from Vancouver who was visiting the nearby Apple developer’s conference, showed me photos of Chapada Diamantina national park on his iPhone while sampling the same coffee in a siphon pot. His take was that it was very clean, bright, and straightforward — lacking any buttery characteristics, etc. We picked up some beans to test the home version ourselves.)

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We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963.

In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are slowly creeping in. Yet the gap is still exceedingly large: of the current Top 28 on CoffeeRatings.com, only one location, Bar Bambino, is an actual restaurant.

There is a litany of reasons for why this is. Unfortunately, much of the food service/restaurant industry seems clueless about them. Case and point is a recent article published on the culinary Web site, Behind the Burner: Interview With a Coffee Roaster – Article – Behind the Burner TM.

The author, John Grossmann, interviews Alex Roberts, master roaster at Emeryville-based Roast Coffee Co.. Roast opened in early 2008 as part of the Bacchus Management Group (love the Web site, btw), a small management team behind a handful of eclectic Bay Area restaurants. Mr. Grossmann calls Roast an “unusual startup” that’s performing a “new twist in dining” by sourcing and roasting its own beans. And that’s where the naïveté starts spilling out.

Bean there, done that

For one, roasters offering restaurants custom roasts and blends has been a common practice for decades. One potentially different angle could be in custom bean sourcing, but market economics would prevent Roast from directly sourcing beans from different farms for a single restaurant — which would be the only new ground there. Bacchus Management Group promotes Roast as unique because it is “by the restaurants, for the restaurants”, but exclusively servicing the industry’s least discriminating business customers hardly seems like a virtue.

The interview then succumbs to the ever-popular wine analogy. (It’s quite ironic that they should then do that, given that we cannot think of any restaurant-operated wineries worthy of note.) Mr. Grossmann asks, “Has the day of the coffee sommelier dawned?” To which Mr. Roberts replies:

I think so. I’d love to have the first job as a coffeelier, let’s call it. This would be somebody who understands all the single origins. All the specifications of the farm it came from, all the nuances of the coffee. Is it high grown, low grown? If there’s a blend, what each coffee in the blend contributes. The coffeelier would also suggest coffee and dessert pairings.

What’s so wrong about a restaurant coffee sommelier?

And therein lies the rub. Any restaurant mention of a coffee sommelier invariably glosses over the fact that a successful coffee service isn’t as simple as merely pulling a cork on a bottle of roasted beans. Just a couple weeks ago, we posted an article with the common opinion that a great barista can make magic of weak bean sources, and that superior beans and roasts can go to rot in untrained hands and poorly maintained equipment. Machine maintenance and “barista” training standards at restaurants are still woefully inadequate at best.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with dreaming of the day that restaurants offer a variety of coffee options and a guide, or coffeelier, to walk patrons through them. But while Roast can tweak their fresh bean formula until the cows come home, any lofty designs for restaurant coffee appreciation will fail miserably if they’re built upon a rotten foundation of poor training, faulty equipment maintenance, and shoddy brewing practices.

An article from last year does suggest that training is an integral part of Roast’s engagement with restaurants. However, elite Bay Area roasters have long expressed immense frustration at getting training compliance out of cafés, let alone the scattered attention of restaurants. (Some have even expressed using CoffeeRatings.com for business intelligence — to identify retailers doing unmerciful things to their roasts, pointing to our site’s reviews as evidence of the need for training.) Roast Coffee Co.’s three-person operation is hardly poised to succeed where so many larger organizations have failed.

Until these fundamentals are addressed, Mr. Roberts’s dream of being a coffeelier rings about as hollow as a dentist who waxes poetic about the latest laser teeth whitening technology but cannot be bothered with the mundane task of actually cleaning and polishing your teeth. What good are white teeth if plaque and gum disease cause them to fall out? Coffee sourcing, roasting, and a lack of coffeeliers aren’t the problem. Restaurant coffee standards will not improve until the basics of training, maintenance, storage, and a commitment to quality are fixed.

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Because it is patently uncool for legitimate coffee professionals to gush over gag novelties for coffee tourists — i.e., kopi luwak — the media needs an alternative outlet to feed its overly simplistic “since it’s the most expensive, it must be the best” obsession. This is what we once called the nouveau riche stereotype: knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing (credit to Oscar Wilde’s quote on cynics). Coffee from Panama’s Hacienda La Esmeralda farm fits the bill nicely, and the worldwide media parade hit the streets with the news that their Esmeralda Special fetched $117.50 a pound at auction this week.

So far, this week’s hit parade includes NBC Bay Area, who yesterday reported on an industry cupping of the Esmeralda at the Flora Grubb Gardens: Cupping Coffee With Bay Area “Titans” NBC Bay Area. “Titans”? Are NBC headlines not-so-subtly plugging the DVD sales of their long-canceled TV series?

Even more bizarre, the article cited the L.A. Times — which decided that a coffee cupping among Bay Area roasters in SF’s Bayview district was newsworthy in the Southland: ‘Cupping’ with the boutique coffee titans in San Francisco | Daily Dish | Los Angeles Times. (Nice photo in the L.A. Times, btw, stolen below.) But beyond Bay Area cuppings, Esmeralda news and cuppings have reached as far as London’s The Guardian: Is the ‘world’s best’ coffee worth it? | Life and style | guardian.co.uk.

Of course, we’re no better — having written about the Esmeralda Geisha breaking price records in 2006 and publishing our own road-testing experience with the coffee in 2007. The trouble is that while the Hacienda La Esmeralda farm produces some fantastic coffees (the farm also scored highest at a Rainforest Alliance cupping in April), they’re hardly the only player. But with the way human psychology works sometimes, you might never know that.

The cruelties of second place

All it takes is scoring ahead of another coffee by a few, relatively insignificant digits to make all the difference when forced rankings are involved. CoffeeRatings.com uses such a forced-ranking system, and we can honestly say that the differences between our #1 and #5 are insignificant enough to flip-flop their order with something as subtle as the day’s humidity.

Subjective matters of personal taste aside, who can honestly discern the clear superiority of a coffee that scores 88.60 versus one that gets an 87.69? But we are invariably asked by anyone unfamiliar with our Web site, “What is your #1 coffee?”

Curiously enough, the Hacienda La Esmeralda did not win the 2009 Roasters Guild Coffee of the Year (pdf, 57kb). That went to a coffee from composite triple beatC.I. Viramax Colombia S. A., and La Esmeralda came in second. And the 2008 Roasters Guild Coffee of the Year went to a coffee from Colombia’s C.I. Racafe & CIA S.C.A., where La Esmeralda also came in second.

Of course, there’s no dishonor in perennially placing in second. Its price tags at auction and the familiar consistency of La Esmeralda contribute to its prominence in the press as the world’s ‘best’ coffee. But good luck finding this kind of hype for one of the recent Colombia winners. On the top, there’s only room for one. Adding others to the mix would only be too confusing.

UPDATE: June 12, 2009
Newsday published a brief series of photos from the aforementioned cupping event, explaining a cupping along the way: The elaborate art of coffee cupping: Step by step — Newsday.com.

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This St. Helena outlet of a two-location Napa coffeehouse and roaster routinely receives “best coffeehouse” awards in the area. Given how they handle roasted beans, consumer coffee education, and filter coffee, this isn’t much of a surprise — particularly given their general lack of legitimate competition in the region. But from what we can tell, these accolades are for everything but their espresso.

Like their sister location in Napa, this spot is a large, barn-like wooden structure. It has skylights, a few patio tables in front, and plenty of seating inside. There’s also a working Probat roaster at the back, a community book trade, and a central counter devoted to retail coffee bean sales and a four-cup Melitta bar.

Also like their Napa location, they use an unusual two-group Diadema machine for espresso. With it, they pull shots with a medium brown, textured crema that barely coats the surface. It comes in a larger pour size. The resulting shot has a bit of bulk when you taste it, emphasizing body over brightness. Flavorwise, it has an earthy, slightly smoky flavor that also, unfortunately, tastes too much of ash.

The Napa Valley is certainly about wine. It might even be about coffee a little if you look hard enough. But it’s definitely not about espresso — at least yet.

Read the review of the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company in St. Helena.

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Recently we have been thinking about all the great, Top-20-caliber SF coffee bars that have opened up in recent years. So much so that the news of a great new espresso bar opening in town is thankfully becoming a little monotonous. With all the great coffee now available, we thought we could all use a helpful reminder of how bad things can get.

For anyone who watches a TV program involving food these days, there’s the tiresome, obligatory money shot of the chef or host sampling a dish, smirking to the camera after a mouthful, and exclaiming “Mmmmm, that’s delicious!” It’s never, “Ick! What’s that weird texture?,” or “Do you taste something metallic?,” or “I don’t think I’ll be coming here again.” With no sense of balance, it’s nearly impossible to truly appreciate the good stuff.

So where to find SF espresso’s misery market — the coffee shop equivalent of bumwine.com? (A favorite site of ours, btw.) While inside Farm:Table earlier this week, the four-packs of Café Bustelo on display were more trash-as-treasure than, say, the outright trash we were seeking. So we walked a few blocks from there into the heart of the Tenderloin and encountered a temple of physical self-abuse we could not resist: the L.A. Café at Turk and Jones Sts.

While it’s too easy to speak ill of the Tenderloin and its many disadvantaged and addled residents, there are few blocks in the city where you can view an Airstream trailer parked on the roof of a four-story building — just past a faded outdoor wall painting advertising 7up and “transient rooms” (see photo above). And yet this is hardly one of the Tenderloin’s worst intersections.

Everything about the place screamed, “Run! Don’t walk!” But even if going into a place like this to sample the espresso requires a mental state akin to donating your body to science, we couldn’t help ourselves. Even if we risked nightmares and waking up from our fitful sleep in cold sweats thinking about the place afterward.

Where to begin? The corner entrance has no fewer than two signs designating it as an emergency exit only. There are also no fewer than two “No Trespassing” signs posted by the SF police in their store windows — to deter vagrancy. So you have to walk inside via a side entrance further down Jones St.

Once inside, it looks like any Happy Donuts/Sad Espresso chain, with its plain tables and chairs. But this is misery coffee at its finest — complete with the very same neon coffee sign you can ironically find at China Basin’s The Creamery.

At the far end of the café was a drugged-out, hooded Dave Chappelle look-alike who, perched over a table, did not move during the 30 minutes we were inside. The rest of the clientele who came in and out sported either gold teeth or wheelchairs, if not both. The pastries are covered in plastic, and the owners sport a Vietnamese calendar advertising bail bonds. If this is called “L.A. Café”, it’s clearly modeled more after downtown Broadway than Hollywood.

Using a two-group Astoria machine with the portafilter handles left out cooling in the drip tray, they pull surprisingly short shots of “espresso” that look and taste more like water than anything else. And, no surprise, they serve one of SF’s finest examples of ghetto coffee: America’s Best Coffee. Their homeopathic espresso comes coated with a balding layer of almost white-pale crema and tastes neither bitter nor ashy — nor much like anything at all. At a steep $1.75 price, we have to figure that the owners are gouging like anyone else trying to make a living in this neighborhood.

Currently L.A. Café is ranked tied for 609th place among SF’s best espresso shots, but it’s not the worst by a longshot. Scarier is that their 2.40 coffee rating still significantly trumps their 1.50 café rating, thus tying L.A. Café with an aforementioned Happy Donuts for SF’s third worst in the café rating category.

Read the review of L.A. Café.

After our sordid and tasteless espresso experience at L.A. Café, we could only think of this following sordid and tasteless video of Vince, the hooker-beating ShamWow guy, and how he hates L.A.:

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Opening just a week ago — in the space previously occupied by the Illy shop, Caffé Il Latte — this tiny café is the first in San Francisco to use beans from Santa Cruz-based Verve Coffee Roasters.

The tiny space relies on mirrored walls to add depth, and there is a little bit of a kitchen to prepare their local, organic foods. But it seems largely about the coffee here — even if people are apparently always coming in asking for bagels. There’s a single square wooden table inside with wooden bench seating on two ends.

Meanwhile, their three-group La Marzocco Linea at the front counter almost dominates the space. The place is run by two former Blue Bottle staffers in Kate and Shannon Amitin, and Verve was convinced this was the right place to start an SF presence.

For their standard espresso shot (reviewed here), they use Verve’s All-City blend — which was custom designed for the café. Shannon indicates he wanted an espresso blend without “trendy” fruitiness in its flavor profile, and the All-City delivers a potent, sharp, extremely bright shot that reminds us a little of Stumptown’s Hairbender. They were going for an Italian-style espresso, and it is served relative short and with a very potent herbal flavor. (It is not for the meek who like their coffee mellow or with milk.)

They considered forgoing the whole “single origin thing”, but they offer a unique Sumatra ($3.50) that contrasts greatly with their espresso blend: more floral and smooth-bodied. Served in classic brown ACF cups. And to appeal to the trendy misery coffee market, they also sell cans of Café Bustelo. Kate’s SF-famous sea salt caramels are also on offer.

Read the review of Farm:Table.

A San Francisco Espresso Milestone?

Farm:Table represents a sort of milestone for us — and a good one at that. In the six years we’ve been publishing espresso reviews here at CoffeeRatings.com, we’ve witnessed a number of coffee bar openings…and closures. We see Farm:Table representing the natural turnover from a previous generation of coffee bars to a new one with much better standards.

We’ve long been noting how often new coffee bar openings crack our Top 20 rankings for the city. Many of them have been highly publicized and located in SF’s “trend-friendly” neighborhoods. But when the replacement for a hole-in-the-wall café opens up in a less-traveled coffee neighborhood, offering excellent espresso and featuring a new roaster for the city, we have to take a step back and appreciate how much local standards have improved in San Francisco.

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Australians are no slouches when it comes to appreciating good coffee. But last month, an opinion piece in The Australian highlighted what the author, John Lethlean, felt was a lot of misplaced fuss, pomp, and circumstance going into coffee origins these days: Just a strong one, thanks | The Australian.

A self-described “coffee-geek groupie,” Mr. Lethlean appreciates the energy and dedication behind the many nuances of “single origin”, “estate-grown”, and “cupping”. However, he refuses to play along. Why? In the end, many of these subtle shades of variation don’t make all that much difference to him — particularly when contrasted with the impact a barista can have preparing an end result espresso.

Mr. Lethlean also reaches out to the inevitable wine analogy. But even there, he points out, few wine consumers can discern subtle differences of terroir, variety, harvest condition, and method — and even fewer consumers can do the same with their coffee.

We agree with many of Mr. Lethlean’s sentiments. His article reminded us of what we recently wrote about the recent obsession with origins and “maximizing adjectives”: that it reflects a current trend intensely focused on experimentation over a more learned enjoyment. However, our society has yet to simplify a single consumable after fragmenting its market — whether soda, yogurt, or orange juice. So even as consumer interest in coffee experimentation could potentially wane, we still expect the adjective parade to live on.

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Today’s SF Chronicle features an article on some of the lesser-known coffee growing regions of Hawaii: Hawaiian Islands erupt with new coffee regions. For each of the islands of Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Hawaii (the Big Island), they offer info on the coffee growing history of the island, what’s brewed from there today, and additional tourist perks near the growing regions.

Just when we were pointing out the annoying media obsession with all things shiny and new earlier this week, here comes this article’s headline. But while coffee growing has a history on the islands dating back to a commercial farm in Koloa, Kauai back in 1836, many of the designated growing regions in the article have only been operating plantations since the late 1980s.

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Esquire magazine named this place 2008 Restaurant of the Year (among new restaurants). The same Nov. 2008 issue also crowned Dominique Crenn, executive chef at SF’s excellent-but-underappreciated Luce, as 2008’s Chef of the Year.

While L2O is a pretty fabulous restaurant, calling it the year’s best is debatable. However, there’s no question this is a serious dining establishment. More to the point, unlike many of its high-end restaurant peers, their seriousness extends all the way to their coffee service.

Located in the Belden-Stratford Hotel across the Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chef Laurent Gras resurfaced here in May 2008 after previously making waves in SF. In 2001, he served as Executive Chef at SF’s Fifth Floor and was named Chef of the Year in San Francisco magazine for 2002.

The restaurant models itself as a sort of inventive, high-end, Japanese-influenced (and very expensive) seafood restaurant, but that’s limiting the menu a bit. They boast that they don’t use distributors for their seafood — FedEx’ing it in from fishermen directly, so that what they serve has only been out of the sea for two days. They’re also proud of their two tatami rooms, where they sand down wooden tables before you eat off of them.

As a test, we saw their Japanese seafood snobbery and tried to raise them with some of our own West Coast J-snobbery, asking if they offered any unpasteurized sake. No dice. (Hooray for San Francisco snobbery.) They are inventive, however, and borrow heavily from the science lab techniques of the cuisine-formerly-known-as-molecular-gastronomy: liquid nitrogen, freeze-drying equipment, vacuum pumps, etc.

To their discredit, they tend to go crazy pairing some form of a gelée with nearly every course, and they also exhibit an occasional odd use of what we can only call marshmallow nouveau. It’s no COI, but it’s impressively good.

And of course, there are white tablecloths and multiple servers — the latter who are fun rather than stuffy.

We would have been remiss by not talking about their food, so back to the subject of coffee. Restaurant coffee has long been an afterthought at many of even the finest American restaurants, but that’s not true here. This is the only restaurant we’ve seen with a Clover machine. They offer Intelligentsia for both Clover and espresso use, using Black Cat Espresso (also available as decaf) from a two-group La Marzocco in the back service area.

With the Marzocco, they produce a thinner, textured layer of medium-to-dark brown crema. The body is a bit thinner as well — related to the larger pour size. It has a mostly pungent flavor with no smokiness and is served in Hering-Berlin porcelain cups.

They make a serious attempt at a restaurant coffee program here. Yet it still leaves significant room for improvement.

Read the review of L2O Restaurant in Chicago.

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