Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Four years ago we posted about our disappointment over high-end restaurants that offered plenty of options for tea but only one for coffee. It’s as if these celebrated houses of distinguished taste decided that coffee had all the nuance and variety of unleaded gasoline — and it showed in the product they served. And when we are buying unleaded gasoline, we at least get the typical options of regular, plus, premium, and/or ultra. So establishments known for their shotgun-wielding maître d’s and their counter displays of beef jerky actually beat out our nation’s finest restaurants in this regard.

Fast forward to today, and our finest restaurants have evolved little. However, this week we did have an experience that suggested at least some improvements are coming from retail coffeeshops. While seeking out some roasted beans at the Blue Bottle Cafe to share for pour-over this weekend, their Ethiopian Amaro Gayo caught my eye enough to purchase a half pound. Their response to my purchase request: “Washed or natural?”

Washed or natural!? What delightful music to this coffee lover’s ears. Now there will be those inevitable coffee consumers who will react to such a question with we-all-drank-Maxwell-House-in-my-day-and-that-was-good-enough-for-us uppity disdain. Not unlike the way some have made a hobby out of ranting over drink sizes named grande or venti — or being asked whether they liked a dry or wet cappuccino. But I was pleasantly surprised with the option to purchase essentially the same coffee with two different forms of processing (prior to roasting).

Which isn’t to suggest that there aren’t reasonable limits to the amount of preciousness we pour into our coffees. Reading the descriptors on Blue Bottle Coffee Web site (washed, natural), we can’t be sure whether we’re buying coffee or hallucinogens that provide us with a gateway to Total Recall. Reading the coffee’s descriptors from NY’s Gimme! Coffee (washed, sun-dried/natural) or Denver’s Novo Coffee (washed, sun-dried/natural), we get the impression that gender politics must taste better than the coffee itself.

Even with all that over-earnest prose, we’ll take the lump sum as an improvement.

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Near SF’s Flatiron Building (yeah, we got one too), this one-time Starbucks kiosk arguably put the then-next-door All Star Cafe & Bakery at 550 Market St. out of business in its first year of existence. Yet despite morning lines of commuters waiting for their lattes, and an overworked crew of three in tight quarters with an overworked Verismo machine, Starbucks abruptly closed up shop here.

In came Giorgio Milos, Illy’s head barista and a former Italian champ, to help reopen this space as an Illy-branded café a couple months back. It’s a real improvement for the location, as the old All Star Cafe even beat out the Starbucks that once resided here. But even so — it painfully seems that you still can only do so much with Illy coffee in America.

They offer espresso, panini, and pastries — plus cans of Illy (with Francis Francis machines) on display in the modern, tight space. There’s a lone iron bench on the sidewalk in front, but that’s it for seating. Using a seriously polished, chrome, new, two-group La Carimali machine, they pull shots with a textured medium brown crema that look generally good. But the crema here lacks a real thickness and volume — as you can classically expect from exported Illy coffee.

It has a generally bolder flavor than most American Illy shots: bolder spice and a sharper bite to it without much of the typical woodiness. Served in Illy-logo IPA cups. The milk frothing here shows some care. But as the photo illustrates, the results can be a little suspect.

Read the review of Prima Cosa Caffe.

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Quick!: name a city that’s surrounded by the exquisite natural beauty of mountains and seas, with brightly painted houses that decorate quaint neighborhoods, with great food everywhere you turn, with a nearby wine country consisting of hundreds of vineyards and many nationally renowned restaurants, with hipsters who frequent farmers’ markets in transitional neighborhoods, with a diverse racial mix from black to white to Indian to Southeast Asian, with the nation’s most vibrant gay population, with a touristy waterfront featuring seals on piers and a ferry that takes you to a famous prison island, and with a whole lot of really good coffee.

Why, it could only be Cape Town, South Africa.

Alright, that was a trick question: San Francisco’s Pier 39 has sea lions, not seals per se. But the point being that for anyone from our fair city, many aspects of Cape Town will seem very familiar. But there are also significant differences.

Familiar and not

If you’re talking liberal laws, it’s probably not a major surprise that gay marriage is legal in South Africa. What may be more of a surprise is that, for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the South African constitution had to be temporarily suspended around the soccer stadiums for FIFA security purposes. (We can’t say enough good things for how festive the South Africans were as hosts to the World Cup, btw.) Years of abuses under Apartheid made many personal searches — ones we’re quite accustomed to in the U.S. — illegal. The 14-year-old South African constitution is one of the most liberal in the world.

On the other hand, there’s the old local joke that rock and roll never dies, it just tours South Africa. (“Hey, was that really Bryan Adams I just saw in town the other day?”) And given the nation’s history of economic disparity and its 25% unemployment rate, there are the major issues of poverty and security.

Some expected us to witness crushing poverty and aggressive homelessness in Cape Town, but it’s hard to say that it is any worse than SF. In the month we spent around Cape Town’s central business district (CBD) — a.k.a. the City Bowl — we were approached by all of one person for money. Yet security is a big concern among the locals and it’s an even bigger industry.

Even with all the truly great options in town to satisfy any SF food snob, food is handled a bit differently here. Some of the best sushi in town can be found in Italian restaurants — sushi being a decidedly California thing in Cape Town, and less of a Japanese thing. Which also explains why the grocery stores sell flour tortillas under the name “California wraps”. (To make matters worse, in turn, one of the more famous Italian restaurants in town has a German name.) This theme of playing a bit fast and loose with labels and names will again come up with coffee later in this post.

Coffee standards in Cape Town

Speaking of coffee, like Italy or Australia or New Zealand, the baseline quality standards in South Africa are clearly better than in the U.S. You can walk into just about any random store and trust that you’ll get a rather acceptable espresso, whereas this practice is still ill-advised even in San Francisco. But, as in places such as Italy, examples of very good espresso are a rarer find — even in the biggest cosmopolitan cities. But with a little research and a few contacts, we were able to identify some of the best places in Cape Town.

A few things come to mind specifically about the espresso here. WEGA machines are ubiquitous. The coffees tend to emphasize more rich-bodied flavor than the wilder, bright coffees you may come to expect from Africa, but there are exceptions. And the cappuccino here almost always comes with a very Portuguese dusting of cocoa powder; you quite literally ask to have for one without it.

And somewhat contrary to an earlier post of ours, you can find the cappuccino quite often on café menus — even perhaps moreso than flat whites, and especially at the cafés that are a little less obsessed about their coffee. However, most places do treat the cappuccino and flat white interchangeably. Which leads us to our next topic of discussion…

South Africa’s wine analogy: coffee-flavored wines

After spending a month in South Africa, it made sense that this is the nation that gave us “red espresso” — or Roobios tea. Even if you like the tea, as we do, the term “red espresso” comes off as unnecessarily deceptive and has never sat well with us. Just because you can stick something into an espresso machine does not make it espresso. Which reminds us a little of eggspresso — or should that be “yellow espresso”? And yet “Red Cappuccino” is also a registered trademark.

Now if you thought coffee’s wine analogy was a bit over the top, over the past several years South Africa has developed something of a niche market for coffee-flavored wine. They’ve been growing wine grapes around Cape Town since 1655, but it wasn’t until 1925 that a Stellenbosch professor crossed the fragile pinot noir grape with the heartier cinsault (known locally as hermitage) to create a local cultivar called pinotage.

In 2001, noted pinotage maker Diemersfontein Wines came out with the original “coffee chocolate pinotage”, and they’ve popularly released one every year since. Meanwhile, imitators came to the fore in the form of Cappupinoccinotage from Boland Cellars, Café Culture from KWV, the Vrede en Lust Mocholate (a malbec), etc. The original Diemersfontein coffee pinotage wine maker, Bertus Fourie — literally nicknamed “Starbucks” for that reason — has moved on to Café Culture and now Barista Wine (we are not making this up), where he holds the title of “Head Barista” and their Web site offers a Nespresso Le Cube D180 sweepstakes.

Coffee pinotage is sometimes called the red wine for coffee addicts, and it certainly doesn’t come without some controversy from the purists, but it’s really more the red wine for coffee drinkers who don’t like red wine. That said, there’s room for everybody’s tastes. We’ve long stated that Starbucks’ stroke of genius was in convincing millions of customers who don’t like the taste of coffee that they actually do. While coffee pinotage doesn’t use any actual coffee for flavoring, the taste aims for the consumer are the same.

Now despite all the wine-growing activity around Cape Town and a number of its very good wines, many South African wines are still (IMO) global underachievers and/or acquired tastes. Having tried a 2007 Diemersfontein coffee pinotage and a 2009 Barista pinotage, we were reminded of all the beer + coffee combinations that have failed over the years … the “coffee stouts” where the results were second-rate as a beer and second-rate as coffee, rather than something better than the sum of its parts.

Of course, we live in a diverse, global culture that sometimes wants their wine (or beer) to taste like coffee, their coffee to taste like chocolate and hazelnuts, and their chocolate to taste like bacon. So why not skip the middleman and market bacon wine? Sure, it might be a curious novelty to hear Céline Dion perform an album of songs by fellow Canadians Death from Above 1979, but it’s no stretch to presume that it will optimally satisfy neither fans of Céline nor Death from Above 1979.

As Oscar Wilde famously once said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” This South African dimension to the coffee-wine analogy largely fails coming from a different angle.

Now why don’t we do that?

A little more towards the authentic in the African continent, in the category of “now why don’t we do that in America?”, we did enjoy the occasional Ethiopian coffee ceremony — even if it originates on the continent’s opposite side of the equator. At a restaurant such as Cape Town’s Addis in Cape, we enjoyed an odd mix of Frankincense, popcorn (?!), and coffee served from a Jabena pot.

While the coffee undergoes some of the oldest and crudest handling and brewing known to man, the resulting cup is quite flavorful. Perhaps more importantly, the ceremony uniquely resonates with coffee culture, capturing much of the wonder that’s truly native to coffee without the creatively lazy marketing contortionists who squeeze coffee’s square peg into wine tasting’s round hole through the mutant coffee cupping fad in America. But alas, Californication applies to coffee cupping here just as it does to sushi and flour tortillas in South Africa.

At the coffee chain level, Vida e Caffè serves as an example of how Starbucks and even Peet’s fall short. Even Woolworths W Café serves both espresso and cappuccino in a paper cup that run circles around Starbucks.

While at the “artisan” end, there are places like TRUTH. that seem to go through the Third Wave motions, but with much success. And then there are places like Origin Coffee Roasting, who not only broke quality coffee ground in Africa in 2006, but they established a roasting and training operation that most American coffee entrepreneurs have only talked about. And then there’s Espresso Lab Microroasters, who show some of the most cohesive and comprehensive vision for what a quality coffee operation could be — while making espresso as good as anything in SF.

The wine may have room for improvement compared to what San Franciscans are used to, but everything else about Cape Town makes it a fantastic and compelling place to be — including the coffee.

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In the transitioning Cape Town neighborhood of Woodstock, which out-Missions the Mission, this espresso bar and roaster perhaps looks like no other you’ve seen before. Located inside the newly-art-conscious Old Biscuit Mill, this small space is a pristine, stark black-&-white-themed coffee lab that exudes meticulous organization. The Old Biscuit Mill is known in town for Cape Town’s original gourmet food market (and hipster Mecca) that it hosts each Saturday — giving Espresso Lab Microroasters a little bit of the small-operation, gourmet-public-market-based origins familiar to the Bay Area’s Blue Bottle Coffee.

The periodic table of the chemical elements features heavily in the highly consistent theme of this roaster/café. It shows in the elemental-looking coffee drink menu printed on the white tile walls (those “atomic weights” in the photo are actually prices in South African Rands), through to the labeled chem-lab-looking buckets of unroasted green beans, and all the way to the company T-shirts packaged in silver ziploc bags labeled with the “element” Ts for T-shirt.

Opening a little over a year ago, they have three internal benches for seating plus a couple of outdoor patio tables. In back is a black & white Diedrich IR-7 roaster. In front they offer Hario Buono kettle/V60 drip coffee — their “Artisinal Brew” (Ab). Renato, co-owner with Helene, noted how the locals still haven’t made a leap to filter coffee just yet. However, he is assisting in the opening of a pour-over bar (with Espresso Lab Microroasters’ coffee) in Stellenbosch — part of Cape Town’s famed nearby winelands and their associated fine dining establishments. (Stellenbosch is very much akin to the Napa Valley when compared to Cape Town’s San Francisco.)

Although the pour-over uptake may be slow at this location, there’s plenty of espresso to be had from their two-group La Marzocco GB/5, where you have the choice of an espresso blend or (on the day’s visit) a single-origin Kenya. The Kenya, Gichatha-ini from the Gikanda Farmers Co-Operative Society, won the SCAA’s Best of Kenya. Cup of Excellence still doesn’t exist in Africa outside of Rwanda.

Their Esp008 espresso blend (rated here) uses 40% Serra do Boné Brazil as a base, 40% Puente Ecológico Tarrazú Costa Rica for the midrange, and 20% Guji Ethiopia for brightness and “wildness”. Their espresso blends vary mostly by different African varietals for that last 20%, and they emphasize changes in blending ratios — rather than using additional microlot farms or roasting the coffees differently for different blends or uses.

The Esp008 espresso blend shot (R14, or about $2 US) is dense without being too syrupy — with a textured dark-to-medium-brown crema and an upfront sweetness that’s not too off-putting. Still, its citric bite on top of an herbal background makes for a uniquely layered espresso flavor — one that Renato says is influenced by the lighter roasts of his Oslo, Norway coffee upbringing combined with his Portuguese roots and what Africa adds to the cup. Renato’s Norwegian influences include former WBC champ, Tim Wendelboe, and it shows in the lighter roasting styles and the feel of this space.

Their shot of single-origin Kenya (also used for their “Artisinal Brew” pour-over) was super bright with a pleasant floral and citric base — but without being a brightness bomb. They also offer something they call a cortado, which is pretty much the same as an American Gilbraltar out of a Gibraltar glass. And for milk-frothing, they produce rather exquisite latte art with fine surface bubbles. This is a fine and somewhat unique example of what South African espresso has to offer.

Read the review of Espresso Lab Microroasters in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa.

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Mention the name “Woolworths” to an American, and they’ll think “Woolworth’s” [sic] (again with that possessive thing). Woolworth was founded in 1879 as one of America’s first five-and-dime stores — even if it has become known as Foot Locker since the turn of the millennium. For those who remember Woolworth as a discount dimestore, the last thing you’d expect from something named “Woolworths” is decent espresso.

Woolworths is a South African chain of clothing stores that was founded in Cape Town in 1931. This chain has no relation to the U.S. company, other than legally stealing an inspired variant of its name (without the possessive). They also operate in Australia under this name as a clothing retailer and discount grocer, so Australians have a similar reaction to Americans. But just as the American Woolworth’s evolved into an athletic shoe store, in South Africa Woolworths has evolved into something of a fancy packaged food store. It has the wholesome, feel-good green messaging of a Whole Foods, but without any of the whole food produce — making it more akin to an upscale version of the American Trader Joe’s chain. (Woolworths identifies not only the breed of cattle on their milk cartons, but also the farmer with his/her photo.)

Cultural perspective can do a lot to screw with your head. Take the Italian sportswear label, Kappa. Most Americans look at their Adam-and-Eve Omini logo and blush red, being culturally conditioned to think instead of the Eve-and-Eve silver naked ladies on the mud flaps of 18-wheelers. Meanwhile, any Italian knows it as the image of Adam and Eve — representing equality in sports, analogous to America’s Title IX, and the complete opposite of the chauvinistic American interpretation.

What helped get us beyond our cultural conditioning about Woolworths was that their W Cafés have earned some notoriety for the quality of their cappuccinos (not flat whites, mind you). A W Café is also home to the reigning South African barista champion — stealing the crown from Origin Coffee Roasting.

Review of the W Café Espresso in Cape Town’s City Bowl

This W Café is located around the corner from their corporate flagship store/corporate offices in Cape Town’s City Bowl. There are a number of W Café parasols along the Longmarket St. sidewalk for sidewalk dining, but who really wants to here? (It’s not the most inviting sidewalk seating and people-watching in town.) Inside the small space there’s loud music and a festive staff with a limited number of stools to sit at along a short window counter facing Longmarket St., plus a lone table in back. The shop specializes more in “to-go” food, which leaves few options for breakfast and more for lunch (let alone indoor seating).

Using a three-group Nuova Simonelli — and a worn, three-group La Marzocco Linea — behind the front counter, they pull shots of decidedly organic espresso with a richly textured brown crema in a short paper cup (R11).

Ugh — if only they had something besides paper here. That’s enough to get us swearing in Afrikaans. However, the cup offers more than the usual paper design: with a grippable spiral, like the inside of a Hario V60 dripper. And the resulting cup is surprisingly good: with a full crema of real thickness, and very good body, and a rounded and smooth flavor that’s mostly a blend of herbal pungency.

A good place to go for a shot, and even a pretty good cappuccino (which is more like a caffè latte) — but not too much else.

Read the review of the W Café at Longmarket St. in Cape Town, South Africa.

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In the news today, researchers in Australia have decided to take a deconstructionist’s approach towards creating the ideal coffee: Australia Looks To Produce The Ultimate Cup Of Coffee | Gov Monitor. The Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation (RIRDC) performed experiments to determine how picking coffee cherries at different stages in their maturity might affect their taste in a resulting cup.

From the article:

Researchers taste tested a range of roasted coffees which had their cherries harvested at different stages of their growing cycles. Their aim was to determine when is the best time to harvest coffee cherries in order to achieve the tastiest cups of coffee for the growing espresso market and the traditional plunger market.

They rated the coffees according to five criteria; sweetness, balance, body, flavour and aftertaste.

We applaud the intended goals of measurement-driven thinking in their research, even if we’ve previously debunked the confusion between measurement and science for people tinkering with coffee. However, we also cannot help but feel that the RIRDC’s approach is loaded with the self-deceptions of food science deconstructionism. Another example of this deconstructionist approach being nutritionism.

The big problem with deconstructionism is that it presumes the superposition principle. In less geeky terms, this means assuming that nature behaves as if everything you can isolate is completely independent from everything else you can isolate, and that nature follows a simple sum of all the parts. This is a naïve belief because biological systems are highly interdependent. For example, vitamin D is added to most forms of dairy milk because our absorption rates of vitamin D are much poorer if we take it separately — i.e., without milk.

Similarly, what might give coffee a better body might also adversely impact its brightness or flavor (and does, in fact). Is it any wonder why coffee blending is more of an art than a science?

I Write, Therefore I Am A Barista

In the less geeky news department, we have this post from the Seattle Times‘ regular “Coffee City” columnist, Melissa Allison: Business & Technology | Coffeemania — from the mouths of baristas | Seattle Times Newspaper.

In true tyranny of the barista fashion, Ms. Allison offers several short interviews from coffee industry notables, from Tonya Wagner of Victrola Coffee Roasters to David Schomer of Espresso Vivace to author Michaele Weissman. With her lead-in of, “We’re going behind the counter to ask baristas to talk about themselves,” clearly we have several people who either currently aren’t or never have been professional baristas.

Must we always presume that anybody doing anything for quality coffee in the industry must be a barista? Is there any better way to simultaneously lowball the qualifications of a barista while grossly oversimplifying how good coffee arrives in our cups?

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Few things make our blood curdle like the words “culinary” and “craze” abutted next to each other. Which is not to mention that that the name “Fancy Food Show” sounds more like a culinary event for cats than humans. But as we mentioned earlier, coffee made a big appearance at the 56th Fancy Food Show in New York, and the Epoch Times covered the event: Epoch Times – Check Out the Latest Culinary Craze at the NY Fancy Food Show.

For whatever reasons, the Italians aimed for high representation at the event — particularly through the Caffè Italia exhibit. The author mentions variations between the different regional coffees of Italy from the Roman Caffè Trombetta and Sant’Eustachio to the Neapolitan Caffè Kimbo — heavily endorsed in Italy by the ever-present actor, Gigi Proietti.

In any case, something tells us the slaughtering of live animals was not on the bill — even if it could have improved the atmosphere a bit.

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This breakfast spot near the Parliament is often frequented by well-heeled, manicured parliamentarians — and for good reason. They have excellent baked goods and very good coffee. Very, very good coffee — at least when it comes to blending with steamed milk.

Out front they have a few wooden sidewalk café tables under parasols advertising themselves and their use of Origin coffee. Inside there are many café tables that extend to a back room. The chalkboard menus provide a heavy emphasis on the coffee service here — advertising the occasional oddity like the “Big Daddy” quad shot of espresso.

Using a newer, red, two-group La San Marco behind the counter, they pull short shots with a mottled medium-brown crema (R13). The crema isn’t too distinguished, and it has a simpler flavor of mild pepper and cloves. But it has one of the richer bodies for Cape Town espresso.

Read the review of Bread Milk & Honey in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Cappuccino vs. the South African Flat White

The staff particularly excel at microfoam (and latte art), however. Their milk-frothing consists of fine, consistent bubbles, resulting in a cappuccino that’s well-blended with properly made espresso. But like the rest of Cape Town, here they make no distinction between a cappuccino and a flat white. South Africa may be part of the Commonwealth, but this slippery definition might be considered grounds for war among member nations Australia and New Zealand — where flat white purists beg to differ. A cappuccino’s third/third/third ratio of espresso/foam/steamed milk is generally considered one-third/two-thirds espresso/steamed milk (i.e., no foam) in a flat white.

Even so, milk foam is a rarity in Cape Town — though we did find a prime (and surprisingly good) example of it on a café cortado at the quasi-Spanish local mini-chain, Café Sofia. South Africans who know their coffee tell us that ordering the flat white is a way of avoiding not just froth-ball cappuccinos but also what sounds like the curse of the overly milky gargantuan cappuccino (common in America).

In any case, Bread Milk & Honey may skirt the controversy by referring to their flat white as a cappucino [sic]. But you can’t go wrong for either breakfast or people-watching here.

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As we warned you last month, this is the first of what should be a series of espresso-related trip reports from Cape Town, South Africa.

Opening in Nov. 2009, this tiny breakfast and lunch eatery is owned and operated by Ammy Cope & Tom Sheehy, who are major food enthusiasts. They have a few tables and benches under a small, covered patio, and they specialize in fresh baked goods and good coffee from Deluxe Coffeeworks, one of the more notable roasters in South Africa.

Using a stainless two-group WEGA, they pull shots with a medium and darker brown spotted crema. The crema may be thin in thickness, but it is visually rich. The resulting cup may run a bit thinner on body, but it has a flavor profile that’s smooth, earthy, and more body-forward.

Their milk frothing is also rather impressive, as they blend the microfoam well with the espresso crema – often producing latte art. Served in delicate Crown Professional porcelain cups. With the espresso standards in town starting to evolve beyond the routine, this cup is one of the better options around town. But there are many higher-profile places yet to try…so stay tuned.

Read the review of Cookshop in Cape Town, South Africa.

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A blogger in New Jersey posted an interview with Carlo Odello of the Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano, or the Italian National Espresso Institute: Espresso Italiano, Talking Coffee the Italian Way with Carlo Odello – Serge the Concierge. Mr. Odello (a friend of this Web site) was recently working Caffè Italia at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York.

Talk of Italian espresso standards have recently ruffled a lot of feathers this side of the Atlantic. Especially for those who bang their heads against their knockboxes with the zombie-like mantra, “Third Wave is Best Wave“. But this brief Q&A with Mr. Odello touches on good and bad coffee odors and the differences between coffee blends roasted in Rome, Sicily, and Liguria.

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