Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today’s East Bay Express published a good, and long-overdue, cover story on some of the quality coffee changes going on in our fair East Bay: Surfing Coffee’s “Third Wave” | Feature | East Bay Express. Its use of the Third Wave crutch is unfortunate, but also par for the course these days. Meanwhile, we will try to avoid becoming too tiresome (and absurd) by limiting our Third Wave mockery to only one post per week.

Luke Tsai’s article was fair and somewhat balanced in its reporting — even if it had to make mention of two of our least favorite (and, IMO, least reliable) Web resources for café reviews: the insufferable gluttons at Chowhound.com and the social networking gamers with arbitrary standards at Yelp.com. We even made page 3 of the article for our routine Third Wave ridicule. The article touches on one of our Third Wave stereotypes, lighter roasts, and even our defense of coffee Nazis.

The notable cafés and roasters in the article include Local 123 (and their Flying Goat coffee), Remedy Coffee (Ritual Coffee Roasters), SubRosa Coffee (Four Barrel Coffee), Blue Bottle Coffee Co. (for their new Jack London Square roasting facility and café), and Awaken Cafe (Taylor Maid Farms). The article also makes mention of notable pre-Third Wavers, Cole Coffee. A number of these truly are a gaping hole in our current review database.

Mr. Tsai had originally contacted me for this article back in early October. So coincidentally, just yesterday I searched the East Bay Express Web site to see if his article had been published yet (it hadn’t). However, a search for “third wave” on the site did amusingly produce articles mentioning third-wave ska, third-wave environmentalism, and third-wave feminists.

UPDATE: Dec 23, 2009
A regular coffee column in the Seattle Times picked up this story yesterday: Coffee City | How seriously should people take their coffee? | Seattle Times Newspaper. Interestingly, the author, Melissa Allison, took upon defining “third wave coffee” this way:

A term coined around 2002 that aims to define an evolved coffee scene in which baristas, roasters and farmers know each other and are connoisseurs of a product to which they’re all passionately connected.

If you go back to our post from April 2006, our debate in the comments with Nick Cho was about how the term “Third Wave” may have been originally conceived about “letting the coffee speak for itself,” or enjoying coffee for coffee’s sake, but the phrase has since been completely co-opted for marketing purposes. That is: what started with more of a consumer-focused perspective was redefined for the convenience of business-focused uses — i.e., uses by baristas, roasters, and farmers.

Note that there is no mention of the coffee consumer in Ms. Allison’s definition above.

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For a few years now, we had an idea for a post that sat in our unpublished queue: how can you tell a good espresso shop from a bad one? (At least before sampling it.) Given the thousands of good, bad, and mediocre espresso shots we’ve reviewed over the years, we have definitely noticed some patterns worth sharing.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve recognized the value of shorthand rules. Back in the 1980s, I once (famously, in my circles) observed that the ghetto status of your neighborhood can be surmised by the fast food chicken chain nearby. (In short, Church’s Chicken = “wear Kevlar”.) Earlier this month, there were a couple of coffee-related posts from coffee professionals that inspired us to dust off this idea:

• Flavorwire » Blog Archive » The Kool-Aid’s in the Coffee: An Interview with David Latourell of Intelligentsia Coffee Roaster
• Detecting a Great Coffee Shop with the CoffeeMeister – Slashfood

But while coffee professionals know their establishments and their industry favorites best, few have subjected themselves to the horrors of many a bad espresso bar from a consumer perspective. Not that we at CoffeeRatings.com have a taste-bud death wish. But we’ve developed a sort of sixth sense about what to expect just by walking into a coffeehouse and having a look around. This post is an attempt to articulate both the positive and negative cues we get when entering a new establishment.

Some suggested rules are more obvious — like the wine enthusiast’s equivalent of “avoid wine that comes in a box.” Other rules are more subtle or outright unusual. For example, as a news story today had it, if the aroma from the coffee machine forces your plane to make an emergency landing, you might consider tea.

Encouraging signs of decent coffee ahead

In no particular order…

• They roast their own. Score extra points if they date-stamp their roasted beans for retail sale.
• They bother with latte art. Latte art is more gimmick than a sign of quality per se (sorry, Aussies). But it’s almost unheard of to find a place that bothers with latte art and yet makes a lousy cappuccino.
• A La Marzocco machine. Oh, sure, there are plenty of other great espresso machines out there. And there are places that can make great espresso from the most modest equipment choices. But shelling out the bucks for a La Marzocco is typically reserved for those who believe it will actually make a difference for them.
• They offer more than one kind of bean for espresso. This is a rare find. But when they do, they expect you to notice that the espresso there isn’t just some generic, nameless commodity shot out of a soda gun. Many other establishments think more like Homer Simpson’s tour of the Duff Beer factory, where a single spigot fills Duff, Duff Light, and Duff Dry.
• They serve a glass of water on the side. Despite the American obsession with the Big Gulp®, espresso should not quench your thirst. Better espresso can often be found at places that don’t expect it to.
• They take time to make it. You could have a really new, or really slow, barista. Or they could be a little bit of a perfectionist about what they’re doing. We never encourage our baristi to rush the job.
• Cleanliness is next to decent espresso. If the staff keeps their work areas clean, there are better chances that they clean their equipment of rancid coffee oil build-up — and that they keep their equipment properly tuned and maintained.

Signs of when to run — don’t walk — away

Now for the cues when you know things are about to get ugly. Call it coffee’s homage to Waiter Rant’s “Signs An Establishment Isn’t Going to Deliver the Service You Expect”.

• The roar and/or whine of poorly steamed milk. This is one of those cases where their handling of milk can translate to their handling of coffee. And milk that is steamed in the pitcher to the scalding sounds of a 747 takeoff or the squeal of a dentist’s drill is a major red flag.
• A superautomatic espresso machine. Superautomatic machines almost never produce an espresso better than “palatable”. Hello, Starbucks.
• The barista is wearing a company-issue hat or cap. One sure-fire way to non-verbally tell a customer, “How may I massacre your order?” is to require them to dress like fast food employees.
• They use a two-group La Spaziale 3000 espresso machine. Ouch. Do we really have that much against La Spaziale? They honestly make some good equipment, and a few cafés are quite capable with them. But in the Bay Area, the two-group La Spaziale 3000 is the machine of choice (namely: they’re inexpensive) among cafés looking to skimp and save a few bucks.
• America’s Best Coffee. Or Peerless coffee, should they admit it. The most common combination of the cheap-and-careless café is the two-group La Spaziale 3000 with America’s Best Coffee beans. A close second is Peerless coffee — which we’ve also found to be the coffee most likely for employees to say it’s Illy in an attempt to make up something that sounds better. Of course, almost as bad (it varies) is the café where the employees have no idea whose beans they serve. But the pattern here seems to be this: the more self-aggrandizing the coffee brand name, the worse the coffee.
• Portafilter handles are left cooling on the drip tray. This is often the kiss of death: a café that knows nothing about the importance of stable temperature control, and they could care less.
• Served with a lemon rind on the side. You’d be surprised how many restaurants still do this. Why? We don’t know, because it’s like a neon sign that says, “Prepare to spew.”
• Paper cups are the only option. There are times where even we want a coffee “to go”. But those conditions are so sub-par. For a café to serve their espresso only in paper cups, you may as well be greeted by a fiberglass clown head with a speakerphone in his throat at the drive-thru entrance. If someone’s idea of quality and class is the stemware at a four-year-old’s birthday party, we emphasize the “go” part of “to go”.
• Flavored coffees on the menu. Or the word “gourmet”. In some parts of the country, and rare corners of the Bay Area, the 1980s are still alive and well and some people are still selling chocolate macadamia nut flavored coffee. If a café sells coffee that sounds more like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, you’d be better off looking for ice cream. Same goes if they use the word “gourmet” in their branding — a word that has since become affiliated only with the mass-produced packaged foods that line the aisles of Wal-Mart, marked for quick sale to their morbidly obese loyal customers.

We really need to stop here before we are overcome with snarkiness poisoning.

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As we mentioned in our last post a couple days ago, being popular and being good can be two very things. There are few places where this is more apparent than on Web sites that thrive on aggregate public user ratings and reviews. We had intended this article to be about Yelp’s top SF coffee picks — much like our annual round-up on the Best of CitySearch. However, our analysis of Yelp’s rankings became so absurdist so quickly, our story changed dramatically from what we originally intended.

Yelp not only failed at the fundamental task of telling us what other San Franciscans thought was the best coffee in town, in aggregate, but it took us down a dark and strange path into the social motivators behind the site. In essence, we found that Yelp’s rankings are a better measure of a social game among its users than as a measure of the establishments its users supposedly rate.

It’s been a good year since we last poked Yelp in the eye over its major flaws. So this time around we will take a critical look at Yelp’s actual rankings for top coffee in San Francisco based on their rather mad methods.

Arbitrary Standards

Many of you probably know that Internet users were TIME magazine’s choice for the 2006 Person of the Year. You might even be familiar with James Surowiecki’s book, Wisdom of the Crowds, which illustrates many ways in which the collective intelligence of large groups of people is greater than that of individuals. All of this is certainly wishful thinking in an election year. However, any “wisdom of crowds” has also provided us with mob behavior, witch hunts, and mass hysteria.

Fortunately, poorly biased coffee ratings should not inflict any bodily harm on espresso lovers who have been lead astray. Or at least in theory — as there have been times we’ve sampled some pretty awful espresso and still wonder about the long-term health effects. But sites such as Yelp are often utterly useless to us because the rating criteria are often completely arbitrary.

To help illustrate this point, we present a summary of Yelp’s Top 20 SF Coffee & Tea establishments as of June 5, 2008, as determined by Yelp users. (Given that the review rankings are dynamically affected by new user ratings, and that we had something of a Web hosting meltdown since the time we started penning this post, the ranks have changed a little since last month. They are also likely to change after this article is published.)

Next to each ranked establishment, we’ve listed their equivalent rank on CoffeeRatings.com (many of which are tied with others for the same ranking), real quotes from reviewers who gave the establishment a maximum rating of five stars, and our associated thoughts on the reviewers and/or the reviewed. It’s the kind of stuff that makes us think they should change their name from “Yelp” to “Wince”.

And the next 10…

The Negative Review Head-scratchers

While the above covers the excitable, five-star reviews that contribute to sometimes puzzling accolades for otherwise weak espresso purveyors, there are equally puzzling criteria reviewers use to depress the rankings of otherwise great espresso options. Below are a few more of the more bizarre rankings on the list — optionally accompanied by some classic excerpts from the Yelpers themselves who gave the places one-star reviews (with a couple two-star reviews thrown in for good prose):

• The Hayes Valley Blue Bottle was ranked #36 of 784, below The Castro Cheesery at #24, and just below the ever-disappointing 595 Mission St. SOMA Peet’s at #34. Overheard: “OVERRATED… this spot can be such a freaking scene, filled with thirty-year-olds holding little dogs on a leash, talking about internet gossip on their iphones.” (Apparently coffee quality is dependent upon age, dogs, and iPhones.) “I don’t like coffee, except for maybe an iced one on a hot day.” “I don’t know how anyone can drink coffee if the[y] say they believe in global warming.” (Note to Al Gore: Solve global warming by shutting down Blue Bottle.)
• Theatre Too Cafe ranked #59 with an average 4.5-star rating (Overheard: “Tasty. Juicy. Ample. Cheap.”). Meanwhile, CoffeeRatings.com gave it a 1.80 espresso rating, ranking it 584th out of 594 — or the 6th worst in all San Francisco.
• Blue Bottle Farmer’s Market at #63 of 784 ranked below both nearby purveyors, Frog Hollow Farm at #44 and the 2 Embarcadero Peet’s Coffeeat #60
• Coffee Bar (tied for #1 on CoffeeRatings.com) at #74 ranked below a Mission Starbucks on 2727 Mariposa St at #71. Overheard: “I wasn’t exactly inspired to try it myself” (So I gave it a one-star rating anyway.) “The MUSIC is way too loud.” “Coffee Bar has been open for about two months, but they haven’t bothered to mention that small fact on their website which still says it’s ‘coming soon.’ What gives? … So you get one star until you get your act together.”
• Blue Bottle Cafe (tied for #1 on CoffeeRatings.com) ranked at #114. Overheard: “I asked for it to go, they made it to stay. Then they insisted on throwing that away to make it right.” (Those bastards!) “Sure it’s organic, sure it’s shade grown, sure it’s fair trade. But you needlessly spend cash on expensive coffee; but by the same token you won’t give a homeless person change?” (Note to greenies: hardworking homeless people in Nicaragua don’t count.) “I’m really more of a tea guy, myself.”
• Ritual Roasters, Mission ranked at #145, just below Java Beach Cafe at #143. Overheard: “If you knew me at all you know I don’t drink coffee…I only went into Ritual because I was walking by and I had to pee.” (There’s grounds for a one-star review right there.) “Pffff, how incredibly lame to cover up the plugs… Whose brilliant idea was that?” (Laptop owners speak out on coffee quality.) “In all honesty, I have not tried your coffee because the masses of bug eyed yups and students clinging to their laptops and I pods makes me want to vomit.”

I don’t know what kind of parallel, warped universe some Yelpers are living in. But one that ranks Theater Too Cafe at the 92nd percentile — well above Blue Bottle Cafe, Coffee Bar, and Ritual Roasters in the Mission — must contend with questions such as, “Mommy, why do you have three heads?”

The Yelp Rating Lifecycle

To be sure, there are a few ratings on Yelp that we’d actually agree with. But take Cento, for example. It was only open one month when it was ranked #9 on Yelp — and it had a ways to go before it left the “honeymoon” stage of the Yelp rating lifecycle.

What is the Yelp rating lifecycle, you ask? Typical for a place like Cento, wannabe hipsters race to be the first to review a place they like and pump it up — particularly if it’s obscure or relatively out of the way in some back alley. Apparently, from what we observed, they believe this behavior somehow bestows upon them some form of social currency among other Yelp posters. It’s the “I’m cool because I am an insider and I found it before any of you” badge.

But then as a place gets exposed and more people know about it, this is followed by a wave of professional killjoy reviewers that love nothing more than to say, “OVERRATED! — And they’re so arrogant here” as a form of their own social currency among Yelp posters. It’s the “I’m late, but I’m cool because my tastes are way better than this” badge. Mark our words. Give things a few months and Cento’s Yelp ranking will drop like Starbucks‘ stock price.

Interestingly enough, since we originally wrote this paragraph in June, Cento’s Yelp ranking has dropped from #9 and is now currently hovering around #24. While our repeat visits haven’t produced espresso ratings as strong as our first, we sense there’s more going on than just a subtle weakening of their espresso.

So what does any of this have to do with the rating of quality coffee, you ask? Absolutely nothing. But it has everything to do with how Yelp works. Which is precisely our point. Using a site like Yelp only makes us feel dumber than we already are.

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This weekend’s move to a new (hopefully more reliable) Web hosting provider seemed to go rather smoothly. If you’re reading this post, you are viewing CoffeeRatings.com at it’s new home.

Since the whole ordeal to change Web hosting providers took us a full month, and since we don’t trust Web hosting providers all that much these days, we will be keeping our WordPress account at http://coffeeratings.wordpress.com/ for announcements and other emergency purposes should this site suddenly become “unavailable”.

But otherwise, we’re happy with the move (goodbye and good riddance, Burton Hosting!) and are looking forward to getting back to business as usual. Thanks for your patience throughout this transition.

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Given that our headaches with our Web hoster are resolving themselves at a snail’s pace, we’re itching to get back to business as usual. So we are carefully returning to publishing here (saving copies of our databases as frequently as possible) — even though we risk a future “blackout” at any given time. How better to do that than with a classic CoffeeRatings.com Trip Report?

This is a quiet, local place that gets many SFers worked up as if they’ve experienced the Real Italy here — or at least something that authentically makes you feel as if you’re someplace else. And they’re not entirely off the mark. There are often authentic Italians speaking the language inside. And this has been in operation since 1905 — with the Lucchese Gamdaccini family now running the place (as proudly painted on the front door). They are a very friendly lot and offer fresh-baked Italian breads, biscotti, other baked goods, and typical café lunch items.

The café itself occupies a nice corner not far off of Columbus Ave. at Bannam Pl. There are some sidewalk café tables in front, large glass windows, and several indoor café tables and chairs.

Using a two-group La Spaziale machine, they pull shots with a thinner layer of a medium brown crema, served in modern Miscela d’Oro IPA cups. The body is a touch thin, the Miscela d’Oro flavor leans towards the smoky/tobacco side with some pepper notes, and the cup has more of a potent aftertaste than an initial flavor. But overall, it’s a decent espresso. And drinking it in a location such as this only helps.

Read the review of Danilo’s Bakery BaoNecci Caffè.

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Thought CoffeeRatings.com went belly up there for a while, didn’t you? If not, we certainly did.

On Saturday, June 14, our subscription with our Web hosting provider (Burton Hosting: avoid like the plague) automatically renewed after a credit card payment cleared. The next thing you know, the DNS to route traffic to CoffeeRatings.com (and all e-mail, etc.) was completely botched up for over a week.

Which is when we learned how bad things can get when a Web hosting provider slowly pulls their own plug without telling you anything: emergency tickets go unanswered for more than a week, you discover support phone lines have been disconnected since you last used them, and all e-mails to former e-mail contacts there go unanswered as well.

Essentially, our current Web hosting provider appears to be a sinking ship, so we’re trying to refrain from posting much here with the expectation that the lights could go out at any moment. Databases have been backed up in triplicate, and we’re in the process of planning a switchover to a new host that might actually have a live human or two behind the operation.

You can read more about it at CoffeeRatings.com – Our Nomadic Home (http://coffeeratings.wordpress.com/), which we’ve designated as an alternate information source while we go through this transition.

Thanks for hanging in there, and sorry for the mess. The mops are out, and we’re going to be in a bit of a tussle trying to wrest control of our domain name from a business that apparently exists only as an answering machine in a broom closet somewhere in England.

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As we hinted in a previous post, San Francisco magazine just published Josh Sens’ story on the more recent evolution of San Francisco’s local coffee scene in its most recent issue: A new buzz | San Francisco online. (There’s even an article featuring CoffeeRatings.com on the back page: The coffee bard | San Francisco online.)

The article features Coffee Bar, Blue Bottle Cafe, Ritual Coffee Roasters (including some great quotes from one of our favorite area baristas and coffee writers, Gabe Boscana), and Trouble Coffee. A couple of interesting points Mr. Sens raises in his article include:

• “It’s just coffee” — Running a business that really cares about the details involved with good coffee often requires a thick skin — especially in the face of the many knee-jerk reactionaries who ridicule what they see as coffee elitism. (I.e., “Folgers’ Crystals was good enough for my parents, and it should be good enough for you too.”)
• The Caffeine Factor — Trouble Coffee’s Giulietta Carrelli directly addressed the role caffeine plays in good coffee, which Mr. Sens found unorthodox and refreshing. In many ways, we appreciate the decaffeinated coffee drinker as a sort of “true” lover of coffee, independent of its psycho-chemical effects (i.e., its about “enjoyment” rather than “usage”). But there’s a reason why Duncan Hines is the #3 consumer of purified caffeine: the caffeine enhances the “mouth-watering taste” (OK, that’s a bit subjective) of their brownie mixes.

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Last week, the Guardian (UK) published an article on a home espresso enthusiast’s journey to obsession: In pursuit of the ‘God shot’ | Food and drink | Life and Health. Having reviewed almost 600 espresso shots in SF proper ourselves — most of them pretty bad — we’d like to believe we know a thing or two (a thing or two too many) about obsession. But the pursuit of the “God shot” — the unachievable attainment of the perfect espresso — is a common story among home espresso enthusiasts.

As highlighted in the article, the story typically starts with a “starter” espresso machine — the gateway drug. It then soon leads to machine upgrades, grinder upgrades, and tampers. Conversations with fellow home enthusiasts via online forums (what they were known as before “social networking” became the phrase du jour — and the beginning of the end of the Internet’s second bubble) lead to more areas for obsession, lost kitchen counter space, and financial ruin. These typically include home roasting, naked portafilters, and the point of no return: PIDs.

PIDs, or Proportional-Integral-Derivative devices, are a programmable digital control unit, relay, and a temperature probe combined into one. They enable owners to control the temperature of a boiler to one-tenth of a degree for maximum brewing precision. Now I may be an electrical engineer by way of college degree, but I’ve always seen the PID as the first step of the descent into espresso madness. The point of no return.

Fact is that my home machine is a “simple” manual Gaggia G106 — the modest, illegitimate sister to the author’s original La Pavoni Europiccola. And OK, I also own a Mazzer Mini (pre-doserless model). I’m obviously part way to madness there. But why haven’t I been lured by the siren song of the “God shot”?

I could easily improve my home espresso set up. But there’s this thing called the law of diminishing returns. There comes a point where after every few hundred dollars of investment, how much better does your home espresso really get? And what is the dividing line between simply “enjoying coffee” — and enjoying only something that requires the equipment and budget of a high-energy physics lab that recreates the first few microseconds of the universe’s Big Bang? (My apologies to James: I like that you own a $20,000 siphon bar — so I don’t have to!)

I’m sure I’m missing out on something by not taking my obsession further. But then there’s a lot else in life I could be missing out on too.

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Dealing with the media can often feel like waiting for a Muni bus. Just when it’s been so long that you forgot that they exist, suddenly three pull up in a row over the span of a few minutes. This time the media frenzy surrounded the recent openings of Blue Bottle Cafe and Coffee Bar — with additional curiosity spent on filter coffee from the Clover brewer and James Freeman’s $20,000 siphon bar.

Trouble is that there are a lot of eyes that roll when they see things like $20,000 siphon bars and $11,000 Clover machines. “It’s just coffee!,” they mockingly say. “These pompous coffee snobs are rightfully getting ripped off.”

So we at CoffeeRatings.com wanted to put our 15 minutes of media fame to good use: to help promote better coffee in the Bay Area. (By saying “we” instead of “I”, it at least helps me to believe there’s more than one Bay Area resident who wants better coffee standards in town.)

Coffee Achievers, Coffee Believers, and Coffee Agnostics

Fortunately, I didn’t encounter much “are you out of your caffeinated mind?!” reporting. ABC 7 TV (KGO) Morning News, for example, had a lot of fun doing a recent coffee story — as I did shooting it with them: abc7news.com: San Francisco coffee bars offer unique, expensive brew 2/08/08. This wasn’t entirely surprising, given that Amy Hollyfield and the rest of the morning TV crew has to get out of bed at 3 a.m. every day for the 5 o’clock News. Let’s just say they have developed a deep appreciation for chemical stimulants, yet they’re rather particular about their morning coffee. (Big Peet’s fans — they thumbed their noses at Starbucks.)

Last month they brought me along as their “expert taster” (their words, not mine) for a TV segment ride-along to Blue Bottle Cafe and Coffee Bar to evaluate some of the newer technologies in brewed coffee. (Classically, at Blue Bottle Cafe the next day, James Freeman asked me if I saw the piece that aired on TV that morning — as he doesn’t own a television.)

Then last weekend I hooked up with Josh Sens, a reporter writing a story on Bay Area coffee for San Francisco magazine, and his food-writing/TV-show-producing friend, Sarah Alder, for a coffee-tasting ride-along in San Francisco. Also quite a caffeinated road trip blast, we visited Blue Bottle Cafe, Trouble Coffee, Ritual Roasters, and Caffe Bello. They particularly enjoyed Trouble Coffee for its off-the-wall quirkiness and good macchiati — but they were most impressed with Trouble’s “build your own damn house happy meal” consisting of coffee, toast, and a coconut (the entire shop menu) for $7. (Sarah gets the credit for all of the Trouble Coffee photos, save for the Happy Meal sign, associated with this post below.)

Given their mutual appreciation for good food and wine, my obsessive coffee habits weren’t too off-putting. Josh asked a lot of intelligent, detailed questions about coffee production, preparation, and the industry, and I’ve put him through a bit of my address book for follow-up interviews. It promises to be an interesting piece that should come out in the next 2-3 months.

It’s Just Coffee!

A bit more unusual was my interview with Joe Eskenazi, who wrote a similar story for the SF Weekly a couple weeks ago: San Francisco – News – SF’s $12 Cup of Coffee at Blue Bottle Cafe. (Their Web site even included a brief bio piece: News & Politics: The Snitch – Too-Much-Coffee Man: San Franciscan’s Java Obsession Has Led Him to Rate Every Last Cafe in The City (From 1 to 587).)

From that experience, I learned a little more about the art of the media misquote. In the article, Joe quoted me as saying of Blue Bottle Cafe’s siphon bar coffee, “It’s probably not something I’d pay for more than once a month.” However, just as the article’s title misleadingly mistakes a $12 pot for a $12 cup, I was referring to a personally drinking an entire pot of the stuff by myself. Simple mistakes, or examples of poetic license to amp up a story intended to expose the excess of coffee gluttony? You be the judge.

The question is valid — but more for the line of questioning that (thankfully) never made it in the article. In typical SF Weekly socialist bias fashion, I was asked, “There are a lot of homeless people living around the Blue Bottle Cafe’s neighborhood. How can you justify a $10 cup [sic] of coffee when you have to step over the homeless to get it?”

Champagne ethics on a beer budget

Forget for a moment the illogic of buying a $1 cup of dreck at Lee’s Deli as a cure for homelessness. Some people in this town will whine to no end demanding the purest organics, sustainable farms, and well-paid workers with living wages and health benefits … and yet have a coronary if somebody actually expects them to pay for all of that.

One could argue that you could save the spare change from buying cheaper coffee (though screw the workers exploited to grow, store, ship, and serve it to you) and donate the difference to the needy. But what is it about good coffee that is somehow less ethical than buying your clothes somewhere other than Goodwill or relying on a mode of transit other than a bicycle?

Of course, getting this line of questioning from a publication largely funded by its final few pages loaded weekly with ads for escort services and every other form of female sexploitation imaginable raises a whole other set of ethical questions, but let’s stick to coffee.

Even Dante’s Hell puts good coffee in only the third circle

Is premium coffee at a premium price so self-indulgent as to corrupt the moral fiber of our nation? Every time I think that I’m getting too obsessive, elitist, or pretentious about coffee, all I have to do is look at a site like Chowhound and read users’ “trip reports” of restaurant meals, their price tags, and their insular critiques of citrus foam or xiao long bao. Believe you me — we had better hope One Laptop per Child doesn’t succeed at connecting much of the Third World to the Internet. Otherwise hoards of outraged, starving villagers will want to suicide bomb the living crap out of this country after reading sites like Chowhound.

The critical consumptionism of CoffeeRatings.com is already shaky ground. But when you elevate that to competitive criticism of consumption — while seeming so blissfully unaware of how offensive that might be perceived by anyone else — you may as well hand out duct tape, bags of nails, and explosives.

Yet another reason why CoffeeRatings.com might never solicit open user reviews…

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Yesterday Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World aired a broadcast on the Italian espresso: Espresso | PRI’s The World. While every news outlet in America was regurgitating Starbucks‘ publicity over their token three-hour store closure for employee training, reporter David Leveille took a different approach by interviewing the art of the espresso from a distinctly Italian perspective.

(David Leveille tried to contact me for an interview for this story yesterday morning — he was particularly interested because this blog regularly cites the Gambero Rosso Bar d’Italia. But alas, that day job thing kept me from getting back to him in time for his deadline.)

The radio story gets a few details wrong — for example, a proper espresso is produced with near-boiling water, not steam as reported in the story. But the story outlines how Italian baristas “perfect their craft over the period of years, not hours”. It even includes an interview with the head barista at Sant’Eustachio il caffè, who is as comically arrogant and opaque about their methods and materials as you’d expect from this beloved café. (There’s something about Europeans and the ceremony of the safely guarded culinary secret, such as the Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon.)

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