Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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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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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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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We had originally posted this as an addendum to our recent review of the new, more permanent installment of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in the Ferry Building Marketplace. However, the strange phenomenon of the Gibraltar deserves its very own post. Originating here in San Francisco, the Gibraltar has since spread to Los Angeles (Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea), New York (Café Grumpy), and now London (Climpson & Sons). The purpose of this post is to demystify, debunk, and, well, defrock the Gibraltar before the misconceptions behind this invasive species are allowed to propagate any further.

So what is the Gibraltar? Technically speaking, it’s the registered name for a line of glassware tumblers from Ohio-based Libbey Inc..

So what does any of this have to do with coffee? Prior to opening Blue Bottle Coffee Co.’s first SF café in Hayes Valley in January 2005, owner James Freeman experimented and tuned variables for his café by making cappuccinos in 4.5-oz versions of these cheap restaurant supply glasses. He offered these practice runs to his staff and to employees of the Dark Garden corset shop down the street.

Word of mouth spread, and these test beverages needed a name. Steve Ford, then a barista and roasting colleague of James at Blue Bottle (and now head roaster at Ritual Coffee Roasters), apparently found inspiration from the packaging for these glasses. Thus the Gibraltar was born out of a combination of happenstance and an inside joke. Except now the joke has gone global.

Sarsaparilla — in a dirty glass

We chalk up the rise of the Gibraltar as one of coffee’s more pointless creations — an artifact of America’s milk-engorged bastardization of the standard cappuccino.

Why? Because the 4.5-oz Gibraltar glass is redundant with the regulation 4.75-oz ceramic cappuccino cup. (James obviously knew this when he started his experiments.) Both are sufficient for containing the 150-ml Italian regulation cappuccino. Except that the ceramic cup is explicitly designed with thermal and aesthetic properties for consuming a cappuccino.

The problem is that few people in America have experienced a true, regulation cappuccino. As illustrated in the photos below — comparing a medium cappuccino from Peet’s Coffee & Tea with a 4.75-oz regulation Intelligentsia-branded cappuccino cup — Americans drown their cappuccino in so much milk that the typical cappuccino technically qualifies as a caffè latte (latte being Italian for “milk”).

When preciousness is valued more than quality

So when a local food & fashion magazine such as 7×7 says that the Gibraltar is a “MUST ORDER” at Blue Bottle Cafe, and that it ranks #28 on the “100 Things to Try Before You Die”, this is basically shorthand for, “We’ve never had a properly made regulation cappuccino in our lives, so we’re willing to worship it in a cheap restaurant supply glass.”

It’s things like this that make it easy to be cynical about consumer behavior, particularly among self-described foodies. We would dismiss this misplaced (and misinformed) obsession with the Gibraltar as just a lone opinion in 7×7 magazine, but we personally know too many knowledgeable people working professionally in the quality food business who also contribute to the Gibraltar’s cult-like status.

Where’s the harm in that, you say? We’ve long lamented that genius chefs are often coffee fools, but many of these food writers and bloggers serve the role of influencers and arbiters of taste. Trouble arises when they spend more energy trying to be precious than focusing on quality.

The trap of this preciousness is the illusion of exclusivity. This makes the Gibraltar a cousin of what we’ve previously called the Malaysian street food experience: cafés that serve espresso out of the alleyways of heroin deals, stripping themselves of all customer amenities, to fabricate an image of exclusivity. The Gibraltar grew out of behind-the-scenes experimentation carried out in a Hayes Valley alleyway, and to this day the Gibraltar has never been featured on a Blue Bottle coffee menu — even though Blue Bottle’s espresso machines sport stacks of Gibraltar glasses in anticipation of the inevitable orders. (Mr. Freeman doesn’t receive enough credit for his clever marketing savvy, even if the cult of the Gibraltar was far from his intentions.)

So instead of encouraging people to enjoy a proper espresso drink served in a proper cup, this desire for the illusion of exclusivity ends up proliferating ignorance (about the existence of the regulation cappuccino) and trumping a better sensory experience (drinking out of cappuccino cups instead of cheap restaurant supply glasses). The next thing you know, the Gibraltar — and not the regulation cappuccino — is being held up as a standard in London cafés.

In an article from London posted last month on this subject, Steve Ford put it this way:

I’ve never really talked about the Gibraltar for publication, partly because I think it was very much of a time and place – that being the Bay Area circa 2005. The fact that I’m talking about it now is mostly because I’ve given up on the original idea. There WAS something special about it back then. Now, it’s just another drink on the menu to me, and like so many cappuccinos, generally prepared poorly or just wrong. Every year people ask about it, so I can track how far the idea has gone, but the fact that it’s all the way in the UK and I have no idea how it got there is disappointing. And not to be too melodramatic, but I feel like the soul of the drink has been lost. It used to be something unique, and now it’s just another piece of fucking latte art.

There you have it: the Gibraltar as the Fool’s Cappuccino. James Freeman, always looking at the bright side, still offers Gibraltars in his cafés “off the menu” because he sees demand for it as a way of weaning people off paper cups and overly milky caffè lattes. But for some of us, the Gibraltar represents a faddish Band-Aid for how badly America screwed up the cappuccino.

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Opening this past Thursday (April 2, 2009) after a long wait for Blue Bottle to expand the production of their roasting operations, this café technically marks the third and fourth Blue Bottle stations in operation at the Ferry Building Marketplace on a busy weekend. But this is the first with more permanent (i.e., no cart) space. They have dedicated a bit of shelf space to a variety of coffee-making accessories, from Mazzer Mini grinders ($700) through tiny French presses — plus a lot of retail roasted coffee.

Unlike the two carts outside during farmer’s market days, inside here they offer two service stations around the corner from each other. One uses a three-group La Marzocco Linea, the other a fully manual Mirage Triplette three-group lever machine (the latter rated here). While you can find Kees Van Der Westen-designed espresso machines at Four Barrel, we were a little surprised to find Blue Bottle sporting one here. It’s a little out of character, though not as hot-rod flashy as Four Barrel’s setup. (Though they did omit the Mirage branding and chose a classic lever machine: very much the classicist’s touches for a very modern machine.)

Line waits and SF’s elastic demand for Blue Bottle Coffee

Both espresso stations also offer made-to-order filter drip coffee. There is limited stool seating along the Mirage espresso bar in front and a corner counter on wheels nearby: sparse by most standards, but ample for the Ferry Building. And on weekends with all four Blue Bottle stations running full-throttle, service speeds are still glacial — with modest-sized lines still taking an inordinate amount of time to process. Waits of 15-25 minutes from line-to-serving are typical.

On the one hand, we appreciate that you cannot rush good coffee. For Blue Bottle to be running four, count ‘em, four coffee stations simultaneously at the Ferry Building Marketplace is almost unheard of. And yet they still cannot keep up with demand; customers put up with a lot to get their coffee. Perhaps that’s just the bizarre nature of the San Francisco resident: we oddly always seem happy to spend countless hours in line on weekend mornings for our favorite coffee and brunch spots. In any case, Blue Bottle is proving that they have an elastic demand similar to Internet bandwidth and freeway construction: the greater the supply, the higher the demand.

And when your espresso finally arrives…

They serve espresso shots with a mottled dark and medium brown crema — it’s rich with a just-as-rich aroma. There’s a real potency in the cup: a cloves-like edge and a robust sweetness that rounds out the bottom of the smoky cup. Worth the wait? For many of us, certainly.

For the few customers who order their coffee “for here”, they use brown Heath ceramic cups — revered among the Bay Area’s food-obsessed (e.g., standard at restaurants such as Coi and Chez Panisse), but they don’t seem as functional for espresso as a classic brown ACF of Nuova Point cup. But it sure beats paper. Why so many people would be offended to drink a $6 serving of wine out of a paper cup, but not their $4 latte, is still beyond our comprehension.

In addition to offering Heath ceramics, of course, the warming tops of Blue Bottle’s espresso machines are also decorated with 4.5-oz Gibraltar glasses — for those unfamiliar with the regulation cappuccino and the (far preferable) regulation 4.75-oz ceramic cup it is served in. But we’ll save our “contempt” for the Gibraltar in another post.

Read the review of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. inside the Ferry Building Marketplace.

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Just when we write about the stifling conformity among roasters and coffee professionals of this modern era, today’s New York Times blog reports on the use of robusta beans in espresso blends: Robusta Economy – Times Topics Blog – NYTimes.com.

Although there’s nothing in the post we haven’t heard before, it’s the tone of the post that we find a little sad and almost incredulous. To read the author, Oliver Schwaner-Albright, you’d think measured use of robusta beans in espresso blends were akin to the medicinal practice of bloodletting — and that those who continued to use a little robusta in their espresso blends were akin to underground disciples of Falun Gong in modern China.

We may not seek out robusta beans any more than necessary. (Ain’t that the truth.) But the apparent belief that there is a singular, conformist voice about what definitively does and does not make good coffee today smacks of a “taste totalitarianism” — not to mention a historical and factual revisionism.

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For the last installment of our three-part series on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we wrap up by examining two major social fads that have come to identify the Third Wave:

• The focus on baristas
• The role of coffee geeks

We’ll also touch on why, if quality coffee is to progress, we must get beyond through these and the qualitative fads of the times. For good coffee to continue proliferate in convenience, access, and quality, these qualities require a healthy, growing consumer market to support them. So the question is: are these fads helping or hurting those aims?

The Cult of the Barista

One of the hallmarks of these coffee times (call them Third Wave if you like) is that the barista has been promoted as the focal point and pinnacle of all things quality coffee. It’s as if we now expect our barista to be picking beans at origin. This despite the fact that many coffee preparations have no need for a barista.

If we promote the barista as not only the public face of coffee but its only face, we end up with representation by many of the least experienced, most novice members in the industry. Meanwhile, many in the industry still believe that barista competitions — themselves a decidedly Third Wave construct — are just as worthy as many cooking programs when it comes to TV-ready entertainment such as “Iron Chef” or “Top Chef.”

It only takes 20 minutes of sitting through an online video feed from the USBC to convince the layman consumer otherwise. Not only that, instead of promoting executive chefs at the height of their profession, barista competitions are more akin to Top Chef de Partie (or “Top Line Cook”): highly skilled and trained individuals at specific, technical tasks, but much less so the conductors of a great, comprehensive coffee offering.

Another reason that our barista competitions are more like drills for line cooks concerns the intense technical precision and narrow focus of these competitions. Specialty drinks add an element of creativity, but they are completely irrelevant to what a retail customer can purchase in a café. Then at the other extreme you have latte art competitions where the results are little more than eye candy: no more the hallmark of a technically gifted barista than a plating contest would be for a competitive chef.

What is a great barista?

Is that to suggest that the barista should be humbled more as a mere entry-level, high turnover position for the coffee industry? Anything but. Great baristas can make or break a café and often for reasons other than the amount of grinds left in their doser — i.e., abilities and skills that just don’t rank on the current barista competition scoresheets.

Earlier this week, I had dinner with New York-based Nicolas O’Connell, an owner and Managing Partner at La Colombe Torrefaction who earned his rank starting as a barista in one of their cafés. While talking about favorite coffee places in New York City, Nicolas was quick to cite Jamie McCormick of Abraço as NYC’s best barista. (Jamie is an alum of SF’s Blue Bottle Coffee.)

Nicolas waxed poetic about Jamie’s ability to connect with people in line, to engage with his customers by name and learn/know what they want — avoiding the you’re-a-waste-of-my-time attitude common among the staff at many NYC competitors. Nicolas even went so far as to say, “People love Abraço and think its a great place just because of the coffee. But the real reason they are great is Jamie, and most of the customers don’t realize that.”

You won’t find Jamie in a barista competition. Nor will you find many of the skills he excels at valued in the structure of a competition. And yet he is as critical as anyone in New York City at introducing people to better coffee standards.

Coffee Geek, R.I.P.

We save perhaps one of more controversial points for last: the coffee geek ethos needs to go. (Apologies to Mark Prince of CoffeeGeek.com.) We not only mean it for the amateur enthusiasts, but also among the professionals.

You can argue that coffee geeks have existed throughout previous waves, from home espresso enthusiasts to their übergeek home roaster brethren. As for the professional trade, yours truly still sports a goatee he grew as a joke while taking a summer grad school class at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1995 — the old joke being that all Seattle residents must be flannel-wearing, Nirvana-moshing Starbucks employees. But the explosion of these social archetypes came after the 1990s, and in part they have come to define the Third Wave.

So why is losing the coffee geek ethos critical? Because we believe it will improve access to better coffee for everyone. The longer that high quality coffee remains the exclusive domain of coffee geeks, hipsters, and “uniformed” coffee professionals, the longer that mainstream accessibility and acceptance will be an uphill battle. We joke about coffee’s tiresome wine analogy, but the wine industry successfully figured out how to bring mainstream wine out of the Gallo era in part by circumventing the image of the elitist, self-absorbed wine snob.

Some believe the Third Wave can build a supporting market for better coffee through an intense public education campaign. But too often, we’ve made it harder for consumers to relax and just enjoy a simple cup of coffee — without feeling the pressure to make a lot more decisions nor feeling burdened by educational materials and processes. And instead of tearing down walls to get more people asking for better coffee, we’ve instead built up a few walls.

If they’re not with you, they’re against you

While it’s hard for readers here to fathom the idea of Starbucks being elitist, nearly every online post that mentions Starbucks attracts a heavy level of venomous contempt for the company and its patrons. (Google it — we dare you.) This contempt seems to originate from staunch defenders of the mainstream and the “prudent” — people who take great offense that their cheaper, mainstream tastes are no longer “good enough.” Now just imagine the shock-and-awe bursting of aneurysms if these same people encountered an army of coffee geeks that look down their noses at Starbucks and its patrons?

We don’t envision a Tocqueville-like an end to stratification. And there may always be people so insecure as to feel threatened by another person’s beverage choice — as if it were a personal judgment of their self-worth — where only professional therapists stand to have any hope of changing them. But there are also many coffee geeks, amateurs and professionals alike, who would prefer to keep quality coffee as “this thing of ours.” If for no other reason than irrational fear that the mainstream popularization of quality coffee would devalue their own identities and/or constitute a commercial sell-out.

Every advancement “Third Wave” coffee has brought to bear — from the varieties of single-origin beans to roast-dated coffee to public cuppings to barista competitions — would not have been possible if not for the development of an economic market to support them. But more mainstream coffee consumers — the ones who will help build sustainable economic markets for even better coffee — will not get over their apprehension of delving deeper into coffee as long as its image is that of the self-celebrated coffee geek or judgmental coffee snob. Even the very word “geek” defies social acceptance.

If quality coffee remains trapped in its insulated niche, standards across the board will be stuck. And even we coffee geeks will eventually be stifled by Third Wave coffee’s conformity of non-conformity.

Links to other parts of the series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

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For the second of our three-part installment on How future coffee “Waves” will come to disparage the so-called Third, we examine some of coffee’s biggest qualitative fads going today:

• Single-origin coffees
• Medium roasts
• The heavy-handed use of cuppings

We’ll examine a little of why we must get past these fads for accessible quality coffee to continue to evolve — with more details in our last post of this series.

Death by Single-Origin

Quality coffee is currently mired in industry fads that, in due time, will seem as quaint as the non-functional garnish (NFG) — once a staple of restaurant plating in the 80s and 90s, symbolized by the sprig of curly parsley, that has since gone extinct.

Those curls of lemon rind served on an espresso saucer? NFG. Need we say more?

But let’s invoke another restaurant parallel: the molten chocolate cake. A once-ubiquitous staple on early 1990s dessert menus, today you can’t even find any kind of cake in most restaurants. The single-origin espresso made from medium-roast beans could ultimately suffer a similar fate. But what makes us think that?

People such as Nick Cho and Trish Skeie may have originally conceived a Third Wave to be about the appreciation of coffee for its own sake. (Curiously enough, we wrote this part before Nick’s comment on part one.) Yet one of the greatest overriding characteristics of coffee appreciation today is an intense focus on experimentation over a more learned enjoyment. This experimentation is often expressed through a dizzying array of coffee varietals, a deliberate campaign to proliferate public cupping, and more diverse brewing methods and equipment.

Two unfortunate side effects of this include:

1. a presumption that the coffee consumer is in a constant state of ignorance
2. the inadvertent devaluation of coffee consumption that lacks educational goals

These drivers helped fuel the explosion of single-origin coffees available commercially, but it has also done so at the expense of many quality blends — the very thing with which espresso excels. Because blends are rather opaque to most palate-developing exercises employed by “Third Wave” experimentation, they have fallen out of favor. And in the process, the current wave has at least limited these experiences in the world of coffee enjoyment.

Which brings us to a Third Wave paradox: in the name of providing coffee consumers with more options, it has also limited some choices. Dark roasts being another example.

Medium Röaster Cult

Common with generational waves and the naïvité of youth is a rejection of many things and practices of the past. It’s revolutionary/counter-revolutionary logic — also known as rebelling against your parents. Some motivations are forward-looking; others look backwards — simply going the opposite route to be different for different’s sake. The Third Wave glorification of medium roasts, and its fear of the second crack, falls into this category.

It’s not hard to see why. Not long ago, a lot of quality sourced and processed coffee beans were roasted into third-degree burn victims. But the reaction to this has been to introduce a new kind of narrow conformity so that even beans that excel at darker roast levels — such as Indonesian coffees with great body characteristics — sometimes never see the other side of Full City. By doing this, we’ve simply replaced one thoughtless, conformist monotony for another.

We were acutely reminded of this in our recent trip report at Rodger’s Coffee & Tea: experiencing a single origin bean freshly roasted into the second crack (not charcoal) seemed as alien as a genetically reanimated mastodon.

Public Cuppings, and Worshiping at the Cupping Altar

Among the tools and techniques behind the Third Wave’s emphasis on experimentation, coffee cuppings top the list. Cuppings have been around for decades, but under the Third Wave they’ve proliferated like childhood peanut allergies. Among professionals, cuppings have been exalted as the high watermark of coffee education. Worse, these same techniques are being heavily marketed to consumers as well.

As a result, many in the industry have overtly relied upon cupping as the ultimate test of a coffee — even if the experience of cupped coffee is once or twice removed from what the end customer actually purchases and consumes.

Recently, in response to some less-than-glowing opinions of their roasting operations, a notable Bay Area roaster invited us to cup their roasts. Of course, CoffeeRatings.com is not CuppingRatings.com. We deliberately focus on what coffee consumers experience. So while it was a generous and thoughtful offer, the roaster suggested it almost as an automatic retort. As a reactionary response, it reflected the insular thinking of a trained coffee industry insider — someone who very briefly mistook cupping for the final say on consumer experience.

In reality, cupping is merely a surrogate to what consumers experience out of a French press, a filter process, or portafilter handle. One characteristic we’ve noted among many Third Wave professionals is that they sometimes lose sight of their goal to produce good coffee, not just good cuppings.

Tune in next time…

For the last post in our series, we’ll cover the impact of some of the Third Wave’s major social fads and how these, too, are holding back quality coffee’s evolution. We promise it’s going to be controversial, but then we like that. The two major topics?:

• The focus on baristas
• The role of coffee geeks

Links to other parts of the series:

• Part 1
• Part 3

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We’ve all been told that coffee’s self-fabricated Third Wave has brought many improvements and options to our enjoyment of coffee. Whether you subscribe to this wave theory or not, quality coffee has experienced an unmistakable renaissance over the past decade or two.

Of course, the same could be said for olives, olive oil, vinegar, cheese, pork, cured meats, beer, scotch, tea, chocolate, and even salt — even if these examples are all technically “waveless” (we prefer wave-free). And although we’ve been encouraged by the state of quality coffee in recent years, we’ve also been thinking about how limiting and confining this so-called Third Wave has been by engendering its own copy-cat behaviors.

Many of these confinements may not seem obvious today, because we’re still momentarily dazzled by the novelty. But if you subscribe to a wave theory of coffee, just what will future waves have to say about where we are today? This post is the first installment in a series of three on this subject.

Why Waves?

Before we explain the shortcomings of the current wave, first a moment to explain why we find this whole wave business dubious to begin with. The moment you declare yourself in some sort of wave is the moment you’ve dated yourself. This has been true whether you’re a drummer for Blondie, a director of French cinema, or a writer of science fiction.

Having grown (groan?) tired of the contrived generational analogies in music, cinema, and the Web, we’ve always felt that a term like Third Wave represented a sort of self-ordained self-importance combined with an aching desire to always live in interesting times — even if it means building an unwavering belief, a benign form of mass hysteria, that your own times are more interesting than they actually are.

History is littered with political and sociological examples of this. It’s no coincidence that many of these examples, including coffee’s Third Wave, originated among younger people convinced they had discovered something the world had never experienced before — mistaking naïvité and newbie-ism for enlightenment and wisdom. (In speaking with impressionable college students who wax poetic upon just discovering Ayn Rand and Objectivism, I’ve personally lost count of how many eye rolls I’ve had to restrain over the years.)

Many coffee veterans shake their heads, thinking, “If only they knew how often these industry changes come and go.” Many of coffee’s Young Turks shake their heads, thinking, “Forget that old guy — he’s not very Third Wave.”

We refute the idea of waves simply because coffee quality has been an evolutionary, and not revolutionary, process. Claims of “revolution” largely come from those newest to the business who have the least amount of context, and coffee has too many centuries of history to suddenly favor a more myopic viewpoint.

A Necessary Twilight for Third Wave Coffee Fads

But waves or no waves, quality coffee is currently mired in industry fads that, in due time, will seem at least as antiquated and primitive as some of the coffee drinking fads we can look back upon today — things like percolators, instant coffee, “charcoal” roasts, flavored coffees, etc.

In our next installment, we’ll examine some of Third Wave coffee’s biggest qualitative fads — and why we must get past these fads for accessible quality coffee to continue to evolve:

• Single-origin coffees
• Medium roasts
• The heavy-handed use of cuppings

And for the last post in our series, we’ll controversially cover the impact of some of its major social fads and how these, too, are holding back quality coffee’s evolution:

• The focus on baristas
• The role of coffee geeks

Links to other parts of the series:

• Part 2
• Part 3

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Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune reported on a curious coffee bar concept planned for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea’s latest location, currently under construction in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach. The concept includes featuring five different stations where five separate baristas personally attend to each customer, individually catering to their unique coffee whims: Intelligentsia plans a groundbreaking coffee bar in Venice Beach | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene.

Although this proposed system will supposedly accommodate the customer that’s merely interested in a quick cup of coffee, Intelligentsia CEO Doug Zell claims, “We want the role of the barista here to be like a sommelier or a great server at a restaurant.” Hence the main emphasis of this process will be to individually educate customers about coffee varieties and brewing options, to direct customers to the kind of coffee experience they are seeking, and potentially suggesting possible pairings for the coffee along with home equipment options.

Now coffee’s wine analogy is already a beaten dead horse — particularly as many coffee bars continue their march towards becoming surrogate wine bars. But Zell’s proposed concept seems to take the barista role well beyond sommelier and into the new territory of a Nordstrom personal shopper. Will sophisticated coffee consumers welcome this as a lower barrier to delve deeper into coffee, or will they see this as more of a bloated and heavy-handed sales pitch?

Is “the Ignorant Customer” a viable restaurant concept?

Sometimes we feel that the premium coffee industry is a bit over-earnest in their consumer marketing efforts. While we applaud some of Zell’s eyebrow-raising moves, such as eliminating the venti-sized drink, this latest idea smacks of trying to mold consumer behavior — rather than relaxing a little and letting consumers organically help define it a little more.

Part of the fun is figuring out things for yourself. And nobody likes the experience of dining at a restaurant with a sommelier always hovering over them. So while some hand-holding is good, too much and you risk Starbucks‘ insistence on customers speaking in their specialized drink-size language.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t want to be a coffee tourist at Intelligentsia Venice Beach. And Zell and company should be commended for their out-of-the-box thinking and original approach. But this time, we wonder how long before the novelty wears off.

Intelligentsia’s concept seems founded on expectations that most coffee consumers are uneducated, that they will wax poetic about $5-a-cup Cup of Excellence beans from El Salvador if only an expert explained it to them, and that they will come to appreciate cuppings as the ultimate enjoyment of coffee.

That may be true for some of their customers — and certainly more true for Intelligentsia than for most coffee chains. But as with the current fad of experimenting with only single-origin coffees, consumer interest and the business model generated through this educational process is neither long-term nor sustainable. Consumers cannot remain ignorant forever. And in this era of simplifying our lives, enjoying coffee shouldn’t always have to be an educational chore.

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