Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Despite the article’s cringe-laden writing, it was nice to see coffee legend George Howell getting a write-up in this month’s Boston Magazine: Back to the Grind: George Howell CoffeeBoston Articles.

If you don’t know who George Howell is, you may as well be drinking Maxwell House out of a dirty gym sock. His coffee legacy goes as far back as the 1970s where — in contrast to the industry drive for cheaper, more plentiful coffee at the time — George was a pioneer in selecting higher quality bean stocks and roasting them at different levels to bring out their finer qualities. He has old ties to Alfred Peet, of Peet’s Coffee & Tea fame, and the early days of Starbucks and CEO Howard Schultz — who ultimately watered down much of everything he stood for.

In more recent years, George was the brainchild behind the Cup of Excellence competitions. Today he’s forging his own coffee vision in Boston now that his non-compete clauses have finally expired.

That said, Mr. Howell is no stranger to controversy either. It’s ironic that Mr. Howell rightly dismisses the overly precious treatment coffee has been given lately — including the frivolous nature of latte art competitions (something we dearly agree with). Because he is also credited with inventing the beverage that essentially gave birth to the coffee-flavored milkshake: the Frappuccino. (Btw, the name frappuccino is derived from frappé, which most people forget is actually a Greek word. After all, the Greeks really did invent everything — including the art of saying you invented everything.)

All of which is made much more difficult to appreciate given the article’s hackneyed and superficial writing. It’s a bit of a predictable paint-by-numbers magazine bio piece, right down to an opening description of Mr. Howell’s attire on the day — which, btw, included the incredibly relevant “button-down shirt the color of orange sherbet”. The article insufferably regurgitates the retold version of this “third wave” business as perpetrated by the many terrorist cells of Third Wave hijackers. It also so wrongly fashions coffee cupping into some elevated consumer ritual for appreciating coffee — as if it were a realistic analogue to wine tasting.

And in comparing the basic ratio math of the ExtractMoJo to “the precision of a nuclear physicist”, it smacks of that scientifically ignorant “Golly gee whiz, Wilbur, you must need a PhD in chemical engineering to operate that vacuum pot!” cluelessness. It’s more of that dumbing down of honest science and math in America that’s usually reserved for Hollywood movies. (Note: I often have the urge to bitch slap “A Beautiful Mind” director, Ron “Opie” Howard, for introducing the infamous “String Theory” movie trope of representing math or complexity through pegboards interconnected by string and thumbtacks.)

But don’t let all that stop you from reading it. Just keep an airsickness bag at the ready to get through it.

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What a fantastic find on the fringes of Monterey city. This location, open for a few years now, is mostly a roastery (with a roaster in back supplied by Roasters Exchange) who supplies a number of area restaurants and cafés, however they also offer kiosk-like walk-up retail beverage service.

The address will take you to their non-descript garage entrance, so you need to head around the corner to an alley with a cyclone-fence-enclosed parking lot. Even if there’s no place to sit here, there are plenty of locals who frequent this spot and all seem to know each other: women in exercise pants, hipsters, old guys with pick-ups, former employees, etc. There are two short metal counters to stand against and drink your brew, however.

There are various stickers against the front counter, plus various odd collectables on the walls and a general homage to the odd and unusual. It feels a lot like the Barefoot Coffee Roasters Coffee Works and Roll-UP Bar in San Jose, just with a lot more quirk. (And how many places do you know sell straight chicory for $3.50 a half pound?)

For coffee service they offer a pour-over bar, a two-group, turquoise Rancilio Z9 lever machine, and a very rare and less-used three-group orange Brugnetti Aurora lever machine. In addition to espresso shots with their Motor City Espresso blend, they were offering single origin shots of Guatemala Hue Hue Tenango.

They serve shots with a mottled, swirled dark and medium brown crema, a potent aroma, a rich body, and a complex, well-blended flavor of fresh spice, some tobacco, and sweeter notes. Served in a mismatched collection of ceramic espresso cups. This is one of the finest new espresso shots we’ve had in a year.

The milk-frothing leaves a lot to be desired, however, as they serve cappuccino in only paper cups and with too much coffee volume – making it more of a latte with some stiff froth. Monterey’s Café Lumiere makes a much better cap with latte art.

Read the review of Acme Coffee Roasting Co. in Seaside, CA.

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Opening around Thanksgiving of 2011, this downtown location of Verve clearly ups the design aesthetics and sends a signal across the street of the venerable Lulu Carpenters. If only the coffee service could live up to everything else promised by visual pageantry here.

It’s a beautiful, open space with a prime location. A former curiosity shop (fruit baskets, etc.) called “Best of Everything Santa Cruz”, this space remained vacant for a number of years prior to Verve’s move-in. There’s a lot of exposed, unfinished wood integrated in its interior design (though less wood than, say, Sightglass) and bare, decorative hanging lightbulbs.

It’s an airy space with seating concentrated at stools and window counters along Pacific Ave. and Front St. There’s also larger wooden tables with affixed, movable seating that suggests a strange cross between a McDonald’s and a German biergarten. There’s a wall of merchandising, which includes a variety of freshly roasted coffees. And not that we’re big fans of marketing literature, but they oddly offer nothing for potential consumers to discriminate their different coffees. This becomes particularly perplexing when they offer roasts from four different El Salvador farms as when we visited. (For the record, we tried some of their El Salvador La Benedición, which we randomly purchased and recommend after some home trials.)

They showcase two gleaming three-group La Marzocco Strada machines, each accompanied by three Mazzer grinders featuring three different bean stocks. It’s not like their service counter doesn’t take the appropriate time — waits for an espresso shot can be 5-10 minutes even at 3pm on a Saturday. But the resulting shot, using their Sermon blend, had a tepid serving temperature, a thin medium brown crema with some limited texture, and a watered-down body that tastes of wet tobacco leaves. Served in notNeutral cups with a side of sparkling water.

It is surprisingly disappointing, given the quality at their mothership location, although not inconsistent with most places that opt to showcase modern pressure-control machines like the Strada or Slayer. (Too often we find that new toys or aesthetics can matter more than a good end product.) It certainly could be an off barista or one that refused to sink shot when they should have. But the overall experience leaves you with the impression that the emphasis and expense here are focused on the wrong, superficial things.

A setup like this with the results they produce are as wastefully aggrevating as the guy with the $60,000 Porsche roadster driving 55mph in a 65mph zone along US 101 — using the passing lane instead as a retirement lane to mentally check-out and avoid making any driving decisions. We will take a storebought roast with a cheap, used La Spaziale machine and a barista obsessive about perfecting his/her shot — and who knows how to use the equipment properly — over this puffed-up experience anyday. It may cost a mere $2.75, but when you can get comparable quality shots for $1.25, Verve is letting their standards and their customers down. Verve is clearly capable of much better, so a revisit is mandatory.

Read the review of Verve Coffee Roasters in downtown Santa Cruz.

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My brother lived in Austin years ago, and the town has changed a lot since then. That is, besides the construction of a fence and pillars at the North Congress Ave. end of the Great Walk in front of the Texas state capitol — to prevent people like my brother from accidentally driving vehicles down the front steps and chipping the pavement.

Talking with the locals, the biggest attraction to living there seemed to be, “it’s fun and it’s cheap.” It certainly isn’t the surface-of-the-sun heat in summer.

But being a college down, Austin also seems to try to capitalize on its “Keep Austin Weird” vibe — and yes, they sell T-shirts that say that, just as in Santa Cruz. However, looking down on the Austin walk-of-fame sidewalk on Trinity St. between 4th & 5th Sts., you’ll find a star for Sandra Day O’Connor right next to a star for Mean Joe Greene. So who is going to argue?

Another change in Austin is the improvement of its coffee scene. Patika Coffee is one of several examples. Except this example is really a coffee cart that sits in an otherwise vacant-looking parking lot downtown, next to the beached trailers of a couple of other food purveyors. Think of it like Réveille Coffee Co. — just grittier, less mobile, and with sketchier neighbors.

The parking lot is separated from the sidewalk traffic by handrails, and there’s an outdoor table/picnic bench and an over-hanging tarp for shade.

Inside their two-person cart, two staffers run the operation with a two-group Synesso machine, using Cuvée Coffee. They are apologetically required to use paper cups by city ordinance, as they are classified as a “food truck” and thus have limitations on the vessels and utencils they can pass out. (Apparently, food trucks are required by Austin law to generate disposable waste.)

They pull shots with a rich, medium brown, even crema on a layer of a thinner-bodied, more acidic espresso than served by the Caffé Medici serving Cuvée across the street. It’s potent, narrower in flavor profile, and lighter on body: a stereotypical “third wave” North American espresso — you know, the kind that’s high on punch and low on balance and finesse.

Read the review of Patika Coffee in downtown Austin, TX.

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Last week we were down in Austin, TX for the first time in over a decade. We managed to do just a little coffee exploration downtown. However, we were primarily there attending the SXSWedu conference. No, that’s not SXSW — once a cool independent music conference 20-25 years ago that’s now a bloated, corporate-sponsored wankfest that also sports “film” and “interactive” themes. SXSWedu is related to the main SXSW, but it is crawling with teachers and educators with no money and — in the spirit of teachers buying their class pencils and much unlike the gaudy entertainment bashes and freebies of SXSW — features a cash bar where attendees have to buy their own drip coffee.

Last Friday the conferences crossed over. Suddenly a cold, rainy wind kicked up as all the teachers left, and the town was invaded by an army of rich white people who dress like 8-year-olds and spend all day tweeting on Apple products about their food-trucks-for-dogs start-ups and their trips to Haiti. KMN. Arguably we couldn’t have left at a better time.

But before we did leave, we became quite enamored with the downtown location of Caffé Medici. It’s a small, three-shop chain of Austin coffee bars, and at the downtown location the coffee is excellent and the environment is also great.

They offer patio sidewalk seating in front on metal tables and chairs of what looks like a rather corporate office building. Inside, you can sit at the center bar where the barista works behind one of two red, three-group La Marzocco FB/80 MP machines. There are a few indoor tables, leather bench seating along one wall, and an upstairs for more seating. Order at the counter in back, beneath the massive red wall with Caffé Medici’s “Cosimo” on it, and your order will electronically beam over to the center barista area.

They mostly pull shots of local roaster Cuvée Coffee with a very even, medium brown crema. They serve it properly short and potent, with a rich body and a nice, blended flavor of spice, herbal pungency, even a little wood and yet a noticeable brightness over the top.

It has a complex flavor, though oddly served in cheap Delco cups and with a side of sparkling water. One day they brought in bags of Verve‘s Sermon blend, so they do a rotation at times. Though one word of warning: the Cuvée Coffee roasts sold at the bar were about three weeks old. But that’s more of a minor complaint.

Their milk-frothing is very wet and somewhat dense — there’s no real foam here — and it comes with decent rosetta latte art.

Read the review of Caffé Medici in downtown Austin, TX.

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Some five years ago we wrote about the problem of espresso sameness in the SF Bay Area. At issue is the challenge for local communities to preserve a diversity of quality coffee purveyors. On that subject, today’s Washington D.C. City Paper posted an article on their city’s growing quality coffee monoculture: How Did Counter Culture Coffee Take Over D.C.? Freebies – Young & Hungry.

A regional diversity in roasting styles, bean sourcing, and even plain old philosophical approaches towards coffee (for example, industry-centric practices vs. being customer-centric) is a prerequisite for any vibrant coffee culture to exist. Too much of one philosophy or approach without a foil, and it becomes hegemony — if not also a little monotony.

Given this age of large corporate buy-outs and company financial failures — to which D.C. is no stranger — having all your eggs in one basket is also a recipe for disaster. The article also offers up some local purveyors that give hope for more of a balanced coffee economy in the area.

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If you were to read it in the current Roast magazine article (from the Jan-Feb 2012 issue), India is a coffee consumer desert. This week TIME magazine wrote about the entrance of Starbucks in the Indian market almost as if to dismiss any prior coffee consumption there. But after spending three weeks in South India’s coffee-growing state of Karnataka last month, these articles read like front-line trip reports from Christopher Columbus to Queen Isabella suggesting that the New World he just discovered is “uninhabited”.

India accurately gets the label of a tea-loving nation. But South India has a coffee-happy culture that arguably rivals most of the places we’ve visited in Europe. In fact, we found far more coffee fanatics in South India than tea lovers. And when we say “fanatics”, we mean people whose eyes light up with delight when you offer the suggestion, “Coffee?”

When we reported from Northern India four years ago, much of the coffee culture was a relatively new, youthful, cosmopolitan import of the modern global café culture. South India also has ample evidence of the modern “third place.” After all this is where Café Coffee Day, India’s largest modern coffee chain, got its start in 1996.

But South India is steeped in coffee houses and coffee culture that goes back to the fading memories of Old Bangalore — from long before the British moved out, “road widening” programs blighted the city with horrendous traffic in place of groves of majestic trees, and global high tech campuses moved in. You can somewhat neatly divide South India between its old and new coffee cultures.

Old South India Coffee

Starting from the lore of the seven Yemenese coffee beans introduced by Baba Budan to the hills of Chikmagalur (a region within the state of Karnataka) in 1670, India has been a coffee producing nation. But traditionally only in the southern states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. These lush, fertile states represent much of India’s agriculture and the world’s spices.

In South Indian cities, you can still find old school bean-and-leaf stores (Peet’s Coffee & Tea‘s original model, i.e. as opposed to retail coffee beverage sales) where local customers ask for coffee from their favorite Coorg farm by name. But despite this terroir-like awareness among some of South India’s older coffee fans, they typically do not buy their coffee in a whole bean format. As ground coffee, it is often purchased as “coffee powder”. And as a matter of history, economics, and/or taste preferences, coffee powder for traditional South Indian filter coffee is frequently cut with chicory.

In fact, if you were to describe the typical South Indian filter coffee preparation, it is also served with a lot of attention given to hot, manually frothed milk. New Orleans may lay claim to the chicory cafe au lait, but South India has predated that claim with a very similar traditional coffee drink by a century or more. One significant difference being that South India likes to aerate their hot milk by distributing it between metal vessels from side-to-side. Some purveyors even take this form of milk frothing to the level of theatrics, providing their customers with a version of latte art rooted more performance art than design.

This form of South Indian coffee consumption takes place in homes, offices, and in the old school restaurants typically called “hotels” that you will find throughout South India. They may be called “hotels”, but you won’t find a place to lay down — let alone private rooms. Many are vegetarian restaurants, and you’ll even find the occasional “military hotel” — which is shorthand for a diner on the cheap, typically with stand-up self service and a cafeteria-like counter for ordering. South Indians very much look forward to their coffee breaks throughout the day for both the enjoyment of the drink and to briefly discuss family, work, events, etc.

In other words, when it comes to coffee, they’re a lot like Europeans.

New South India Coffee

India is a dance in contradictions, however. Someone we met near Delhi a few years ago put it best when he told us, “everything you find to be true in India, you will also find the exact opposite to also be true.” And that includes South India’s coffee culture.

The local presses have stated, “India is low on coffee knowledge.” That is as apparent in South India as anywhere else in the country. There is a decent proliferation of modern coffee shops — including even a Caffè Pascucci in downtown Bengaluru and an Illy espressamente in its airport. However, the coffee “language” used by many of these coffee shops seemed dumbed down for a more coffee-naïve public.

For example, a very popular, local coffeehouse for the young Bengaluru professional set called Matteo Coffea outwardly brands itself as a place for consumer coffee education. However, most of this is in the form of basic historical coffee trivia and quotes you might otherwise find on a souvenir coffee mug: e.g., “Did you know that coffee was discovered by Ethiopian goat herders called kaldi?”

A non-chain place like Matteo Coffea is also a good example of the modern South Indian coffeehouse. It has all the hallmarks of a great “Third Wave” coffeehouse in the West: an outward dedication to consumer coffee education, a shiny red La Marzocco FB/70, and selective bean sourcing and roasting operations. However, the resulting espresso shots look a lot better than they taste. India is going through a lot of the motions on quality coffee, but the coffee quality itself has yet to live up to the show. Other modern coffee shops and chains in the region put a modern spin on coffee quality while still sticking to the area tradition of pre-ground coffee mixed with chicory.

High-end restaurants in the area — those guardians of gourmand tastes — seem to know enough about quality coffee to dissuade customers from ordering the traditional South Indian filter coffee, which is often made with the aforementioned “coffee powder.” It’s almost as if they are embarrassed by it. Instead they steer customers towards “black coffee,” which is barely acceptable straight espresso served in very long, but yet not diluted, pours.

And yet our experiences with traditional South Indian filter coffee there were all very positive — even if it doesn’t bow down to the gods of single origin elitism, handling attuned to maximum freshness, nor even the avoidance of milk adulteration. Perhaps the most humbling aspect was when I returned to the U.S. and tried to reproduce South Indian filter coffee at home. Using a South Indian brew pot I bought at a Bengaluru housewares store for $8 — a contraption not unlike the Neapolitan flip coffee pot — I got out my best beans, technique, and milk to ultimately produce one of the three most undrinkable cups of coffee I have ever made in my life. This is harder than it looks, folks.

The South Indian Business of Coffee

Bengaluru is also home to the national Coffee Board of India, a large, multistory complex that we decided to visit on a whim. Expecting a closed-door government agency with security guards and suspicious eyes intent on keeping foreigners and trespassers out, we were surprised at how open and welcoming they were.

Showing up on their doorstep and merely expressing our love of good Indian coffee, we were directed to the offices of Dr. K. Basavaraj, who is head of the Quality Control Division. There we received an all-access tour of his lab, test batch roasters, and cupping facilities: all the trappings any Western coffee fanatic would feel right at home with.

Out at “origin,” in the coffee-growing lands of the Kodagu (aka Coorg) district of Karnataka, we visited a few coffee farms. Most were modest agricultural operations, some associated with so-called “coffee curing works” that often seemed in the general business of trading commodities. Collectively they supply the majority of India’s domestic coffee consumption — in no small part because India imposes steep tariffs on just about any imported consumable. (They impose a 100% import tariff on beer and wine, with spirits typically topping 150%.)

You could fault India for growing a lot of “cheap” robusta here — it is half the crop relative to arabica by some counts. However, India grows some of the best quality, best cared-for robusta in the world. And in typical Indian contradictory fashion, one of the more memorable modern coffeehouses we experienced in South India was a roadside hut in rural Nisargadhama, Kodagu that served, among other drinks, decorative Spanish cortados.

No matter what, there is something to be said about a coffee culture where, when you ask a restaurant or café who supplies or roasts their coffee, you invariably get the name of an individual — often with an honorary “Dr.” title — rather than the name of a business. It’s not unlike parts of Hawaii where some restaurant menus list the name of the fisherman along with the fish.

India is such a complex, diverse place it’s next to impossible to try to sum up what it is and what it isn’t, as the answer tends to be “all of the above.” We can only hope that with all the forces of modernization and globalization at play here, coffee doesn’t lose some of its cultural diversity.

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Yesterday morning, KQED radio aired an hour-long Forum segment featuring a small round-table of SF coffee “luminaries”: SF’s Coffee Innovators: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. The panel included James Freeman, of Blue Bottle Coffee, Eileen Hassi, of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and an unusually quiet Jeremy Tooker, of Four Barrel Coffee.

Much like the title of its associated Web page, the radio program played out like your typical coffee innovator/”third wave“/bleeding-edge routine that we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. While a bit heavy on the Coffee 101 — particularly when callers asked common FAQ-type questions that have been answered on the Internet 20,000 times over already — KQED produced a good program overall.

Some of the more interesting comments included Eileen Hassi stating that “San Francisco has better coffee than any other city in the world” — with the only potential exception being Oslo, Norway. We’d like to think so, and there’s a bit of evidence to back that up.

James Freeman noted Italy’s “industrialized system of near-universal adequacy,” which is a different but accurate way of summing up our long-held beliefs that outstanding coffee in Italy is almost as hard to find as unacceptable coffee. Other covered topics included coffeehouses eliminating WiFi, Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum inventing the latte, the Gibraltar, and even James Freeman designating home roasting as coffee’s “geeky lunatic fringe.”

The rumors of home coffee roasting’s meteoric rise have been greatly exaggerated…

While it’s worth noting that Mr. Freeman started as a home roaster, recent media coverage of home roasting has been a bit bizarre. To read it in the press these days, you’d think home roasting were at its apex rather than continuing its gradual decline towards its nadir. This despite numerous media stories covering it over five years ago as some hot new trend.

At the 2006 WRBC, we were perplexed by the complete lack of home roaster representation among the event’s attendees. (Namely, any home roaster worth his weight in greens would have been giddy over the reappearance of the Maui Moka bean. Nobody there even noticed.) And yet by 2009 we noted a real decline in online home roasting community activity, and we wrote about some of the underlying reasons for it.

South India coffee

Curiously enough, the first caller to the radio program (at 12’12″ in) mentions a recent trip to South India and his interest in South Indian coffee. I’m posting this from South India — Bengaluru (née Bangalore), to be precise. And I have to say, I’ve become quite fond of both South Indian coffee and the South Indian coffee culture.

Sure, they prefer it sweetened and with hot milk (that often has a skin still on it). The coffee is often cut with cheaper chicory and is brewed with a two-chambered cylindrical metal drip brewer — not unlike a Vietnamese brewer or an upside-down version of a Neapolitan flip coffee pot. But damn, if this stuff isn’t good. Even better, there’s a culture of regular coffee breaks that would be familiar to many Mediterraneans.

We’ve reported from India before, but only from the North — which isn’t known for a strong coffee culture beyond young people frequenting chains that emulate the West. Bengaluru is home to the Coffee Board of India, and this weekend I hope to head out across its state of Karnataka to visit origin at the Kodagu district. Also known as Coorg, this district grows a good amount of India’s good coffee. (Yes, they even grow really good robusta there. Just ask Tom Owens of Sweet Maria.) Details certainly to follow…

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A New Year’s Non-Resolution?

First, a Happy New Year to everyone. I may be in the camp that believes celebrating January 1 is about as arbitrary as celebrating March 6 as “New Year’s Day,” but I can still appreciate much of the sentiment behind it. Namely: leaving the past behind and trying to set a better course for the future.

Which brings us to our Trip Reports — the last of which I wrote in October. Over the past year, I’ve become embarrassingly self-aware of the kind of social monster I’ve contributed to (and even helped create). Namely: the problem of mobile device zombies. We’re written before about the cultural blight of laptop zombies, but the mobile device zombie has also reached rather epidemic proportions.

It’s become that much harder to enjoy the vibe of public spaces without an acute awareness of zombie armies staring into their mobile devices, each dutifully penning their Foursquare check-ins, Yelp reviews, and Facebook status updates — if not also photographing everything put on the table. Things sort of reached critical mass for me when I found it impossible to enjoy pupusas at my favorite neighborhood El Salvadoran dive without encountering at least one table of gringo hipsters glued to their mobile phones, penning some kind of check-in or review.

Yet my guilty streak runs long. Nine years ago I was tapping in review notes into my old Palm Vx at various cafés for this Web site. Back then, I was just a freakish novelty that my coworkers would parody. But today it seems nearly everyone is guilty of some form of mobile device zombiedom, and witnessing it is a bit like a horrific visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. Engrossing ourselves with our mobile devices has become something of a public ritual or rite by which we consume anything in the public spaces of society.

The big joke being that all this is classically a First World Problem of the highest order. Even so, there’s something to be said about making a conscious effort to be present and experience life in the first person — and not through some application on your mobile phone. Being the type that dismisses New Year’s resolutions, I really can’t say what this means for any Trip Reports here in the future. But I can say I am keenly aware of contributing to the problem.

West Marin and Toby’s Coffee Bar…

One place that still seems relatively untouched by the mobile device zombie invasion is West Marin County. Thanks to a low population density and a rugged coastline, mobile phone networks like AT&T continue to offer one of their best services: an excuse for why you cannot be reached by the outside world while you’re out here. There are still major dead zones for voice calls, and 3G Internet access seems about as far off as astronauts landing on Mars.

It’s still Marin County, so you can’t escape the crystal healers and obsession with Westernized yoga. Stare a few locals in the eye, and you’ll undoubtedly find a few who choose to believe that Stevie Nicks is still spinning in gauzy robes as a member of Fleetwood Mac.

Not surprisingly, the coffee options in West Marin are generally heavy on the organic and Fair Trade sourcing but light on quality. One of the better exceptions is in the tiny town of Point Reyes Station.

Toby’s is something of an institution in the area. It’s a general store with a rear feed lot — complete with haystacks, bags of feed, strings of prayer flags, and — you guessed it — a neighboring yoga studio. It’s at the entrance to the feed lot, sort of sharing a wall with the town post office, that you’ll find a kiosk window branded as Toby’s Coffee Bar. There are a few picnic tables and other outdoor tables in front. You can also buy organic baked goods, newspapers, and teas.

Using a newer, two-group Nuova Simonelli machine inside their small service cubby-hole, they pull shots of Taylor Maid Farms in saucerless cups (which seems customary for West Marin). It comes with a dark brown crema, small bubbles, and a lighter heat spot. As espresso shots go, it’s deep and dark: no fruit bombs here. It has a nuttier flavor mixed with cloves and other herbal pungency and is served as a default double shot.

Read the review of Toby’s Coffee Bar in Point Reyes Station, CA.

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We’d apologize for the lack of postings this past month, but that’s partly the result of good editing. The trouble is that we typically board up our windows and hide from most coffee blogs this time of year, as most become inundated by insipid annual round-ups of coffee gift ideas to help cash in on the season.

Not that we’re into role playing a disgruntled Scrooge McCafé for the holidays. We love coffee. But loving coffee and willingly wading through endless coffee advertisements, Clockwork-Orange-style, are two entirely different things.

However, like the trusty annual newspaper article on how different cultures around the world celebrate Christmas, one recent exception caught our eyes. It’s an article on how different cultures around the world like their coffee: A Caffeine Addict’s Guide to the World | Travel Deals, Travel Tips, Vacation Ideas | Budget Travel. Argentina, Spain, Austria, Mexico, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Japan… each location comes with a description of a unique local coffee experience, a tip for trying it, and a suggested place for it. Plus a slideshow to boot.

But before we forget: a public service message to all wannabe coffee journalists out there. Please don’t make the hackneyed, lazy, and bogus equality between coffee and caffeine. One of the most offensive things a journalist can do to insult a coffee lover is to equate them to a “caffeine addict”. We’ve always felt this is the equivalent of calling wine lovers “alcoholics”.

So, please… just don’t. It’s insulting, it’s unimaginative, and it’s been beaten to death. It makes you sound like some overly perky, bubble-gum-chewing dolt writing for the high school newspaper. And we promise we won’t be offended by the term “coffee lovers”.

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