Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

This coffee farm specializes in the under-appreciated (next to Kona) Hawaiian coffees on the East side of the Big Island (Puna, Ku’a, Hamakua) as well as Kona and coffee from the other islands (Maui Moka, Oahu Waialua, Kauai). They take in beans from many local farms for roasting or selling as greens, and they’re at the heart of a modern revival of East Hawaii beans.

In the late 1800s, some 6,000 acres of East Hawaiian rain forest were used to grow coffee until more profitable sugar cane took over at the turn of the 20th century. But since the last of the Big Island sugar plantations closed in the mid-1990s, East Hawaii coffee has been making a comeback.

In talking and sampling with the barista on duty (and Hilo Coffee Mill co-founder), Jeanette Baysa, we learned how nearby Puna coffees are generally less acidic than their world-famous Kona counterparts (also, FWIW, Hilo Coffee Mill only sells estate Kona). And given that the Hilo side of the island receives up to 300 inches of annual rainfall versus Kona’s typical 10 inches, there’s often a challenge in drying the coffee.

They have two 30-lb Diedrich roasters on site for roasting — choosing the Idaho-based manufacturer for a greater availability of parts and the ability to get equipment service “in a known language”.

Also on site is a showroom that sports an espresso bar and a gift shop full of flavored coffees, teas, and the real deal in paper bags. Next to these rows of coffee and related accessories is a bar powered by a two-group Laranzato ME-2 machine. With it they produce some of the best espresso shots on the island.

It’s not just the fresh roasting, either. They spent nine months developing their espresso blend of 100% arabica beans from Central America, South America, and India (note: no Hawaiian coffees). The resulting shot has a darker brown, even crema that’s just a touch thin. Served tall in Laranzato-logo cups; it’s too tall, but yet it’s not overextracted. It has a pungent aroma and a more rounded and pungent flavor of a good espresso blend.

Read the review of Hilo Coffee Mill.

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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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We really hate doing Starbucks posts if we don’t have to. After all, Starbucks hasn’t been relevant to quality espresso in over a decade. But if you’ve been following some of the Clover brewer posts here, you may be surprised to learn that Starbucks liked them enough to buy the company: Aroma comeback: Starbucks to start grinding coffee in stores. (More details here: Starbucks to Acquire The Coffee Equipment Company, Maker of the Clover - HispanicBusiness.com.)

OK, so the rest of the world seems to be “oohing” and “aahing” over news that Starbucks is returning to grinding beans fresh at their locations — reversing a move to pre-ground, packaged beans from 10 years ago. The media also seem curious about Starbucks’ announced replacement for their horrid Verismo machines: an even more dismal-sounding contraption from the same manufacturer, Swiss-based Thermoplan, called the Mastrena. (More on that in a minute.)

But the news most relevant to quality coffee is their purchase of the fledgling Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the (oft-cited-$11,000-a-pop) Clover brewer. This after Starbucks tried out the device in a couple of Seattle-area cafés for a couple months. For chocolate lovers, this is akin to Hershey’s buying out Scharffen Berger in 2005. (It’s entirely fitting that Starbucks announced Hershey’s as their chocolate partner earlier this month.)

Starbucks coffee in a Clover machine? Who buys a $30,000 sound system to listen to AM talk radio?

But back to the Mastrena, a device that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer described as “a new machine designed to leave a smaller margin for error in pulling shots and steaming milk.” Apparently Starbucks will now be able to hire employees with less skills than trained monkeys — to produce consistently underwhelming and “safe” espresso beverages that taste like they were squirted out of a coin-operated vending machine.

“It’s an unbelievable tool that will provide us with the highest-quality, consistent shot of espresso that will be second to none,” said Starbucks’ chairman, Howard Schultz. However, we’re wondering if by “unbelievable tool” he meant the Mastrena…or if he was referring to himself.

UPDATE: March 20, 2008
If you envy those at The Coffee Equipment Company, who cashed in big with their Starbucks acquisition success, here’s a story for you from today’s Post-Intelligencer: Starbucks deal ‘dream come true’ for manufacturer of coffee maker.

UPDATE: March 26, 2008
The New York Times kicked the tires of a Clover machine in a Starbucks, bringing along George Howell of Acton, MA’s Terroir Coffee as their expert taster: Tasting the Future of Starbucks Coffee From a New Machine - New York Times. His findings? Most of the coffee Starbucks roasted for their Clover machines was over-roasted and destroyed the flavor, reducing the Clover to something no better than a $20 French press could produce with the same beans.

UPDATE: March 28, 2008
And here’s a version of the story today from the Associated Press, highlighting some of the independent cafés that are disowning their Clover machines in response to the buyout: Starbucks acquires pricey coffee maker … and the indies are upset - SGVTribune.com.

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Having a wife who runs her own private supper club (for which I am the front-of-the-house/”beverage guy”), I’ve been known to occasionally read the goings-on in the food world. This week, my wife introduced me to a post from a renowned food writer, Michael Ruhlman, who recently wrote about the virtues of percolator coffee: ruhlman.com: Percolator Love. It’s the thinking behind posts such as Mr. Ruhlman’s that are contributing to the Philistine state of coffee in American restaurants.

Mr. Ruhlman has made a culinary career out of “writing about food and the work of professional cooking,” including co-authoring The French Laundry Cookbook with Thomas Keller (himself representative of the odd food savant/coffee idiot phenomenon) and authoring The Making of a Chef, a narrative about life in the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). (The CIA thankfully just announced a new coffee program to help dispel coffee quality ignorance among so many budding star chefs.) Combine this with a call this afternoon from Josh Sens, of San Francisco magazine — who asked for clarification on the issues with percolator coffee for his article deadline looming tomorrow — and the subject of percolator coffee seems worth a mention.

Mr. Ruhlman’s post laments the demise of the percolator, a 1940s and 1950s staple which fell out of favor once the prototype Mr. Coffee machine and the ensuing family of filter drip coffee machines rose to prominence in the 1970s. So why was the percolator brushed aside so abruptly? It wasn’t a manufacturing conspiracy — percolators were one of the greatest atrocities modern man ever committed upon good coffee. Coffee is cooking. It’s about using the right temperature, time, and pressure to extract the right flavors from the beans and to leave the nasty stuff behind.

And based on these merits, using a percolator on coffee is akin to baking a cake with a blow dryer. It’s surgery with a shovel. Take ground coffee; scald it with boiling water unevenly sprayed on some exposed grounds and not the rest; guess when the heating element kills itself off; hope for the best; serves 12.

Nostalgia makes some people long for the flavors and smells of their youth, but it also gets Communist Party members re-elected in Russia and sends divorcées back to bad marriages. While most home filter drip coffee machines even today suffer from temperature control problems (their #1 deficiency), they are still largely a step up from our culinary Dark Ages that were characterized by Potato Buds, instant Tang, instant coffee, and percolators.

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A bit slow out of the gate (by a year), Slate magazine filed this article on the Clover brewer, naturally focusing on the device’s expense in the article’s title (”Could a Coffee Maker Be Worth $11,000?”): How the Clover could change the way we think about coffee. - By Paul Adams - Slate Magazine. It’s a timely follow-up to our post yesterday.

When it comes to “bragging rights” over who has the bigger price tag (?!?), it’s interesting to compare the Clover brewer to James Freeman’s siphon bar. While the Clover brewer allows a lot of variables to be tweaked and tuned, as cited in the Slate article, it is largely the Northwest American digital engineer’s approach to better brewed coffee. Meanwhile the siphon bar is more like the artist’s approach to the same problem — with at least as many variables and nuances to adjust, but it’s more like the violinist who prefers to ignore the constraints of precision frets on their instrument to produce something they can more fully control in an analog world.

However, the author of the Slate article, Paul Adams, seems to miss the forest for the trees. A new brewer doesn’t change how we think about coffee. In fact, the only reason the Clover brewer exists is because the coffee itself is getting better; the nuanced flavors and aromas these higher-grade coffees produce won’t otherwise be lost on a precision machine like the Clover. But considering the origins of the beans and the roasting styles applied to them, not every coffee makes sense in a Clover — just as not every coffee makes sense as an espresso. A good microscope and a good telescope may both require precision optics to effectively refract light, but I wouldn’t use the same device to examine both the heavens and the structure of cells.

Advances in brewing equipment and technology are an important element to appreciating better coffee. But to focus exclusively on gadgetry and price tags as the only measure of good coffee is akin to purchasing a $4,000 Viking open burner range top to reheat canned soup. Or, in some cases, to roast a turkey.

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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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“Mystery” solved. As one of our readers commented on a previous post, Starbucks recently purchased two $11,000 Clover brewers for who knows what unholy purposes. However, today Bloomberg reported that Starbucks is testing them in at least one of their Seattle retail stores: Bloomberg.com: Exclusive - Starbucks Tests $2.50 Premium Coffee to Boost Sales.

Between this and recent news of their new “dollar days” promotion, you really do have to wonder if their recent corporate shake-up included replacing their executive VP of corporate strategy with a Magic 8-ball. But whereas the $1 bottomless cup of coffee strategy seems aligned with Starbucks’ continued downmarket spiral, the $2.50 Clover-brewed coffee experiment is quite an anomaly.

Unclear on the Concept: Starbucks Beans…in a Clover?!

There’s been a lot of media coverage and squawk over coffee brewing technology these days. But a big reason why we’re even talking about brewing technology is because the coffee itself is making it relevant. We can use siphon bars and Clovers and notice the difference in our cups because of vast improvements in bean sourcing (Cup of Excellence coffees, etc.) and a more rigorous commitment to quality roasting and to keeping the inventory of the roasted beans as fresh as possible. Without the advancements made in the bean, the roast, and its freshness, the whole exercise of these high-end brewing machines is rather pointless.

Thus it’s not clear that Starbucks even comprehends any of this. Starbucks still sources their beans from mammoth-sized suppliers (to ensure consistency and an appropriate volume to supply their over 15,000 cafés) and uses roasts that they do not dare date stamp. Even Starbucks’ “Black Apron Exclusives” beans aren’t held to the standards that most Clover-using cafés have. This makes Starbucks’ use of the Clover a bit like playing AM talk radio through a $30,000 sound system. What’s the point?

After a decade of relentless focus on growth at all costs, Starbucks is clearly experimenting with quality and other long-ignored factors in the hopes of finding something that sticks with consumers — to revive their flagging brand. We still haven’t ruled out the possibility of Starbucks re-launching some of their cafés as “Starbucks Select” (think “Target Greatland”, etc.) to allow them to focus more on quality at some of their cafés and help buoy the impression of quality at the rest.

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Today’s Seattle Times reported on how the exchange rate wreaked havoc on the American waiting list for the La Marzocco GS/3 — their first machine designed with home use in mind: Retail Report | Espresso-machine price leaves some steaming | Seattle Times Newspaper.

For two years, La Marzocco promised a hefty $4,500 price tag for the device. But when the device was finally unveiled for sale by the American distributor for Franke late last year, two years of Bush Administration spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave depressed the U.S. dollar enough to jack up the price of the Italian-manufactured machine to $7,500. Thus making the New York Times‘ exaggerations earlier this week seemingly rank a little lower on the hyperbole scale.

But like the confused Food Network viewers who insist upon commercial ovens in their home kitchens, regardless of the Byzantine building codes for ventilation systems required by these megaliths, somehow we doubt that the extra $3,000 is really going to stop someone that hell bent on consumption.

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Today Blue Bottle Coffee Co. opened up their long-anticipated Mint Plaza café — their first true space (besides kiosks and outdoor carts at the Ferry Building and in the East Bay) to showcase James Freeman’s commitment to freshness.

The café is located at a bend in Jesse St. in the Mint Plaza alleyway — in the corner of the old San Francisco Provident Loan Association building (SF’s largest jewelry-only pawn shop, if that gives you an indication of the neighborhood’s dicey past). It’s a bright space with tall ceilings and tall windows that look out on Jesse and Mint Sts. Along the windows is a series of stools with counter seating. Inside there is limited seating at the siphon bar (more on that below) and one long, high table surrounded by stools.

Of course the emphasis is coffee in all its various forms. But there’s also a worthy dessert menu (Caitlin A. Williams is their pastry chef).

For their “routine” espresso blends ($2), they use a three-group La Marzocco GB/5. As you would expect from Blue Bottle, the barista concentrates on timing a slow and deliberate shot — producing an espresso with a richly textured, medium brown patterned crema. It has a beautiful color in the light of the space, a potent aroma, but a thinner body than you might expect for something of this quality. Still, it has a classically robust Blue Bottle espresso flavor of roasted tobacco with an edge of a sweeter honey. Served in a classic brown Nuova Point cup with a glass of water on the side.

Single Origin Espresso

Of course, as a showcase for Blue Bottle Coffee, this is just the beginning of the coffee experience here. James has established a weekly rotation of single origin espresso shots, served from a dedicated old copper, manual, two-group La San Marco machine. Today’s special single origin roast was a Brazilian Camocim Bourbon. Producing one of the very best, if not the best, blended espresso in town, Blue Bottle’s single origin Camocim Bourbon will knock your socks off and comes highly recommended at $3. (James apparently knows me too well, as he personally served me up one before I even had the chance to ask!)

It has an exquisite aroma. The crema is a rich, mottled, and frothy medium brown — a touch thinner in size, as you might expect from a single origin espresso, but it has texture for miles. It has a robust flavor — there aren’t any elements noticeably missing, which is common to single origin espressos — and tastes of chocolate and some tobacco smokiness. Served in a white ACF cup — it is an outstanding recommendation over the “standard” blend.

Siphon Bar

For this café’s opening day, the siphon bar earned Blue Bottle a front-page story on the “Dining In” section of the day’s New York Times. And the place buzzed with the feel of a grand opening. James was beaming over his latest pride and joy, cameras were about still taking photographs of the place and its coffee, and many of the local coffeescenti came by to welcome the place (including Eileen Hassi of Ritual Coffee Roasters while I was there).

So what is this “siphon bar”? For one, it’s not necessarily anything radically new or different. It is essentially vacuum pot coffee made with a special system imported from Japan, except it uses halogen lamps as a heat source and cotton cloth filters that James told me should last a whole year. (Cafe Bello, for example, has offered vacuum pot brewed coffee for the past four years — even though it’s no longer listed on their main café menu.) The New York Times may have gone ga-ga over their fixation with its price tag — which they quoted as $20,000 for the setup — but James dismissed some of that figure on many of the peripheral parts they purchased, training, etc.

However, the siphon bar presents a unique way to experience some of Blue Bottle’s most exquisite coffees. They offered three different bean options. I had their Idido Misty Valley Ethiopian ($10) — which comes accompanied with chocolate sea salt caramels. The pairing may sound a bit pretentious (I’m leery whenever coffee people try to shoehorn familiar wine tasting rituals on themselves), but it works quite well — enhancing both the flavors of the delicate, clean coffee and the richer chocolate and caramel. In any case, the café could barely keep up with the novelty demand for their siphon bar coffee.

James Freeman may have made his start in the East Bay, but as a resident north of the Panhandle, he has made this location a showpiece and a true coffee destination for the city. Some Blue Bottle loyalists might piss and moan because “Blue Bottle was way cooler when you could drink espresso shots made by a tattooed slacker over a sewer cover in a back alley,” but we’ll take good coffee over misplaced adolescent attitude and poser angst any day.

Read the review of Blue Bottle Cafe at Mint Plaza. — with ratings based on their standard espresso blend.

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Today’s New York Times revealed the “very special machine” to be showcased at Blue Bottle Coffee’s Mint Plaza grand opening today: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee - New York Times. One-upping the now-blasé Clover, it’s a $20,000 siphon bar for brewed (i.e., not espresso) coffee, imported from Japan via the Ueshima Coffee Company. Yes, UCC — the aforementioned, Kobe-based king of Japanese canned coffee who sports the barista-T-shirt-ready slogan, translated to English: “Good Coffee Smile”.

So what is more amusing? The trumping escalation of high-end commercial coffeemaker prices, or the media obsession with these prices? It’s as if to suggest a Times headline for the brand new Mercedes-Benz CL Class: “At Last, a $118,127 tank of gas.” (Either that or this reporter must think the siphon bar is disposable after a single use.) You can always tell when a reporter is in way over his head when the only vocabulary they have to describe the qualities of an item is its price tag.

Yet the article rightfully ponders whether “the age of brewed coffee” has arrived. To a degree, it has. We’re not ones to take away from the luxury of a great espresso (something that the great majority of cafés still flounder at, and even the best get a little wrong now and then). However, espresso is just one limited method of showcasing the complexity and wide variety of flavor profiles that the world’s coffees have to offer. Now that we’re in an era of coffee quality exploration — with the rise of single origin and Cup of Excellence coffees — it makes complete sense to introduce brewing methods that best highlight those nuances.

Have the Coffee Wars Moved on to Good Old Brewed Coffee?

It doesn’t mean we stop enjoying a little quality washed Indian robusta in our favorite espresso blend — or that we are calling for the death of the quality blend. But tasting a delicate island coffee, like a Kona peaberry or a St. Helena, in a vacuum pot can make a world of difference, and improvement, over forcing it through an espresso preparation.

If anyone should be freaking out over this turn of events, it shouldn’t be the eyes-rolling, look-at-what-those-rich-geeks-are-paying-now-for-coffee reporters. It should be Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. With all his lip service about getting the insanely expanded Starbucks to reclaim it’s spot at the zenith of the consumer coffee world, they cannot afford to participate in this new brewed coffee arena. Because you can not only forget capably training 99% of their 150,000 low-wage employees on how to properly work a siphon bar — you can’t even trust many of them after-hours in the same room with this equipment. And without a strategy for quality brewed coffee, Mr. Schultz is merely fighting the last decade’s coffee war.

In the meantime, San Franciscans should be proud that the likes of the New York Times are spending a lot more time these days reporting on the coffee revolution that’s playing out in our very own backyard.

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