Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that.

If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of Four Barrel Coffee, it’s no coincidence. Owners/brothers Jerad and Justin Morrison have years of veteran experience that includes roasting at Blue Bottle Coffee and the opening of Four Barrel Coffee.

You’d miss this space if you weren’t looking for it. We honestly had to duck under a half-open garage door to get in, and the place looked like it was closing up shop. But despite the tiny serving space at a serving cart on wheels, this is just one corner of a vast, 1924-built, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 25-foot ceiling — or about the size of a typical large auto-body shop in the area. Except this place serves coffee … and not much else (if you include the salt caramels).

They have a Chemex brewing station, which is somewhat unique for the area, but the main attraction is their refurbished two-group La Marzocco GS2 espresso machine — straight out of the 1970s, and a sister to the one just installed at Intelligentsia’s fabled Venice Beach location. Replace cheesy 1970s leather with wood, tune up the parts, and they’ve got a pretty serious machine for enthusiasts.

Of course — as with all these Works-In-Progress Cafés, Inc. — it doesn’t stop there. Since the new model of opening notable coffee bars these days is to open stripped-down with many promises to upgrade later, the Morrison brothers soon plan to employ one of those fancy new Slayer espresso machines in the near future — as showcased at the 2009 SCAA conference — putting their Slayer customer ID in the single digits. Will its manual control of brewing pressure blow our minds? Only time will tell, folks. In the meantime, we can’t help but snicker every time we hear the machine’s name — which conjures up images of Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson head-banging while playing air guitar to “Disciple“.

It’s just not the machine that’s slated for an upgrade, either. They currently have access to Verve Coffee Roasters‘ inventory and equipment until the 14-kg Probat roaster is installed and fired up for their own local roasting. As always in this town, the permit process is one of the key roadblocks. Though they hope to have things up and running in September, we wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still waiting in December.

The resulting shot has a dark, healthy crema. It’s a touch thin on body, but it has a potent pungent flavor of cloves, herbs, etc. There isn’t much to the dynamic range of the flavors, but what’s there is handled well. Served in classic brown ACF cups.

Don’t mind the 90% of the floorspace that’s still being prepped for their lonely Probat. This place will need revisits, as so much is bound to change in the future. For now, it’s a good shot with the promise of becoming better down the road.

Read the preliminary review of Sightglass Coffee. In the meantime, here’s a video of Sightglass making a cap in action:

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A couple months ago, we kicked up a bit of dust when we dressed down the Gibraltar, an espresso beverage created by accident when Blue Bottle Coffee Co. was opening their first SF café in 2005. We called it the fool’s cappuccino — essentially the same beverage, but poured in a cheap restaurant supply glass and gushed over by those who questionably valued faddishness and faux exclusivity over beverage quality. Blue Bottle’s follow-up act in the restaurant-supply-glassware-as-drink-name category is the SG-120, and we put it to the CoffeeRatings.com sensory test.

As many a curious customer asks, what is an SG-120? And why does an espresso drink have a name that sounds more like a license plate number, a Soviet rocket launcher, or a brand of synthetic motor oil? Searching for “SG-120″ on Google, we found that it is also the name of a single door steam jacketed gravity sterilizer and a rotation mill for “viscous or sticky products”. More to the point, as with the Gibraltar, the SG-120 is named after a restaurant supply glass the beverage is served in — this time a shotglass from Japanese glass maker, Hairo.

The SG-120 sensory test

Unlike the Gibraltar, Blue Bottle Cafe actually lists the SG-120 on their coffee menu. They typically offer it for about $3.50 from their single origin Bosco machine — along with the options of the less-milk macchiato ($3.25) and a straight double shot ($3).

Blue Bottle Cafe had been producing SG-120s from their Misty Valley Ethiopia beans until their Bosco had to be sent out for repairs. The machine returned from the shop this week — along with their Chapada Diamantina Brasil as the featured single origin coffee (which shares its name with a national park in Brasil’s state of Bahia). On Wednesday they served us an SG-120 with a smooth, integrated, and well-blended emulsion of coffee and frothed milk. Oddly, it was so smooth it almost didn’t taste much like coffee — more akin to a liquid candy bar.

Despite its non-coffee-like qualities, it was an impressive beverage. But given the SG-120 it came in, it begged the obvious question: would we have enjoyed it more if it were served in a demitasse? Our answer was a definitive “absolutely”. The SG-120 detracted from the experience with some poor glass aesthetics: the SG-120 is thin-lipped, much flimsier than the Gibraltar, it felt “cheap” and almost disposable, and its thinness and materials added no real thermal properties. So once again, we were convinced by the beverage — but not the suboptimal serving format.

(As an aside, Ben, an Apple employee from Vancouver who was visiting the nearby Apple developer’s conference, showed me photos of Chapada Diamantina national park on his iPhone while sampling the same coffee in a siphon pot. His take was that it was very clean, bright, and straightforward — lacking any buttery characteristics, etc. We picked up some beans to test the home version ourselves.)

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We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963.

In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are slowly creeping in. Yet the gap is still exceedingly large: of the current Top 28 on CoffeeRatings.com, only one location, Bar Bambino, is an actual restaurant.

There is a litany of reasons for why this is. Unfortunately, much of the food service/restaurant industry seems clueless about them. Case and point is a recent article published on the culinary Web site, Behind the Burner: Interview With a Coffee Roaster – Article – Behind the Burner TM.

The author, John Grossmann, interviews Alex Roberts, master roaster at Emeryville-based Roast Coffee Co.. Roast opened in early 2008 as part of the Bacchus Management Group (love the Web site, btw), a small management team behind a handful of eclectic Bay Area restaurants. Mr. Grossmann calls Roast an “unusual startup” that’s performing a “new twist in dining” by sourcing and roasting its own beans. And that’s where the naïveté starts spilling out.

Bean there, done that

For one, roasters offering restaurants custom roasts and blends has been a common practice for decades. One potentially different angle could be in custom bean sourcing, but market economics would prevent Roast from directly sourcing beans from different farms for a single restaurant — which would be the only new ground there. Bacchus Management Group promotes Roast as unique because it is “by the restaurants, for the restaurants”, but exclusively servicing the industry’s least discriminating business customers hardly seems like a virtue.

The interview then succumbs to the ever-popular wine analogy. (It’s quite ironic that they should then do that, given that we cannot think of any restaurant-operated wineries worthy of note.) Mr. Grossmann asks, “Has the day of the coffee sommelier dawned?” To which Mr. Roberts replies:

I think so. I’d love to have the first job as a coffeelier, let’s call it. This would be somebody who understands all the single origins. All the specifications of the farm it came from, all the nuances of the coffee. Is it high grown, low grown? If there’s a blend, what each coffee in the blend contributes. The coffeelier would also suggest coffee and dessert pairings.

What’s so wrong about a restaurant coffee sommelier?

And therein lies the rub. Any restaurant mention of a coffee sommelier invariably glosses over the fact that a successful coffee service isn’t as simple as merely pulling a cork on a bottle of roasted beans. Just a couple weeks ago, we posted an article with the common opinion that a great barista can make magic of weak bean sources, and that superior beans and roasts can go to rot in untrained hands and poorly maintained equipment. Machine maintenance and “barista” training standards at restaurants are still woefully inadequate at best.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with dreaming of the day that restaurants offer a variety of coffee options and a guide, or coffeelier, to walk patrons through them. But while Roast can tweak their fresh bean formula until the cows come home, any lofty designs for restaurant coffee appreciation will fail miserably if they’re built upon a rotten foundation of poor training, faulty equipment maintenance, and shoddy brewing practices.

An article from last year does suggest that training is an integral part of Roast’s engagement with restaurants. However, elite Bay Area roasters have long expressed immense frustration at getting training compliance out of cafés, let alone the scattered attention of restaurants. (Some have even expressed using CoffeeRatings.com for business intelligence — to identify retailers doing unmerciful things to their roasts, pointing to our site’s reviews as evidence of the need for training.) Roast Coffee Co.’s three-person operation is hardly poised to succeed where so many larger organizations have failed.

Until these fundamentals are addressed, Mr. Roberts’s dream of being a coffeelier rings about as hollow as a dentist who waxes poetic about the latest laser teeth whitening technology but cannot be bothered with the mundane task of actually cleaning and polishing your teeth. What good are white teeth if plaque and gum disease cause them to fall out? Coffee sourcing, roasting, and a lack of coffeeliers aren’t the problem. Restaurant coffee standards will not improve until the basics of training, maintenance, storage, and a commitment to quality are fixed.

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Last week we came across an interesting article in an unusual place: Barista judge calls for clarification of espresso techno-babble – 30 April 2009 – CatererSearch. A World Barista Championship judge has expressed concern over espresso machine manufacturers’ escalating war of technology — or at least the validity of their claims.

David Cooper, of Cooper’s Coffee in Yorkshire (UK), became a strong advocate of Dalla Corte’s high-tech, precision “group head stability and control” — to ensure optimal temperature control at the point at which coffee touches hot water. But he’s since become disillusioned with what seems like an industry parade of promoted technical advances, for which there’s currently no reliable way to validate these claims.

It all kind of reminds us of the toothbrush technology escalation wars in recent years — where every other month a toothbrush manufacturer introduced an array of new, Rube-Goldberg-inspired technology patents, unleashing a bizarre array of torture-device features that seemingly varied from multiple angled brush heads to lasers. While the toothbrush technology wars have subsided in the past couple of years, few things can top the parody-becomes-reality story of how The Onion lampooned the five-blade disposable razor in 2004, only for Gillette to introduce the five-blade Fusion razor a year and a half later.

All of which makes parodies such as Moore’s Law for Razor Blades and this following MADtv parody for the 20-blade Spishak Mach20 razor that much more humorous and disturbing:

Is espresso machine technology next in line?

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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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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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Last month — after publishing a few trip reports of nearby Cole Coffee, the Spasso Coffeehouse, and Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea — Luigi DiRuocco of Mr. Espresso asked if we tried the espresso at Oliveto.

We last updated our review of Oliveto a couple years prior, so the focus of our most recent Rockridge tour was to explore some cafés we hadn’t evaluated before. However, Luigi pointed out that, last year, the downstairs Oliveto Cafe was entirely remodeled and that Mr. Espresso installed a beautiful, original Faema E61. We last saw one of these machines in operation at Cafe Noir in Monterey, CA four years ago — which has since been swapped out now that it is now known as Café Lumiere. (Curiously enough, the E61 at Cafe Noir was also installed by Mr. Espresso, so it could be the same machine.)

Luigi also mentioned that they did a new round of trainings for the Oliveto staff — a continual need that plagues any coffee roaster that sells to independent retail locations. And, simultaneously, Christian of Man Seeking Coffee fame contacted us with the idea of another joint review. Thus, Christian and I decided to check them out again this past weekend.

This restaurant has existed on this Rockridge corner since 1987, albeit in different forms. The latest generation is a higher end Italian restaurant upstairs with a popular trattoria/café downstairs. Downstairs there’s some rather limited outdoor seating, a number of wooden tables and chairs (which replaced the shared, long tables in their previous interior design), and meals that rely heavily on the simple organics. Upstairs it is white tablecloths and a more extensive menu — with the same espresso shots running about $0.50 more.

Using their older, two-group, Mr. Espresso-supplied Faema, they produced adequate results. While its replacement with an even older, more classic, three-group E61 Faema constitutes serious espresso machine eye candy, we were hoping some of the recent training would come through in the shots it produced.

They still pull shots with a thinner layer of dark brown crema. It’s more substantial than the shots they pulled with their previous machine (which often had a thin ring of light or medium-to-light brown crema). However, there still seems to be plenty of room for improvement. The body of the shot is thinner — it’s a touch watery even — with a flavor more of pungent herbs than the previous mild spice and wood flavors here. The finish is subtly sharper, but it’s still not nearly as bright as you would expect of a well-made espresso.

Some readers here can make the (logical) conclusion that we’re huge fans of Mr. Espresso, given our ratings of places such as Coffee Bar. More accurately, given the inconsistency of preparation that so plagues roasters, we are much bigger fans of Luigi’s barista skills with Mr. Espresso beans than anything else. While it was a decent cup, we found Oliveto’s improvement over their previous shots to be marginal. (Rumor has it, however, that daytime shifts during weekdays may produce better results.)

Served in traditional brown, thick-walled Nuova Point cups with a modest pour size. Oliveto is also one of those few places that offer to top off your empty espresso cup with filter coffee at brunch, which we don’t particularly mind.

Read the updated review of Oliveto Cafe & Restaurant.

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At CoffeeRatings.com, we believe that what the end consumer experiences is what matters most, regardless of who is behind the results. But often the story about coffee becomes more of a story about people. Rodger’s Coffee & Tea is a good example of this — where knowing a little of the back story helps provide a reference point describing some of what goes on in the cup.

Coffee Magic and the Birth of Philz Coffee

The story of Rodger’s Coffee & Tea centers around its owner and founder, Rodger Bories. Mr. Bories started a wholesale coffee business in the Bay Area going back to 1982, which later evolved to become Coffee Magic. In that time, Mr. Bories recognized how coffee freshness is a big determinant for whether brewed coffee tastes any good — or not.

While Mr. Bories remained a background figure, in 2002 he partnered with Phil Jaber of Gateway Liquor at 24th & Folsom Sts. And here is where the versions of events can start to vary, depending on whom you ask. According to Mr. Bories, he was invited in to fix some rather awful coffee operations at Gateway Liquor. The fruits of their partnership inspired a successful coffee quality turnaround at Gateway Liquor, which in turn inspired Phil Jaber to strike out on his own to launch Philz Coffee.

Mr. Jaber, being the ultimate showman that he is, took the path of becoming the P.T. Barnum of SF’s specialty coffee world. Meanwhile, Mr. Bories focused on the back-office details of producing quality roasts, ensuring freshness, and using the right equipment. However, as is now blatantly clear, that partnership ultimately ran a bit sour. Mr. Bories has since opened his first retail café at this location in January of this year, bringing with him the “One Cup At A Time” filter coffee concept he helped develop for Philz Coffee.

A mix of the old and new coffee schools

There’s a lot to believe in Mr. Bories’ telling of events. His café exhibits a much greater knowledge and care of bean origins, roasting styles, preparation methods, and techniques than you will find at a Philz Coffee. It also explains why we’ve long felt Mr. Jaber loved the celebrity but couldn’t be bothered with the mundane back-office details of the coffee business.

However, Mr. Bories, with 27 years in the business, is hardly a “Third Waver” — and that turns out to be a good thing. While his roasts show an attention to quality bean sources and freshness (despite the open bins of stored beans in the shop), he’s also not afraid of roasting into the second-crack for darker roasts. Neither is he afraid of blends (just without some of Philz Coffee’s fairytale names for them).

This results in beans that have a combination of freshness and roasting style that are difficult to come by in the Bay Area. We purchased a pound of their limited edition Brazil Poco Fundo for home espresso use ($13/lb). And while it is a single origin coffee, it produced some attributes in body and flavor roundness that you can’t easily find in the coffees of so-called Third Wave roasters. Most importantly, the quality of the espresso it produced, while not necessarily superior, compared well with the same roasters.

As for the café…

The café is located in the ground floor corner of what looks like some Mission district condo gentrification. They have limited sidewalk seating out front on benches and plastic chairs. Inside there’s a bench and some limited window counter stool seating, but the main attraction is standing up at the coffee bar for service “Italian style”.

Standing at the bar, you can identify dozens of coffee varietals in plastic bins: some blends, but many with geographic designations. You can choose any kind you like for espresso — more than you would practically want, actually. This despite the main attraction of individually-made filter drip coffee. Their hot chocolate preparation is also quite a bit of Benihana-style visual entertainment. The staff is friendly and generally sarcastic, and we like that. Coffee industry rags cover the inside counters.

For our espresso shot, we chose the limited edition Brazil Poco Fundo, in place of the usual Brazil Fazenda. They are careful to grind to order and are conscientious about their beverage preparation. Using a two-group Synesso machine (another example that would never dawn on Philz Coffee), they unfortunately pull overly full espresso shots in a cup without a saucer.

Our primary complaint here is the large pour volume, as our home results with the same beans and shorter pulls proved much better. Still, the shot has a healthy layer of a medium- and light-brown crema, with a body that is somewhat thinner given the size of the pour. It has a simple herbal flavor with some spice and smoke, but you can tell it’s fresh.

Decent beans hindered by faulty pull sizes result in a cup that’s not all that much better than average. They should be capable of something better here — closer to what we produced at home. Perhaps given their young stage, improvements are coming. Cash only.

Read the review of Rodger’s Coffee & Tea.

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It’s time for another espresso review along Oakland’s Rockridge trail.

This coffee shop is the kind that only seems to thrive near a university. It’s a more spacious café than some of its espresso-serving neighbors along College Ave. There are a couple of sidewalk café tables in front, some limited table seating in front at the entrance, and a large rear area with a colorful coffee-growers mural, decorative burlap coffee bags, skylights, and many small café tables and studious people at laptops.

Did we mention laptops?

Free Wi-Fi is the name of the game here. For the clientele, they are like flies to a bug lamp. The locals even seem to adjust their coffee orders accordingly: bigger mugs of filter coffee that they can nurse for hours on end. So of course, we instead ordered the house espresso.

They use Tony’s Coffee, which they sell on site — and bill heavily as “Fair Trade/Organic” as required by the locals. Using a two-group Promac, they pull a short shot with an even, thinner, medium brown crema that dissipates quickly. It’s watery and light, and really quite sour actually — something we believe can be traced back to a rather tepid brewing temperature.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t taste much of any earthiness nor pepper nor pungency beyond the sourness: it was that strong. Time to tune the machine, folks.

Read the review of Spasso Coffeehouse.

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Introduction

Here at CoffeeRatings.com, we prefer to be experimentalists rather than theorists. This means we may have opinions, but we try to back them up with first-hand experience — even if it means consuming coffee, Fear Factor-style, that we would much rather avoid.

Last year when Starbucks announced they were purchasing The Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the Clover brewer, we scratched our heads in bewilderment:

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

This past October, Starbucks finally started offering “Clover crafted Small Batch Coffee” at a few select locations. After giving them a few months to work out the kinks, this week we finally put our expectations to the test at the 295 California St. Starbucks — one of four San Francisco Starbucks featuring the Clover.

Having previously sampled Clover-brewed coffee at the likes of Ritual Coffee Roasters and Coffee Bar, we already had an idea of what to expect. So how would Starbucks’ coffee measure up with the same process and equipment?

Materials and Methods

We started by selecting their Papua New Guinea (aka “PNG”) Kainantu. We were first turned on to some of the excellent PNG coffees by Terry Patano, a longtime CoffeeRatings.com reader and co-owner of DOMA Coffee Roasting Company (Cour d’Alene, ID). And at $3.45 for a “tall”, compared to the others at $2.75 (Colombia Manzanares, Ethiopia Sun-Dried Sidamo, Bali Batur Highlands — and Guatemala Casi Cielo at $2.45), we figured we’d opt for something interesting enough to avoid low-balling our test.

Starbucks’ Clover set-up includes a nice Mahlkönig grinder, an array of Bodum Yohki storage jars containing their small batch coffees, and, bizarrely, a strange fetish for paper cups. If the Mahlkönig was promising, the stacks of paper cups was unsettling. After ordering, the barista immediately produced a paper cup — until we stopped her by asking that it be “for here”. Given the target experience of the entire Clover setup, this is like having to ask for the ketchup on the side when ordering your chateaubriand.

Following that incident, our wait for our coffee was at least five minutes. Part of this delay, we could tell, was because they don’t seem to get many Clover orders. This spelled trouble for the freshness of their coffee, as a low turnover rate will deaden even the freshest roasts.

Results

Now whether the original roasts weren’t very fresh, or whether they were left to grow stale after a couple of weeks, or whether the quality of the coffees themselves weren’t all that great — we can’t be entirely sure. But we suspect all three faults were at work when we say that the flavor of the Clover-brewed coffee here fared no better than meeting our low expectations: AM talk radio. (Not to mention that Starbucks likely burned some of the evidence of flavor out of their coffee using their typical roasting style.)

The beans did not carry distinctive flavors that we commonly found with other Clover brewings, and the finish even lacked some of the characteristic “clean” that the Clover can produce with high quality and properly handled bean stocks. In fact, we’d go so far as to say the coffee was no more flavorful than retail coffee beans we’d brew in our French press at home. Philz Coffee, by comparison, is far more flavorful, interesting, and even cheaper.

Conclusions

In these hyper-conscious economic times, spending $3.45 for filter coffee seems even more outlandish than the $4 latte (aka “Fourbucks”) — even if Starbucks charges less for Clover-brewed coffee than other high-end cafés. But the worst part isn’t that a $3.45 filter coffee seems as quaint as businesses that once slapped their logo on company Hummers for self-promotion. The biggest offense is that consumers are asked to pay double for coffee that ultimately tastes very pedestrian. Even if Starbucks’ high-end competitors charge a dollar more for their Clover-brewed coffee, it at least tastes like you’re getting something special for all the price and pomp.

Starbucks needs to rethink how they’re using the Clover in their stores — i.e., if they intend to keep using it at all. In the end, Starbucks’ purchase of The Coffee Equipment Company may prove to be an entirely defensive move — just as they did with the acquisition of Torrefazione Italia. If you can’t beat superior competition, buy them out and hide the evidence from customers that much better coffee ever existed.

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