Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

We’re more than a bit late with the news here, but a hearty and well-deserved congratulations to Kyle Glanville of LA’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea for winning the 2008 U.S. Barista Championship (USBC): 2008 US Barista Champion « The Official 2008 SCAA Conference Blog.

Proving the West is Best, and giving us some minor trash-talking rights, five of the six finalists all hailed from our own backyard Western Regional Barista Competition. Booyah.

Could we get any further away from Minneapolis? Please?

We weren’t exactly glued to our monitors for the blow-by-blow updates of the USBC as some have. Part of that is being in India, where everything is 12½-hours ahead of Pacific Time (yes, there is an extra 30 minutes in there). But a bigger part reflects the forced spectacle of barista competitions in addition to the overall SCAA conference spectacle itself.

The redeeming qualities of the SCAA conference include a number of interesting presentations and topics of discussion, elements the USBC, and the Roasters Guild Coffee of the Year Competition. But there are also big sponsorships by the irrelevant likes of Krups and Da Vinci Gourmet syrups (never trust a product that has “gourmet” in its name), soapbox political causes that have been uniquely attracted to coffee like flies to a bug lamp, and featured or “award-winning” irrelevant products — such as java jackets (just say no to paper cups), the 2008 PR onslaught of the Handpresso (wow, now we can drink crap pod coffee on the go!), and the exhumed resurgence of a PR onslaught for “Red Espresso” (which is no more “espresso” than if I put orange pulp in my espresso machine and called it “Orange Espresso”) after a two year hiatus.

In short: many of the things about the coffee industry I really don’t like and wish would go away. If this is the promise of the so-called “Third Wave” as advertised on the SCAA conference Web site, please drown me now in the undertow.

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

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

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

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While I’ll be checking out Barista Coffee in India, Minneapolis will be hosting this year’s U.S. Barista Championship during the SCAA conference this weekend.

Yesterday, the host city’s hometown paper, the Star Tribune, published a rather lengthy article on the event: The great barista battle is brewing. It’s a story that’s been covered dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. But besides the usual descriptions of contestants’ “espresso cocktails” (specialty drinks), they touched on an interesting point for the industry:

“Caribou, after Starbucks the nation’s second-largest purveyor of coffee in terms of number of stores, is a major sponsor of the conference, yet has no baristas entered in the competition. Why don’t titans like Starbucks and Caribou participate?”

It’s a great question. The article quotes the new SCAA president, Mark Inman, who suggests that the barista championship is an underground cult and that the big, deep-pocketed coffee pushers are casing out the event before getting more involved. But that’s as much a load of crap as the self-serving “Third Wave” platitudes on the conference Web site.

Starbucks’ and Caribou’s Public Humiliation Championship 2008 — presented by Krups

Sure, according to Mr. Inman, Starbucks and Caribou should “have the resources to hire and train the best talent in the industry and sweep the competitions.” But it’s not because “they choose not to expose themselves to this arena”. What big corporation doesn’t want free PR and employees who can boast national awards? Particularly Starbucks these days, who are desperate to claim some kind of coffee quality relevance after selling their souls and taking the highway to fast-food hell.

Mr. Inman is being rather disingenuous — he knows better than that. Krups is once again sponsoring the competition, afterall — a company that profited for decades selling an armada of landfill-bound home espresso machines. The reason Starbucks and Caribou don’t participate is because they are incapable of participating and they are afraid of the embarrassment when that fact publicly comes to light.

The No Espresso Left Behind Act

The best baristas in the country are not lured to work for the big chains to prefect their craft and their love of coffee. And even if they were, Starbucks’ espresso delivery system™ would put their baristas behind equipment and supplies that place them at an extreme competitive disadvantage: no barista trained on a push-button Verismo or Mastrena machine, using pre-packaged beans purchased in bulk supply for chain consistency, would have a chance against the competition.

The truth is that Starbucks and Caribou don’t want an event to prove to the public how woefully inadequate their coffee standards are — especially when compared to the level of competition that comes to these championships. If millions of their customers realized how much coffee quality they were being cheated out of at $4 a pop, it would be a boon for many independent coffeeshops and it would scuttle corporate coffee with long-lasting damage.

Big corporate coffee may not be that great, but they’re not so stupid as to give away their dirty secrets. The coffee quality strategy of major chains like Starbucks and Caribou isn’t at the high end of the scale — i.e., to provide the best coffee possible served by their most talented staff. Instead, their strategies are focused at the low end — i.e., how to best elevate the worst coffee made among all their chain stores using the least-skilled staff available to them.

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Before we start reviewing the espresso in India, it’s about time we wrap things up on our recent coffee excursion to Hawaii’s Big Island. Hawaii is the only coffee-growing state of the Union (as they say: sorry, Puerto Rico is a territory), which makes it a uniquely American place to both sample the local espresso and visit coffee farms. Hawaii also gives us the opportunity to bore you with vacation photos, which we will spread liberally throughout this post.

The last time we were on the Big Island, Hurricane Katrina was unfolding its tragedy around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005. While it made for riveting television news drama, things back in the mainland U.S. seem so far away from here that it might as well have been on the moon.

But what also gives you a sense of being on the moon are some of the locals. Besides the Polynesian and European immigrants to the area from hundreds of years ago, and besides the throngs of ankle-free tourists from the mainland, Hawaii seems to have attracted residents in the past few decades of some of the more…unusual mainland castoffs. Many haole Hawaiian residents look like contestants (refugees?) from 1970s game shows like “Matchgame ‘75” or “Password” who fled the set and used their meager winnings as down payments on run-down Hawaiian condos. (You can recognize them by their leathery, over-tanned, sea-turtle-like skin — sporting hairstyles not seen since the original “Brady Bunch” filmed on these islands.)

Where the Coffee Grows on Trees

Hawaii may be famous for its Kona estate coffees, but the much wetter, eastern side of the Big Island is also home to many fertile, less famous coffee farms that grow Puna, Ku’a, and Hamakua estate coffees (read our post on the Hilo Coffee Mill). What’s interesting is to contrast the differences terroir brings to the coffee, and the Big Island has enough variations in terroir to make you feel you’re on a Hawaiian beach, on a cattle ranch in Montana Big Sky country, in an Australian Eucalyptus forest, in a tropical rain forest, or on Himalayan foothills — all within an hour’s drive of each other.

Visiting a couple of Kona coffee farms in March (Greenwell Farms and Fike Farms Coffee), the coffee trees were just starting to bloom between seasons. But you still can tour the washing, drying, processing, and production facilities as harvested cherries are brought in as imports. At farms set up for the coffee tourists, such as Greenwell Farms, you can sample many variations of the local product.

Where Espresso Best Comes from Overseas

The Big Island has a lot to rightfully be proud of in their local coffee. Sure, some critics will say that they grow a great product but not for the expense. But sustainable coffee growing with sustainable wages by the local cost of living standard doesn’t come at a discount.

The ubiquitous espresso beverage bug has not passed over these islands. Unfortunately, the local pride in Hawaiian beans has lead to many cafés serving Hawaiian-only espresso blends. This is like visiting Italy or Australia for their French press coffee — the reverse side of the argument we made against a singular approach of coffee appreciation through the Clover brewer.

Here’s where we like to break from theme: the best espresso in the area is typically made with anything but Hawaiian beans, such as the espresso at the Hilo Coffee Mill. (Similarly, I may have had Don Ho and Polynesian drum songs on my mp3 player, but I inevitably listened most to the ear-damaging sounds of “Luau” by Drive Like Jehu.)

But sampling some of the local stuff in a French press can be sublime. Many of the better Big Island restaurants offer a coffee menu featuring Kona beans from various local estates. A French press of Harens Old Tree Estate at Merriman’s, for example, was one of the best coffee experience I’ve ever had. Soon afterwards I had memorized the Hawaiian phrase, “E ‘olu’olu ‘oe, makemake au i ka kope“, or “Please, I’d like some coffee”.

We conclude with a sampling of a few Big Island espresso ratings:

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One of the worst kept secrets on this site is our disdain for paper cups — and the places that insist upon them. Sure, some of our beef is with living in a disposable culture. But if you’re going to offer us some of the freshest coffee beans around, have it carefully roasted to perfection, serve it by skilled baristas, and then charge us $1.65 for the experience — why make us feel like we’re taking a pregnancy test down at the free clinic?

(We don’t even want to contemplate the possibility of espresso consumers that would willingly ask for such an experience. We’re clearly in denial here.)

Last Friday, The Daily Hype blog visually compared the experience of what you get when ordering “one espresso, please” at a typical San Francisco café (a Tully’s) and at a Swiss hotel (the Café Gourmet in Zürich): The Daily Hype: FOODHYPE: One Espresso, Please. The former looks like something spat out of a vending machine. The latter came with “a sterling silver tray with paper doilies, the cup, saucer and cream pitcher in china, a real spoon (also sterling silver), a sweet (coconut macaroons were on offer this day), and a small glass of water”.

Sure, in their respective nations, the latter experience will set you back three times as much as the “economy” version (though less if you tip). But let’s be serious. These days, a Swiss franc can buy most of Vermont, whereas the U.S. dollar won’t even get you a tourist photo taken with a yodeler in lederhosen.

UPDATE: April 4, 2008
And if adults drinking coffee out of cups designed for the birthday parties of four-year-olds wasn’t bad enough, we may soon see cups suggestive of toddlers. According to KRON-4 news today, the planned installation of Peet’s Coffee kiosks in BART stations may make Bay Area adults regress even further to no-spill “sippy cups” for drinking their coffee: BART May Allow Adults to Drink Coffee on Trains from Sippy Cups. No word yet on whether drinking coffee out of baby bottles is the next developing trend.

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With Spring upon us, that means it’s time for the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC): ‘Attention to every detail’ at Berkeley barista contest - San Jose Mercury News. Starting this past Friday and ending today (check out their photo album), the 2008 WRBC performs a time-honored ritual to select a barista champ representing our region to send to the nationals, the U.S. Barista Championship (USBC), to be held in Minneapolis this May.

The WRBC is the biggest of the nation’s ten regionals and includes competitive baristas from California and Hawaii. This year they even drew in a couple of competitors from Seattle’s Zoka Coffee.

But the big question was whether Coffee Klatch’s (San Dimas, CA) Heather Perry, the WRBC’s “Iron Barista” of the past several years, could be unseated from her usual first place finish. Last year, Heather defended her WRBC title yet again, went on to win the 2007 U.S. Barista Championship (a feat she also accomplished in 2003), and then placed second in the 2007 World Barista Championship (to the UK’s James Hoffman).

But there was more at stake than just Heather’s streak. After spending a few years in Petaluma (where we reviewed the 2006 WRBC), this year’s WRBC moved to downtown Berkeley. And this year there were more seminars, training opportunities, and awards.

Berkeley, we have a problem…

Many baristas and coffee fanatics in the Bay Area were enthusiastic about the WRBC’s choice of a new location and venue — including us. But when we attended today’s competition finals, we found both negatives as positives with the switch.

The good

• Location, location, location — A block off of BART? In downtown Berkeley? In a town where Alfred Peet started his specialty bean and leaf business back in 1966?
• An upper balcony, for viewing the competition from above — The Gaia Arts Center provided the public with more and better angles to view the competition.
• Video projection — And where Gaia’s upper balcony views weren’t enough, the WRBC used video cameras and two projection screens to zoom in on the action — providing detailed, hands-level views to many attendees.
• The Clover brewer at the 4th Machine — Introduced for the first time at the WRBC, just in time for Starbucks to buy them out, some area roasters featured Cup-of-Excellence-quality coffee. Maybe these machines have little place in a barista competition per se, but they have good company around coffee lovers everywhere.
• Merchandising — Every event planner needs to raise a little cash to keep operations going and improve the event (especially at this price: free). The WRBC seems to have expanded beyond the T-shirt offerings and is now hawking espresso cups, cappuccino cups, tampers, shot glasses, etc. All of which seemed to be doing a brisk business at the entrance.

The bad

• Cramped facilities — Despite the location and the upper balcony, the facilities themselves seemed woefully inadequate. The space was too small, and crowds packed in the main competition area so much that some attendees had to fan themselves from the build-up of body heat. People crowded the stairs leading to the upper balcony just to find space for a better view.
• No barrier between the competition area and the 4th Machine — “Kitchen stadium” (to use an Iron Chef term) was always at the mercy of the noise and distractions coming from all of the socializing by the 4th Machine — where attendees lined up for a free espresso, cappuccino, or Clover-brewed coffee. You couldn’t hear the baristas nor the emcees over the din.
• No press box, no sponsored booths — The WRBC isn’t a conference. Or is it? There already are speakers, trainings, etc. But if this competition expects the media coverage it craves, it needs to think bigger. That will irritate many die-hard, DIY baristas as “too corporate” — the event still has the strong feel of their private, exclusive club or party. But coffee is also a business — it must decide to either continue to play coy with the real world, and favor their own anti-corporate Hipsters in its own private sandbox, or it has to reach out to play with and compete against the big boys in order to be taken more seriously.

The ugly

• Is there a steady cam in the house? — While the use of video projection was a plus, unfortunately very little of it was useful. Perhaps the cameramen had too many espresso shots from the 4th Machine to hold anything still, but we couldn’t help but feel we were watching The Blair Witch Project turned on to coffee.
• The emcee — Maybe it’s just impossible to replicate the coffee street cred, public speaking skills, and infectious enthusiasm of Barefoot’s Andy Newbom as when he emceed the 2006 WRBC. But emcee Sarah Allen was not terribly dynamic nor engaging in her role. Coincidentally, Ms. Allen is the editor of Barista Magazine — a magazine subscription we’ve recently let expire because, well, as much as we like the subject matter, we find the writing to be rather poor at best. (For example, most articles from the far corners of the world are activity logs rather than actual writing. With the exception of Ritual’s Gabe Boscana and a few others, good espresso artists aren’t always good writers. Public speaking isn’t far behind.)
• The other emcee — While we did not have the privilege of hearing the other emcee for the event — Jana Oppenheimer, a regional sales manager for Franke — having a sales rep from Franke emcee a barista competition makes about as much sense as having an SF Muni official emcee a NASCAR event. La Marzocco GS/3 distrubution included. But given that Krups is once again sponsoring the USBC in May, this is one of the prices of going corporate while still keeping the event free to the public.

And the winner is…

Of the six finalists, half was a posse representing Intelligentsia’s Silverlake (LA) location. But in the end, the “unthinkable” happened. The final results?:

• 1st Place: Chris Baca of Ritual Coffee Roasters, SF
• 2nd Place: Kyle Glanville of Intelligentsia, Silverlake
• 3rd Place: Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch, San Dimas

Congratulations to all winners, all finalists, and all contestants…

UPDATE: April 4, 2008
Today NPR’s The California Report aired a radio segment on the 2008 WRBC, interviewing Kyle Glanville and Chris Baca: KQED | The California Report | Crowning the Best Barista.

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We’ve long lamented over being served good coffee in ridiculous paper cups. But not everyone is coffee obsessive enough to review most of the espresso shots available in the city — and particularly the expectedly nasty ones. But today the Journal of Consumer Research published results from a study that asked, “Does coffee in a flimsy cup taste worse than coffee in a more substantial cup?”: Study Shows Touch Does Affect Flavor - Science - redOrbit. The answer to that question was “yes”.

In a series of four experiments, the researchers discovered that people’s judgments of a drink’s taste and quality were influenced by the container in which it was served. The firmness of the cup was apparently a big indicator of quality and a better perceived taste, with people most sensitive to touch being influenced the most by the choice of cups.

To everyone who insists on serving their coffee in paper cups designed for the birthday parties of four-year-olds: stick that in your Solo and shake it.

UPDATE: March 22, 2008
“That morning shot of espresso probably tastes better in an Italian, thick-walled cup than in a burn-your-fingers paper one,” opens this L.A. Times article on the same study: How’s that coffee feel? - Los Angeles Times.

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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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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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Promising news for anyone who takes the gamble of ordering prepared coffee in restaurants: the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) has recently announced a partnership with Durham, NC’s Counter Culture Coffee to develop a coffee curriculum: newsobserver.com | Coffee partnership forms. (Press release from last week.)

Unlike the closer-to-home CCA (California Culinary Academy) — which has made overtures to become the “Draw Tippy the Turtle” of cooking schools by reportedly whoring itself out to every Food TV watcher/wannabe chef with a checking account — the CIA is held in the highest esteem among America’s top culinary pros. We still feel that many notable chefs suffer a kind of hubris: that demonstrating a mastery in cuisine naturally confers an equivalent expertise with anything put into your mouth (i.e., coffee — let’s keep it clean here, folks!). The fact that the CIA is giving it serious treatment is a real step forward given how far coffee quality standards at restaurants have to improve.

Now we’ve expressed our ambivalence over some of Counter Culture’s Fair-Trade-club-to-the-head marketing, even if their heart is in the right place. (And the next simpleton who says that an argument against Fair Trade is an argument for poverty should be clubbed in the head.) We have even questioned their habit of shoehorning “coffee cupping” into some perverse wine-tasting proxy; even Peet’s has the sense to offer “Comparative Tastings” instead. But by all accounts, they sure do know their beans. Unfortunately they didn’t exist when I lived in Durham briefly back in 1991. (Time to hit my Linden Terrace crew up on my ghettro for a kilo, yo.)

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