Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

It’s that time of year again for Consumer Reports to come to our collective rescue and save us from wasting our hard-earned money on bad coffee: Colombian coffee champ is unseated in our new Ratings. Except we’ve come to the conclusion that Consumer Reports does more harm than good in the name of good coffee.

Of course, We’re no strangers to mocking Consumer Reports‘ odd foray into the world of consumables. Their Web site literally keeps us in stitches whenever we read things like, “If you’re looking for information about coffee, Consumer Reports is your best resource” alongside teasers hawking their reviews of clothes dryers, dishwashers, microwave ovens, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners.

It feels a lot like asking your muffler shop to recommend a gastroenterologist. Their coffee reviews even fall into the “Home & Garden” section of their Web site, where bold type tells us to get ratings for “flooring, windows, lightbubs & more” — the things we clearly worry most about when seeking good coffee. Just throw in lawn mower reviews and we’ll know we’re in the right place.

Setting aside for a moment the dissimilarities between a kitchen appliance and something you eat, despite Consumer Reports‘ consumer advocacy and the socialist causes of its organizational parent, Consumers Union, their editorial approach towards coffee ironically encourages a great deal of consumer, social, and environmental regression. By focusing exclusively on what we call the “ghetto” market of mass-produced, minimal-profit-margin coffees, Consumer Reports is effectively dismissing higher quality coffees — coffees that stand to not only raise the bar for consumer taste buds, but also to improve the social, economic, and environmental conditions for where these coffees might be sustainably grown. Their reviews don’t encourage aspirational coffees at value-oriented prices; rather, they keep their readers constrained to lowest-common-denominator office coffee. I mean… K-Cups? Really?

Now it’s certainly not in Consumer Reports‘ agenda to promote expensive luxury coffees. But when it comes to automobiles, for example, they don’t exclusively review Hyundais while overlooking BMWs, Jaguars, and Volvos. Given how they treat coffee, it’s as if consumers get a public dialog about the best brand of canned green beans — all the while denying the existence of the better quality, and better environmental practices, behind the fresh produce variety. Or, as another analogy, it makes us believe that if Consumer Reports were to review wines, the only wines they’d promote would come in boxes.

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California’s Santa Barbara County is a lot like the rest of America when it comes to coffee: it should face a tribunal for atrocities committed against the human taste bud. What makes these many crimes particularly heinous are the various local media outlets in these communities that celebrate certain local coffeehouses as some of the region’s “best” — and yet these examples turn out to be foul enough to give any self-respecting Italian or Australasian coffee fan the dry heaves. Baseline standards are completely lacking, and the local populace is kept deaf, dumb, blind, and tasteless from realizing things could be any better for them.

Not to devalue the many efforts of great coffeeshops to make their brews with exquisite care and precision. But in this day and age of quality coffee awareness, information, and access, there simply is no excuse for any community within a civilized First World nation to have local coffee standards so pathetic as to hold up a cup of mass-produced, push-button Starbucks as the gold standard. Sometimes we honestly don’t understand why entire counties simply do not rise up and riot in the streets over the horrible coffee to which they are routinely subjected.

With Starbucks listed as a runner-up finalist on SantaBarbara.com’s “Best of” list, Santa Barbara barely salvaged some of its culinary dignity with its recognition of The French Press. Because The French Press makes some great coffee that’s otherwise unheard of in this part of the country. And because naming Taco Bell as the finalist for Santa Barbara’s “Best Mexican” would be no less ridiculous.

Opening in 2009, this Upper State coffeehouse puts most others in Santa Barbara County to shame. A sort of hang-out for the biking set, you can recognize this café by the gathering of young people on the sidewalk in front. They offer a few outdoor café tables and chairs under the entryway, but much of the seating is inside — zinc-topped café tables located along and past a long hallway of artwork that runs along the service area. The service area itself is decorated with painted art skateboards.

Using a shiny two-group La Marzocco GB/5 and Mazzer grinders, they pull shots of Verve (Sermon and other blends) into black ACF cups with red saucers. It comes with a lightly mottled medium brown crema with lighter heat spots.

The espresso here has the tease of a brightness bomb, but without the full-swing delivery. This results in an acidic cup with some balance coming from the chocolate and pungent spice end. They’re also notable at milk-frothing: it’s deliberate and not overly abundant. Their caffè macchiato has a great chocolate flavor with substantial milk density. And of course, they also serve their namesake French press coffee.

All towns should aspire to have at least one coffee place this good. It’s criminal that this is still the exception rather than the rule in this country.

Read the review of The French Press in Santa Barbara, CA.

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The story of coffee at Specialty’s Café & Bakery reflects the story of San Francisco’s consumer tastes for retail coffee.

In the beginning, there was Faema + Prebica — and it was weak

A decade ago, Specialty’s ran a small chain of bakery/cafés with coffee service areas. Some locations, like this one on Pine St., even dedicated a coffee bar area for customers during their morning caffeine rush. Using older Faema machines and Prebica beans (one of “The Big Four” as part of Sara Lee), they pulled espresso as double-shot defaults that, while not terrible, weren’t good either.

Then something weird and unexpected happened. In the Fall of 2003 — years before Blue Bottle even existed in San Francisco, other than as the coffee force behind Frog Hollow Farm at the just-then-opened Ferry Building Marketplace — Specialty’s replaced their Prebica supplies with Intelligentsia coffee. As longtime fans of the then-Chicago-only roaster, we were rather ecstatic. We saw the introduction of Intelligentsia as the first real escalation of what we then coined “the SF coffee wars“. This despite the fact that virtually no one in San Francisco knew anything about Intelligentsia at the time.

Specialty’s got their bean sourcing right. These were, after all, the same guys who were providing beans to Canadian national barista champions at Caffè Artigiano in Vancouver at the time. But they shot themselves in the foot, quality-wise, by replacing all their semi-automatic Faema machines for push-button, super-automatic Franke machines. While this gave Specialty’s greater consistency and allowed unskilled employees to operate their espresso machines, it completely dumbed down their coffee service and squandered any quality advantages they had using Intelligentsia coffee in the first place. We experienced one anomaly where they produced “Top 20″-level espresso, but revisits proved that to be a fluke.

Intelligentsia S.F.?

As San Francisco coffee snobbery has been on the rise, most recently Specialty’s opted to up their game another level. At this sort of “mothership” of the local Specialty’s chains, they’ve gone all-out with a full-service, manually crafted coffee bar. How often do you see places weaned off super-automatic machines and back on to “big pants” espresso machines? Not often enough, as today this location sports not only a shiny red, dual-group La Marzocco FB/70 machine and a Hario V-60 pour-over bar (plus various Intelligentsia Coffee offerings for retail sale), but they also brandish glowing Intelligentsia signage where even the Specialty’s brand name takes a back seat. It’s as if Specialty’s became more serious about coffee the more their customers became more serious about coffee.

Unlike when this location first opened with a dark interior and nice floors that looked of cherry wood, they have since brightened up the space with lighting and a more modern layout. Still, there are long lines at lunch, and paying for a coffee sometimes may require you to wind through the whole line (instead of short-cutting to a dedicated coffee service line). Inside, there’s counter window seating — with one side overlooking the sidewalk and the other overlooking courtyard seating on its Century St. side (formerly home to a Starbucks hutch and then Abigails).

Their switch from their Faema machines to Frankes made them dull (all that factory-produced sameness and uniformity) but more consistent: a mellow espresso with a moderately rich, medium brown crema, plus an herbal/spice flavor. The new, semi-automatic FB/70 has raised their game, but the consistency isn’t there yet. They’re still not maximizing the result, given all the pedigree going into the cup. It lacks some flavor potency and breadth: largely centering around an earthy pungency, despite the fresh-looking, medium brown mottled crema and white ACF Intelligentsia-branded cups (formerly paper only).

They have come so far, and yet still have much to go. Given the trendlines and directions for one of the more forward-thinking small chains in the area, you have to place bets on the coffee getting better more than it is likely to decline. Even so, with the occasional rumor of Intelligentsia opening an owned-and-operated location in S.F., what are the odds that Intelligentsia would do to Specialty’s what Blue Bottle Coffee did to Frog Hollow Farm several years ago?

Read the updated review of Specialty’s Café & Bakery on Pine St.

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For as long as I’ve lived in San Francisco — over two decades now — I’ve lived with laments over the sorry state of local newspapers. Living in a large Victorian shared among Berkeley graduate students many years ago, I grew accustomed to a daily house copy of one of the Timeses (i.e., either the New York or L.A. varietals) for serious news reading. The SF Chronicle, on the other hand, was always relegated to local movie times and for lining bird cages.

Fast forward to today, and my how those once-greats have fallen. The New York Times may have performed a bit of peacock strutting last year, proclaiming, “No, New York City coffee is good. We really, really mean it this time!” But the NY Times can be forgiven compared to the sloth-like L.A. Times, who came out with this special feature just today, in freaking 2011: More refined coffee culture in L.A. is percolating – latimes.com. This more than a year after L.A.-area baristas — after cleaning up on so many awards at the regional and national barista championships — decided to quit the competition program to give someone else a try for a change.

This is akin to a 1961 L.A. Times article proclaiming that quality baseball has arrived in town — merely two seasons after the L.A. Dodgers had already won the World Series. Even so, the L.A. Times does add some useful listings of regional coffeeshops worth checking out: Specialty coffeeshops in the L.A. area – latimes.com. Plus the obligatory coffee map.

Just please don’t call ‘em “craft”.

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Pardon the sensationalist headline. (Like nobody has ever done that before.) But here’s something from yesterday’s L.A. Weekly on Demitasse, one of the more anticipated new coffeeshops in the L.A. area, that questions/provokes some of the conventional coffee wisdom of the month: Demitasse Will Not Have Pourover Coffee + Other Twists on the Third Wave Coffee Shop – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink.

So what’s different here? Anticipated “Third Wave” (ugh) coffeeshop openings have been fodder for the local presses for several years now, so it only makes sense that each might attempt to differentiate themselves from the hoard with a slightly different angle now and then. But what we have with Demitasse is yet another coffeeshop identifying itself (at least in the article) more by what it doesn’t do than by what it does do. And what it doesn’t do is pour-over coffee.

Or does it? Per the article, clearly they’re fans of the Clever full-immersion coffee dripper — which some circles might say isn’t pour-over coffee by only a slight technicality. But the reason the owner, Bobak Roshan, gives for not offering pour-over coffee is telling: “Roshan adamantly is against the method as far too dependent on the skills and utmost attention of the barista, too often to the detriment of the coffee drinker looking to have the cleanest, tastiest cup possible.”

There you have it. The method requires too much concentrated attention, for too long, of an easily distracted barista in a retail environment. There is some truth to this, even suggesting a bit of retail reality folly in the nascent Brewers Cup. Of the few coffeeshops that have offered vac pot coffee over the years, most would only do so after the morning caffeine rush-hour. And yet vac pot brewing requires much less constant attention than pour-over brewing. And then there’s the reality that the biggest expense in retail coffee is labor.

Which isn’t to say that pour-over brewing is going away anytime soon. Despite the many efforts to convince us otherwise, retail pour-over brewing has been around for decades. However, this might suggest that many coffeeshops are starting to learn the dismissed conventional wisdom behind the once-novel-now-passé Clover brewer: that individually hand-crafted, manual brewing processes make a great cup of coffee, but they fail to scale in a retail environment supporting any kind of volume at a competitive price.

Now if only we understood the semi-conventional wisdom behind using Equator Estate Coffees — despite only a single notable retail example of it in the face of dozens of underachievers.

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This month’s Wired magazine published a piece on this year’s Cup of Excellence (CoE) competition in Colombia: Sip, Spit, Grade: Coffee Experts Crown Colombia’s Best Beans | Magazine. Opening with the Q-grading Alberto Trujillo and Intelligentsia‘s Geoff Watts, the article describes the Cup of Excellence process and a little of its short history. It also mentions last year’s Finca La Loma “scandal” involving some Caturra for Castillo varietal slight-of-hand.

The article then belabors the decidedly old art of coffee cupping (am I reading Wired or the Smithsonian Magazine?) We’ve had our past issues with Wired magazine’s editorial choices. As a magazine noted for its futuristic and tech-obsessed bombast, we’re puzzled as to why something as decidedly old and low-tech as a coffee cupping somehow makes the grade for a feature story. The article cites chief CoE judge, Paul Songer, saying he “believes that coffee gourmandism has the potential to rival oenophilia’s cultish obsessiveness.” And yet we’ve never seen a Wired article devoted to wine tasting.

Perhaps a clue as to why Wired‘s editorial board continues to see coffee as relevant to their magazine can be found in a quote from Susie Spindler, the executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, who developed to CoE format: “Cup of Excellence has completely changed the infrastructure of how coffees are sold.” It has certainly changed quality coffee marketing and how the precious, limited stocks of CoE beans are sold. But given their meager supply compared to the overall coffee market and the consumer demand for coffee, how many coffee consumers make Cup of Excellence coffees a regular habit?

However, the most poignant part of the article comes at the end. Colombian coffee farmer, Arnulfo Leguizamo, celebrates winning this grand national competition — something that respected experts have called “the Oscars of the coffee world” as recently as a few months ago. But you won’t find designer dresses, red carpets, and limousines at this competition. Mr. Leguizamo’s response to winning the title? “Now I can pay my debts.”

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It amazes us that the Internetz still hum with “serious” food-obsessed people writing about cowboy coffee. To us, that’s a bit like going to the Mayo Clinic Web site to read about cowboy surgery — involving a bottle of whiskey, a hacksaw, and stick to bite down on.

But if you insist on making coffee under harsh conditions, we are more impressed with these two recent Canadian exports of how-to coffee videos.

The first concerns making coffee in a field of Afghan insurgents. Be forewarned that this how-to video contains more expletives than the movie 44 Inch Chest. “Step one, adopt a firing position and make sure there are no fucking insurgents around. Nothing fucks-up good coffee like fucking insurgents.”

For more family-friendly viewing, and offensive use of the laugh track, here’s Canuck legend Red Green demonstrating the merits of lawnmower coffee.

Changes the meaning of the term “coffee bagging,” doesn’t it? Though I think we sampled this coffee method once at a Happy Donuts.

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A couple weeks ago, a regular reader made a very relevant comment on our last post: “You have become very negative. When was the last positive post?” They were completely on target, and we have noticed this trend in ourselves for months now. (See: Coffee Commenter Archetype #10.) The reasons are worth a post here.

Now we’ve always been prone to sarcasm and even a certain iconoclastic streak. But that alone is insufficient to explain why we’ve even caught ourselves asking, “Are we being too negative all the time?” before posting our next missive. After all, it’s no mystery that the ebullient, sunny, and awe-inspiring posts/tweets/viral-Internet-nuggets-du-jour are what motivate people to read and share.

A rising tide lifts all boats, but what if there are simply more boats?

We’ve come to a sort of conclusion that, since we started this blog in 2005, the quality coffee world has changed a lot — and mostly for the better. The number of places capable of reaching the highest quality standards have proliferated, reaching even what were traditionally coffee’s quality wastelands (e.g., suburbia, New York City, even Paris, etc.).

However, over the same time, the best retail places for coffee have improved little over the years. It may be our humble opinion, but the absolute quality level of coffee has plateaued. This suggests that much of the perceived improvement in quality coffee over recent years was primarily driven by more coffeeshops “catching up” to what the best ones had been successfully doing for years now: emulating their good practices, their quality sourcing, their commitment to training, etc. The stagnation in our highest espresso scores also supports this hypothesis.

In other words, many retail coffeeshops exploited a quantum leap in quality that’s now very difficult to reproduce. With starry-eyed talk about “Fourth Wave” coffee and the like, much of the industry seems to be holding out for the promise of yet another, equivalent quantum leap — the likes of which we will probably never see again. If you grew up eating nothing but canned vegetables all your life, fresh organic produce might seem like something descended from the gods with endless possibilities. But good luck trying to repeat that level of improvement.

Coffee hasn’t gotten better so much as more people learned how to make it properly.

What happens when quality isn’t a growth market

Thus quality coffee has been stuck in a kind of stasis in many ways. As the supply of great coffeeshops has grown, there’s a rampant copycat mentality among coffeeshops now imitating each other — creating a sort of rigid orthodoxy or dogma that, today, makes screwballs like Philz Coffee seem like radicals. One coffee shop replaces their Clover brewer with Hario V60s, and within months all the sheep follow. Local coffee pros echo each other’s trite Third Wave clichés across the globe in interviews. Monolithic opinions pervade about everything from roasting styles to blends. Purveyors wave the Third Wave flag as if to take full credit for the changing and more discriminating tastes of coffee consumers.

While that’s all been routinized, what’s actually growing is the business of generating hype with little substance to back it up — i.e., promising consumers a similar revolution in coffee every month that it never delivers. That it could never deliver. The business of coffee has grown a lot, and so has the marketing hype, the number of profiteers, and the haze and fog of sales & marketing spin.

Thus we find ourselves needing to (over?)compensate for the hype, needing to shine a brighter light through the haze and fog. We’re sure that makes for a real downer when reading some of our posts of late. Though if you were to follow the tweets coming out of the most recent SCAA conference in Houston last week, bad news seemed like the only news. Even if most of that bad news dealt with climate change, dwindling supplies, rising prices, and an inability to meet anticipated demand.

This is the end (of the beginning)

We wish we were a lot more optimistic rather than pessimistic about today’s state of quality coffee. Ironically, while this year’s US Barista Championship was going on in Houston, we were sipping espresso at Intelligentsia in Chicago — home of last year’s world barista champion, an organizational trophy machine at the USBC, and who was decidedly and notably absent from this year’s competition.

The espresso at the Monadnock location was as good as ever — although (surprise!) no better than usual. They had reconfigured their service counter since our last visit: taking up half the front counter-space now with their Hario V60 pour-over bar. As a bit of a throwback, the forward-thinking Intelligentsia now reminds us of coffeeshops that once prominently featured their pour-over bars back in the 1990s.

Fortunately, we occasionally catch a glimpse of other coffee cultures that have gone their own way ever so slightly, breaking from the monotony of the pack to suggest something unique is still possible. Our recent exposure to the coffee culture in South Africa being one reason to be somewhat upbeat. Perhaps as when punk rock refreshingly broke the tiresome conventions of the progressive 70s rock that preceded it, this shiftless, seemingly listless transition is a necessary step for coffee to bloom and blossom into something diverse and interesting again.

Until then, more of our delight may have to come from the occasional amusing typo, such as a New York start-up offering Mothra’s Day specials in the hopes of becoming the Starbucks of flowers. It’s about time Godzilla had to share some of the love.

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Earlier this week, KRUPS, that bastion of great coffee, announced the winners of their National “Cup O’ Joe Awards”: Revealed: Nation’s best coffee shops – This Just In – Budget Travel. Now if only this announcement had anything legitimately to do with good coffee. Heck, if only KRUPS had anything legitimately to do with good coffee.

Of course, what we really have is one of the oldest tricks in the PR playbook: fabricate some kind of award (the broader the better — for potential distribution), issue your press release, and pray that it gets picked up in your target markets. The technique works, because we’re picking up the story here. Just probably not in the way KRUPS’ marketing department intended.

Over the past 20 years, KRUPS has probably done more to disappoint more home espresso consumers than any other company, and a multitude of American landfills contain much of the evidence. To counter this reputation, KRUPS has resorted to associating itself with “upmarket” coffee — such as years of sponsoring barista championships. Here KRUPS created a new Cup O’ Joe Awards out of thin air to honor the nation’s best coffee places — and to remind consumers to keep filling their landfills with KRUPS coffee equipment (and not just KRUPS waffle makers and deep fryers).

One signature of the fabricated press release award is when the award winners have never heard of it. Another is carpet bombing high density population centers (i.e., home espresso machine consumers) to maximum effect. Thus KRUPS ignores Portland, OR, quality coffee’s Biggie Smalls, while New York City, quality coffee’s Jay-Z, gets awards for each of five boroughs.

And when it comes to the criteria for why one place inches out another in a given market for this coveted award, we learn the criteria involves “mailers, street teams and social media pages.” It’s Battle of the Bands all over again.

From their press release: “Krups USA polled 250 coffee-toting New Yorkers on the streets of each borough to discover their picks for the city’s best sips.” Can you imagine a SCAA barista champion crowned without the use of scoresheets — but instead by some quasi-magical popularity contest involving random street interviews, mailings, and Facebook Likes?

The San Francisco award went to Blue Bottle Coffee, which is hardly unwarranted. But KRUPS awarding the nation’s best coffee shops is a bit like Chef Boyardee awarding America’s best Italian restaurants.

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This has to be one of the most clueless stunts we have ever seen anyone perform in the name of the professional quality coffee trade. Coinciding with the first London Coffee Festival, some ad wizards came up with the genius idea of having 100 UK baristas churn out a Guinness World Record 12,005 espressos in one hour. Worse still, they celebrate this orgy of mass-produced gluttony as if it were an accomplishment rather than an embarassment: Newswire / UK Baristas Smash Aussie World Record At London Coffee Festival 2011 – Beverage/Wine – Allegra Strategies | NewswireToday.

It’s been a long time since we’ve encountered a better definition of the ol’ *facepalm*. Here we have a quality-focused industry of small independents struggling to find relevancy in the face of corporate coffee behemoths such as Starbucks. To those ends, they have turned to the language of artisan coffee, individual pour-overs with an attention to detail, the term “craft coffee,” and flowery, self-congratulating prose about the so-called Third Wave.

Instead, what we get is a competition that honors espresso-making like a factory that mass-produces vats of industrial lubricant. And Lord knows nothing says “quality” like “quantity”. Even better: quantity rushed to the point of setting world records.

Apparently, much of the discredit goes to Jeffrey Young, Managing Director of consultancy Allegra Strategies, who revels at the UK besting Australia in the PR Hall of Shame: “This record is a tremendous achievement and really shows the rest of the world London’s leadership in artisan ‘Third Wave’ coffee culture. London offers best-in-class food and coffee with many visitors coming here to learn from trends in this great city.”

Thank you, London. Apparently someone forgot to mention that the Third Wave is about how you can produce over 140 gallons of espresso in an hour.

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