Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Thanks to a helpful reader who today pointed out this find to us: Just Bottled: “Firelit” Blue Bottle Coffee Liqueur – Ünnecessary Ümlaut. If Starbucks is good enough for the booze bottle, why not Blue Bottle Coffee? Apparently that’s the question asked by the folks behind Firelit, a new coffee liqueur made from Blue Bottle beans.

Just five years ago, Starbucks branded itself with Jim Beam to create its own coffee liqueur. (Curiously, you can no longer find it on the Starbucks Web site.) Back then, a lot of people still thought of Starbucks as a luxury brand rather than a ubiquitous commodity, so slapping on the Starbucks name (supposedly) upped the liqueur’s street cred. Co-branding being such a universal practice in product marketing, the Starbucks name featured no fewer than three times on the front of the bottle.

Fast forward to today, and now we have the Firelit guys seeing an opening with the small-batch and local angle — popular with a number of discriminating consumers these days — leading them to produce a coffee liqueur with Blue Bottle branding. With the Starbucks brand now sitting somewhere just this side of McDonald’s, this move suggests the possibility for more co-branded product marketing using notable small-batch coffee roasters.

Still, we did have to ask ourselves if this story was even coffee-relevant enough to post here. (Including last week’s coffee inhaler story going around everywhere this week.) We haven’t sampled the product, which hits local retail shelves later this week. But once you process great coffee with alcohol and other ingredients and suspend it in a bottle with a shelf life of several years — as opposed to the two week shelf life Blue Bottle requires of their bean resellers — just how much will the choice of beans really matter besides branding?

Hence why we liken this product idea to using your best straight-sipping tequila to make strawberry margarita mix.

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Stirring a bit of the coffee world today is this piece from TIME magazine: Stumptown Coffee vs. Starbucks: Portland, Seattle Rivals – TIME. If Josh Ozersky’s headline of “Is Stumptown the New Starbucks — or Better?” seems oddly familiar, it’s because his article conceptually (and shamelessly) recycled Ethan Epstein’s piece for the New York Press from last June: “Totally Stumped” — an article that lead Eater to run with the headline “Stumped: Is Stumptown This Decade’s Starbucks?” Mr. Ozersky may have won a James Beard Award for food writing, but talk about a strange coincidence.

One major difference, however, is that the TIME article goes all third wave on us. Our years-long annoyance with third wave fiction aside, there’s something outright creepy about mainstream media stumbling cluelessly into social trends years after the fact in an attempt to explain them to us. It made us rethink their headline as, “Is TIME the new 60 Minutes — or Worse?” — given how reading the article made us feel like we were watching Mike Wallace introduce the World Wide Web to a 60 Minutes audience circa 1999. (We may be fans of 60 Minutes, but its track record of reporting on cultural phenomena years after the fact was exceptionally poor.)

In any case, Trish Rothgeb created a mutating monster that must be stopped.

The TIME article also alludes to, but does not deliver on, the Portland vs. Seattle coffee turf wars going on lately. This would have been a much more interesting angle, although it is only a regional (and not national) story, e.g.: A Tale Of Two Cities: Portland’s Coffee Culture Swipes Seattle’s Crown. Could you imagine an amusing piece invoking a comparison with the infamous East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry? With Duane Sorenson playing the role of 2Pac and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz as “Biggie,” The Notorious B.I.G.

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Today’s The Globe and Mail (Toronto) featured an article on the coming growing pains for Vancouver’s Caffè Artigiano: Coffee chain tackles expansion conundrum – The Globe and Mail.

For those unfamiliar, Caffè Artigiano still represents the best espresso shot we’ve ever had — produced by the hands of barista savant, Sammy Piccolo. Pulled in 2003, years before the Third Wave supposedly even existed, it was an abject lesson for how all the espresso-making automation in the world could never replicate Sammy’s quality control. (He tossed out the first two espresso shots he attempted to make for us — aka, sink shots.)

For the seven years since the Canadian Barista Championship has been in operation, Caffè Artigiano has had a virtual lock on the winners. So you have to figure they generally know what they’re doing. The article interviews Kyle Straw, the current Canadian barista champion and the store manager at Caffè Artigiano’s Hornby location/mothership.

Much like its American counterpart and one-time bean supplier, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Caffè Artigiano has grown to a number of cafés in its Vancouver backyard and now seeks more continental expansion. There are currently rumors of future locations in Toronto, Montreal, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Just don’t expect a Starbucks-like expansion at all costs.

Forget the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games next week. We’d go back for Caffè Artigiano. First the 2006 Winter Games in Torino and now Vancouver? We can only say that Sochi, Russia has a lot of great espresso to live up to for the 2014 Winter Games.

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Has it really been a couple weeks since our last third wave rant? A few years after we thought this topic was dead and buried, lately newbie third wave coffee articles have been cropping up in local newspapers like teenage vampire profiteers. London, Oakland, and now Vancouver: Indie cafés perfectly poised to quench coffee aficionados’ palates – The Globe and Mail. What makes this incarnation worth pointing out is that it attempts to colorize the progression of coffee standards as an independent café vs. chain store debate.

Helping to cement our theory that the phrase “third wave” has been co-opted exclusively for marketing purposes, the article makes no mention of coffee consumers as part of this “third wave” — only coffee purveyors. And as usual, all this talk of distinct coffee waves seems oblivious to an outside world where “Himalayan rock salt” has become part of grocery store vernacular. We’ll even overlook that the article’s cited Piccolo brothers have been making outstanding coffee since a decade ago.

But what’s different here are suggestions that small mom-and-pop coffee houses, the ones that were nearly exterminated at the hands of big coffee chain stores, are making something of a comeback.

Don’t call it a comeback, I been here for years

We see things quite differently. Rather than being about indie-vs-chain coffee shops, this is just the natural progression of a continuous rise in consumer expectations for coffee quality. Many mom-and-pop coffee shops died at the hands of big chains because they sat on their laurels and languished from poor quality and poor management. All it took was a coffee chain that thought a little about improving their coffee quality and consistency — while also replacing the flea market furniture and cleaning up their bathrooms — to put many mom-and-pops out of business.

But as these coffee chains grew (and grew and grew), their quality could only plateau at mass production standards. And in extreme cases such as Starbucks, their quality even declined as their business volume and number of employees ballooned out of control. This opened a major gap for a handful of independents to raise the quality bar further.

But here’s the major catch: do not mistake the independent status of these notable new cafés as a revival of the mom-and-pop coffee shop. If anything, opening an independent café is more challenging than ever. In fact, the only way that new independent cafés can remain viable in this environment is to differentiate themselves through higher quality standards.

In our espresso ratings for San Francisco over the past few years, we’ve noticed the great number of new cafés that typically break in the Top 40 rankings. However, we also noticed very few new café openings that rank below that. The reason being that the big coffee chains will chew up and spit out any new independent café that does not differentiate itself with some of the best coffee out there.

As chain coffee stories continue to expand (e.g., Peet’s Coffee & Tea has grown new outlets like a metastasized cancer over the past 2-3 years), the notable rise of these quality independent cafés is less about a better business environment for independents and more about the fact that they honestly have no other choice to survive.

UPDATE: Dec. 29, 2009
Today’s Toronto Star also published an article on the rise of local independent coffee houses: Grinding out their own niche – thestar.com. However, contrary to our opinions above, they suggest the Toronto independent café market is currently growing by 20-30 cafés each year.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on without some additional numbers. For example, the ubiquitous Canadian coffee & donuts chain, Tim Hortons, is still growing in Toronto — so it’s not clear if these independents are yet eating into the market for chain coffee shops.

You also need a sense for the city’s baseline of annual independent coffee shop openings and closings before, say, a decade ago. And regional markets will also differ based upon their saturation and customer demand for higher-end coffee.

In any case, let’s not forget that the leap to a Starbucks-sized megachain started with independents that quickly grew to the size of our current day Blue Bottle or Ritual Roaster chains.

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Ever since Starbucks announced their outright purchase of the Clover brewer supply, it was a mere matter of time before replacement filter-coffee-brewing setups were anointed by the coffeeshop elite. From the Chicagoist today, at least Intelligentsia seems settled on the Hario ceramic coffee dripper and kettle: More Change Brewing at Intelligentsia – Chicagoist.

Ah, yes. The Clover brewer: what got everyone excited about filter coffee again — with countless citations of its $11,000 MSRP price tag that not a single café (at least to our knowledge) actually paid — was suddenly reclassified as “Oh-so-second-wave” by proxy of ownership. So some coffee shops are turning to a Japanese twist on the old Melitta bar. (And yes, this is the same Japanese company behind the siphon brewing systems you can find at Blue Bottle Cafe, for example.)

Another upside to the Hario? The home version of this game show doesn’t require car payments and dedicated plumbing — so your favorite café doesn’t have to tell you, “Don’t try this at home, folks.”

Call us a little jaded, but we haven’t jumped the bandwagon on these just yet — despite how much they have permeated the coffeesphere since Black Wednesday. But in due time, even with so much coffee to consume, we’ll be sure to give one a test drive. At Chicago’s Millennium Park Intelligentsia if nothing else…

UPDATE: Oct. 13, 2009
It seems that even Starbucks is getting in on the act of phasing out the Clover brewer. According to boston.com today, Starbucks is removing Clover machines from seven of its Boston area stores: Starbucks tweaks test of Clover brewing system – Daily Business Update – The Boston Globe.

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Online social media is hardly new. Online BBSes have existed since the 1970s. Even yours truly geeked out for a bit on packet radio in the 1980s. But today we have reached a sort of critical mass on the Internet where, like sex and drugs in the 1960s, “everyone is doing it”.

Except that “everyone” includes a myriad of business entities — not just people. This includes coffee shops. All of which is part of the modern wonder of social media marketing, where each of us is told that we must excel at social networking or die trying.

Call us digital dinosaurs, but we want our cafés to be focused on great coffee — not on trying to be interactive media companies. That thought hit us like a ton of bricks when we stumbled across this post today: Starbuck’s Joins Flickr and 10 Reasons Why As a Photographer I’m a Fan | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection.

Harking back to an old post here with the cranky grandpa rant of, “Listen, barista, I’ll take my joe talk straight,” we came up with the title for our post today.

Oh Starbucks, will you be my friend?

To explain today’s inspirational post, an excerpt should suffice:

I was pleased today to learn that Starbuck’s has joined Flickr. I’ve been a big Starbucks fan for a while and have personally consumed thousands of their beverages over the years. It is great to see them join Flickr where they can participate in social media with photographers.

Blog posts oozing with that level of brand affection/sucking up are a retail marketer’s wet dream. They can’t pay people to write this stuff. Well, actually they can — just that legally they now need to disclose it.

And while Starbucks‘ marketing department recently crowed over reports suggesting their brand ranked highest at social media engagement, other social media experts have viewed their efforts as a business failure.

But next, combine this consumer fanboydom with a new business wisdom, still reaching for conventionality, that suggests Twitter (or shouldn’t that be spelled “Twittr”?) could be used to promote independent coffee shops — generating all sorts of pent-up demand for mediocre coffee that never existed prior to all these pedestrian cafés creating Twitter accounts.

Social media diseases and their discontents

So here’s the problem. All this social media stuff is superficial fun and games when you’re catching up on your dog sitter’s new skin rash. But why should a business — let alone one that manages to follow 7,349 others on Twitter — be part of my social network?

Every day, multiple businesses ask us to follow their Twitter feed, to get excited about their Facebook fan page, to friend them on MySpace. You can’t listen to a commercial radio station anymore (yes, they still exist) without them telling you to follow them on each and every one of these services. (Ironically, radio is apparently not one of these services.)

It took me a decade to stop from doubling over in laughter whenever high-profile talking heads were asked to stumble through aitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-double-yew-double-yew-double-yew-dot-slash-dot-dot-slash on the air. Now whenever I hear the litany of social media service options read out for each business, I feel like I’m listening to the legalese disclaimers of some anti-depressive medication advert.

It it called “social networking” if it’s not with another person?

It’s bad enough that we’ve given corporations the same legal rights as individual citizens. But look, Starbucks — you’re a corporation, you’re not my “friend”. And yes, that even goes for my favorite neighborhood café.

I don’t want your RSS feed of mindless chit-chat fed into every pore of my existence. I don’t need to have 47 TV sets each tuned to every message-spouting orifice of your business, desperately afraid that I might miss out on one of them.

Here’s the deal: you serve the coffee; I give you money. That’s it. No expectations of RSVPs to weddings and bar mitzvahs. No holiday card or gift exchanges. No arranging play dates between our children. OK?

Clearly, do not send me any electronic hamburgers, do not write on my “wall”, and I honestly don’t want to hear about your movie likes and dislikes. And don’t even think about messaging me through eight different channels that I can save a dollar on your wretched vanilla mocha pumpkin pie latte this week. Please. Just pour the damn coffee. And above all, make sure it’s good coffee. The rest is just froth.

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For the better part of a year, a running gag from the casual coffee lovers who know me is to ask, “So have you tried McDonald’s espresso yet? How does it rate?” Mostly they ask as a curious, sick joke — knowing that I subject myself to the worst kinds of coffee punishment. But now that I have donated my taste buds to science once again, it may be surprising to many of them that I’ve definitely had a lot worse.

Which isn’t saying a whole lot. But this is McDonald’s we’re talking about — one of the world’s most vilified entities in the fights against worldwide obesity, factory farming, and environmental atrocities. Up until recently, we’ve long remarked how visiting the McDonald’s Web site was like viewing an inner city billboard advertising cigarettes: nowhere was there a mention of anything so much as a hamburger, but there were plenty of glossy lifestyle photos of ethnic-friendly families and friends — enraptured in open-mouthed, white-toothed laughter — frolicking about at hillside picnics and poolside parties. By branding themselves like cigarettes, how was that not like a McDonald’s admission of guilt?

We suppose the good news today is that the company with the audacity to create the “Shamrock Shake” now proudly announces the new “Third Pounder” on their Web site. (Because we apparently don’t feel we’re getting fat fast enough on a diet of Quarter Pounders? The Three Pounder can only be around the corner.) But the McCafé concept is heavily promoted on the site as well.

The 16-year-old McCafé concept

And McDonald’s has invested heavily in the U.S. rollout of the McCafé concept. Although much of McDonald’s PR campaign in the States tries to brand the McCafé as “new!”, it is anything but. The McCafé was first spawned in 1993 in Australia, infiltrated some countries in Europe, and it was first introduced to the U.S. in 2001. Since its U.S. introduction, McDonald’s has opened and quickly shuttered various McCafés across the country — such as the one that opened in Mountain View in December 2003 and shut down just 14 months later.

The first generation of U.S. McCafés were dedicated, separate chain stores. McDonald’s latest move has been to integrate the McCafé as a workstation within existing McDonald’s — first starting with suburban McDonald’s chains with more real estate and less coffee competition. The McCafé has arrived in San Francisco, however, and we chose a downtown location for our first experiment.

The tepid and stock flavors of McCafé

The branding for McCafé was laid on thick and heavy. And not uncommon to McDonald’s in expensive commercial real estate districts, this is a tight spot with mirrored walls trying to make the place seem less like a closet. In front is an ever-present refugee-from-a-methadone-clinic as your doorman. (For tips, of course.) In part, the attraction for voluntary doormen is due to the heavy tourist traffic that flows through here — a lot of it from Asia for some odd reason. And at one corner of their serving station is the McCafé setup.

The McCafé signs even provide an espresso-drink-ordering procedure as follows:

1. Size
2. Drink
3. Milk
4. Syrup

Naturally, for us it was only steps #1 & #2, and they use dueling superautomatic Franke machines to pull shots with a large pour size and a blonde, even crema. The existence of any crema thickness was actually a little surprising, given the machines and staff skills, even if its color is way off. Served in a large, insulated McCafé-branded paper cup, it has a tepid flavor of cedar and some pepper. While it isn’t ashy, like some Starbucks and their blackened coffees, it is one-dimensional but not entirely unpleasant. Their ads may call out “the bold and rich flavors of McCafé,” but we find that statement to be accurate only if you’ve been mostly nursed on Maxwell House.

Their coffee is supplied by three main roasters — Distant Lands, Gaviña, and S&D Coffee. And just as McDonald’s buys food staples from multiple suppliers in huge lots to blend out the flavor profile to a single, consistent stew spread across entire nations, their coffee is little different. Although their supply chain for coffee appears to be a lot more thoughtful than the one for, say, beef, another difference is that McDonald’s makes bigger, nameless vats of “mutt” coffee from multiple suppliers who each produce vast nameless lots of “mutt” coffee.

When McDonald’s can make espresso this mediocre, who needs Starbucks? Or Nespresso?

But as we mentioned up top, the espresso here may not be good, but it isn’t outright awful. And therein lies the marketing foolishness of Starbucks: years of dumbing down their product to fill an ever-expanding armada of cafés has made it rather push-button and brain-dead. So much so, that any fast food chain with an ounce of ambition, such as McDonald’s, can make a relatively legitimate quality play for their customers. Slap on a recession and a cheaper price tag, and Starbucks is suddenly dog-paddling to stay afloat in the deep, rapid waters of fast food competition.

McDonald’s espresso quality also depreciates the value of many superautomatic home espresso machines, such as the Nespresso. Why should consumers spend hundreds of dollars on a home machine, plus a subscription of premium-priced coffee capsules, to essentially achieve McDonald’s quality at a similar price point? That just doesn’t cut it.

In a way, this all makes us commend McDonald’s espresso for helping to draw back the curtain on the “Great Oz” of Starbucks — or superautomated home machines such as the Nespresso system. When you are charging a premium for your product, or if you are promoting it as some premium espresso experience, you had better set your standards above McDonald’s (for crying out loud) to be taken seriously.

While we would never go to a McDonald’s McCafé for the espresso unless we were extremely desperate, we like the McCafé if for nothing other than shining some humbling truth behind the many hot-air claims of “luxury” mass-produced espresso out on the market today.

Read the review of McDonald’s at 609 Market St. in San Francisco.

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One of the things that the big coffee chains do well is consistency. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom, lifted straight from the fast food chain playbook. A McDonald’s french fry is pretty much the same everywhere, and the coffee served at a big chain is little different. Or so we’ve all been told.

For example, a Long Island Press article cited in our last post quoted local roast master, Greg Heinz: “Starbucks does a lot of things very well. It maintains consistency nationwide.” The article’s author then later goes on to say, “Just like any chain, Starbucks cannot exist without uniformity.”

Or can it? We’ve always felt that the coffee quality can be quite erratic between one Starbucks and another. Lately we’ve been digging into the CoffeeRatings.com data we’ve collected over the years to validate some of our assumptions about coffee and quality. What we found supported our hunch that some of the biggest coffee chains are actually pretty lousy at consistency and uniformity.

Using our ratings data to measure quality consistency among cafés

Below is a table we’ve compiled by keying off some of the fields in our database from thousands of reviewed espresso shots. Each row represents the aggregate espresso shot reviews for a given chain, a given coffee roaster, a given espresso machine manufacturer, or a given cup manufacturer — reflecting a few choices we made for illustration.

Each row (or sample set) shows the number of cafés, high espresso score, low score, average score, median score, and standard deviation for all the associated ratings. For our consistency evaluation here, the key is the standard deviation — which is a simplistic measure of the spread in espresso scores for a given grouping.

For example, the first row represents all reviewed Starbucks. The data suggest that most reviewed Starbucks — about 68 percent, assuming a normal distribution — have an espresso rating score that’s within 1.05 rating points of the average for all Starbucks reviewed (here that’s 5.13).

Now compare this 1.05 with the other example rows in the table. For example, all reviewed Peet’s Coffee & Tea outlets have a standard deviation of 0.74. This suggests a much narrower variation in their espresso scores — and hence better consistency and predictability.

Coffee quality consistency among independent cafés can be stronger than within the big chains themselves

All reviewed cafés using Blue Bottle Coffee beans may have very different owners but score an even lower 0.70 standard deviation. These cafés may only share a bean supplier and some of standards for freshness and access to common consulting and training, but their espresso scores are significantly more consistent among each other than the cafés under a single Starbucks ownership — or even Peet’s.

Surely, a single quality dimension does not represent the breadth of possible flavor profiles, body weights, and crema textures that might also factor into a consistency analysis. But this data refutes the conventional wisdom that Starbucks, for example, provides a consistently dependable and uniform level of beverage quality. Even with their complete supply and delivery chain standardization, Starbucks fails to produce espresso quality that’s as consistent as a number of independent cafés that have only a coffee bean supplier in common.

Our data also suggests that the Starbucks brand is no better a determinant of quality consistency than whether the café uses a La Marzocco espresso machine or Delco cups. This is a critical point to understand, so let’s put this another way:

The Starbucks brand predicts consistency of espresso quality no better than if all the random cafés we surveyed that use Delco cups decided to re-brand themselves as “The Delco-branded Cups Coffeehouse chain.”

Given the investments Starbucks has made in coffee bean and roasting consistency, standardized push-button espresso machines, and standardized training, we don’t see how you can interpret this data as anything short of a complete failure for the company to deliver on the brand expectations of quality consistency.

If Starbucks’ consistency isn’t in their prepared coffee, then it is likely a psychological perception: the consumer’s brand association, the consistency of the Starbucks beverage menu, Starbucks’ own ridiculous names for drinks and their sizes, and the familiar environment of its coffee shops.

Seeking out chains in the hopes of managing risk

We recently came across a blog post by Chris Pirillo, a tech-geek/blogger/ex-TV-show-host who practically wet his underpants because he found a Peet’s Coffee & Tea chain store in his Sheraton Waikiki hotel. This when located in the very same building is an outlet of the Honolulu Coffee Company — which sources beans from Hawaii’s own Greenwell Farms, operates one of the few Mistral Triplette espresso machines in the world, and last scored as high as the best Peet’s we’ve ever been to anywhere. (Famed Baltimore coffee podcaster, Jay Caragay, disputes the quality there as dubious — but we stick by our last, albeit five-year-old, rating.)

Meanwhile, a friend in the Netherlands told us about a Starbucks that opened in Utrecht a week ago. When he passed by over the weekend, he said, “The line was unholy.” In a country where coffee shops legally sell marijuana by the menu, lines are out the door for one that peddles the double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.

What makes people seek out mass-produced mediocrity over independent, higher quality options just as conveniently nearby? What made an old boss of mine seek out a Pizza Hut for dinner when we were in the heart of London together on business travel with time to kill? These questions are woven into why we started CoffeeRatings.com six years ago.

In the case of coffee, you can largely dismiss the argument that chains provide a convenient shorthand to take out the risk in quality versus an unknown. As our data suggests here, big coffee chains can be less consistent among themselves than independent cafés with a common coffee supplier are to each other.

This is the part of the article where we’re supposed to have a snappy, revelatory answer to these questions. But we’ve got nothin’ — other than the consumer comfort with big coffee chains likely says more about their environment and sales practices than it does about the quality of the actual products they sell.

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Like celebrity deaths, do waves always come in threes? Our long history of mocking the industry term, the Third Wave, aside, we’re starting to think our affections for Starbucks are entering a third wave of sorts. Years ago it transitioned from ridicule to ambivalence, but now it’s starting to take on subtle shades of pity.

The reason? According to today’s Seattle Times, it now seems they’re experimenting with the idea that the Starbucks brand itself has become a liability: Local News | Starbucks tests new names for stores | Seattle Times Newspaper. The news that Starbucks now believes that obscuring their green mermaid brand might help their sales, and their neighborhood image, is pretty much an admission that the Starbucks brand may hold more negative connotations than positive ones.

Oddly enough, this news came out right on the heels of the publicized arrest of a 17-year-old Fight Club wannabe, who bombed a NYC Starbucks back in May as part of his own private Project Mayhem: 17-year-old blows up a Starbucks because he was inspired by Brad Pitt’s ‘Fight Club’ character // Current. (Now if only I emulated all the movies that came out when I was 7 years old…)

Selling your soul to the highest bidder

A little over a year ago, we hypothesized about the idea of a “Starbucks Select” concept for the company to overcome its mass-produced image and regain some relevance to quality coffee again. Think of what Toyota did in launching the Lexus brand. But with this news, in effect, Starbucks is experimenting with taking this idea much further — by omitting the “Starbucks” name entirely and investing in something akin to the absence of branding.

Though if you’re a Starbucks shareholder — and Fidelity Investments is now their largest shareholder — you have to give the company a little credit. If they truly want to convince Wall Street that they are a soulless money-making machine, demonstrating the will to sell out their own brand identity in a heartbeat, should that boost their profits, makes for a compelling argument.

Mike Doughty, NYC resident (OK, Brooklyn) and former frontman of Soul Coughing, performs his song, “Busting Up A Starbucks”:


UPDATE: July 29, 2009
In case you were curious what the inside of a Starbucks Select looks like: Inside Starbucks New Stealth Store: 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea – PSFK. (Thanks to one of our regular readers for the link.)

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It’s tough to be a newspaper man these days. Having run out of tiresome video game and comic book themes, they’re now making Hollywood movies out of bloggers. It seems that anyone with a Twitter account can also get a book deal — ironically celebrating the very media format it supposedly deems irrelevant. So we avoid the knee-jerk reactions when a newspaper staple like SF Chronicle restaurant critic, Michael Bauer, publishes a brief write-up on the local coffee scene: Michael Bauer: Between Meals : Let’s have another cup of coffee.

Trust us: a guy like Mr. Bauer has his haters. The guy even has recent exposés of his identity — Superman-style — despite the fact that his face has been on “WANTED” posters in SF restaurant kitchens for years, offering a bounty for any restaurant employee who identifies his arrival.

What we appreciate about Mr. Bauer is that he makes no pretense about being a coffee expert. That you’ve developed a professional palate for food doesn’t convey credentials as a coffee expert, purely by association, just because both activities involve your mouth. This is a far cry from the megalomania of some Bay Area celebrity chefs who think their coffee reigns supreme — when, in fact, it loses taste tests comparing them with an airport Starbucks. A bellwether of intelligence is a self-awareness of limitations.

In the article, Mr. Bauer notes that, “Blue Bottle has become a name with loads of cachet, and coffee made in a French press is practically becoming as ubiquitous as tap water.” We couldn’t help but notice this very phenomenon this evening, as we watched Noe Valley’s Contigo produce French presses of the stuff like a factory assembly line for coffee-craving customers. Before even asking who supplied their beans, we (correctly) suspected it was branded Blue Bottle just by the heavy rotation at their coffee grinder. (Oddly enough, we found the resulting press pot to be a bit underwhelming — in flavor, freshness, etc. — for the pedigree.)

And to prove his own ignorance of the topic, the last half of Mr. Bauer’s article on “artisan coffee” (his term, not ours) concerns McDonald’s and Starbucks — which have about as much to do with artisan coffee as a Big Mac has to do with Kobe beef. The difference here being that we can forgive the guy — he clearly knows not of what he speaks. But at least he’s not pretending to be something he’s not.

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