Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Last week, the Contra Costa Times published an article announcing the Bay Area arrival of McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks: McDonald’s new coffee drinks ignite breakfast wars - ContraCostaTimes.com. Of course, none of this info is really new, so we’re a bit perplexed over how someone can “ignite” something with a two-year-long fuse. But the article cites some local coffee lovers who didn’t find McDonald’s specialty coffee drinks up to the task.

Is anyone surprised? We already have the McDonald’s of specialty coffee: it’s called Starbucks.

The article also highlighted one of the more ridiculous aspects of the consumer marketing industry: the art of packaging everything as a “solution”. Quoting Matthew Ramerman, principal of HL2, a Seattle-based advertising agency that focuses on restaurant chains: “Consumers have been saying ‘I’m looking for a breakfast solution.’” Huh?!

Perhaps CoffeeRatings.com has missed this all along: all we’re really looking for is an espresso solution. It reminds me of an old joke I used to tell my marketing friends: “It’s not a chair, it’s a seating solution.”

The reporter also interviewed Michaele Weissman, author of a forthcoming book called God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. Which, curiously enough, sounds a lot like like last month’s release of Instaurator’s The Espresso Quest, proving just how difficult it is to come up with an original idea.

We received our copy of The Espresso Quest in the mail from Australia a couple weeks back and are still well behind posting a book review here any time soon. But stay tuned… Miracles can happen.

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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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Reading the papers, for many mainstream consumers, you’d think that the current economic slowdown marked the return of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. However, you could argue that we’ve witnessed the necessary bursting of the real estate bubble, the correction of stupid money that pumped up the sub-prime loan debacle, rising food prices that might finally bring Americans’ spending on food (as a percentage of income) in line with what the rest of the world has been paying (encouraging a better Farm Bill and better farming and health practices), and the potential end to our nation’s unalienable right to ridiculously cheap and subsidized gas and energy…and all the environmental waste and fallout that has resulted from it.

In short, a number of unsustainable systems might actually now be replaced by the sustainable. But to read some media representations of these economic changes, you’d think waves of Americans are now living their own private Grapes of Wrath, wailing over the loss of their daily double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato: Coping with the growing cost of coffee - Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, Starbucks, like any corporation with disappointing quarterly numbers, would be scapegoating unseasonable global warming if the economic climate wasn’t as convenient.

If anything, we see these economic winds of change as potentially positive for hardcore coffee lovers and those who serve them. For us, good coffee isn’t just a frivolous luxury item or status symbol — it’s a way of life. And high-quality products are typically recession-proof, whereas commodity products with an upscale veneer are frequently hammered and undermined by price wars.

Just read the L.A. Times article cited here: not one of the people interviewed who were cutting back on their coffee consumption came across as true coffee lovers. Rather, if they aren’t just psycho-chemical dependents (i.e., people who drink coffee for “utility” rather than “enjoyment”), they fit the profile of the masses caught up in the recent tidal wave of faux coffee drinks (i.e., people who really don’t like coffee, but who have been convinced with enough whipped cream, foamed milk, and vanilla syrup to believe that they do).

The coffee shops that have stood for quality, raised the bar, and sought to appeal to a smaller market of coffee devotees will largely come through these economic times relatively unscathed. We’re just not so sure about everyone who jumped on the coffee bandwagon after their frozen yogurt franchises failed in the 1990s — and the corporations who sold their coffee souls to virtually become frozen yogurt franchises.

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What a strange newsweek it’s been in the coffee world. The best way to characterize it?: What’s old is suddenly new again.

Tuesday we had Starbucks’ latest cry for attention/help/suicide prevention with their mysterious “04.08.08″-on-a-lame-paper-cup campaign. Essentially, the publicity stunt announced the launch of their “new” Pike Place Roast and a “new” return to the old brown-and-white mermaid branding. Yet Starbucks’ Pike Place Roast is something that at least Seattle-area residents have been familiar with for years already, and their “new” branding campaign just underscores the delusions CEO Howard Schultz is having about turning back the clock — making him coffee’s Norma Desmond. (A much better Starbucks post this week also came from the past: the opening of the first Starbucks.)

Then in London on Wednesday, the ever-tiresome kopi luwak story again reared it’s ugly, old head, and hundreds of newspaper editors and bloggers fawned and giggled over it like they just discovered flatulence. What kind of a rock do you have to be living under to miss the first 37,000 times the story of this “new” coffee novelty gag was exhumed over the past ten years on the Internet? Odds are that it hasn’t yet dawned on these people that the 41st and the 43rd American presidents are actually different George Bushes who invaded Iraq. But we can almost forgive these waves of sophomoric, scatological snickers when compared with David Cooper at Peter Jones, who decided to brew Jamaican Blue Mountain as an espresso — which is a bit like driving a Lamborghini in an off-road 4×4 rally.

Not to be outdone, today McDonald’s announced “free latte Fridays” in Western Washington state. After nearly seven years of unqualified U.S. failures, McDonald’s is still trying to convince us that their McCafé concept is “new” and going to rock the world of “unsnobby” espresso lovers across the country.

Putting the “new” back in “news,” or: “Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1991″

So what to post this week that wasn’t some gimmick or publicity stunt retread? How about something truly new to discuss: the coffee scene in Kiev, Ukraine: UNIAN - ”Coffee mania” floods Kyiv.

The article, from the Ukrainian UNIAN news agency, notes the burgeoning coffee scene in the capital city — where coffee shops in the city center are now as little as 30 meters apart. But reading through their list and description of area coffee shops, we had flashbacks to the coffee house reviews in San Francisco from the late 1980s/early 1990s. Back then, it was enough just to mention that a café offered coffee — the rest was some rant about ambiance, where you could read Kant, and what food was on the menu.

But we suppose even that is cultural progress in a nation’s appreciation for good coffee; things could be a lot worse. Take Vietnam, for example. Today Vietnam’s leading coffee producer and exporter, Vinacafe Bien Hoa, announced that they have made the world’s largest cup of coffee: Vietnam makes world’s largest cup of coffee _English_Xinhua. Said “cup” apparently holds some 3,613 liters of coffee — or the equivalent of one horribly overextracted doppio shot of Vietnamese robusta espresso.

No word yet on whether Howard Schultz, not to be outdone, has purchased this massive cup of coffee for Starbucks’ next publicity stunt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Yesterday Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World aired a broadcast on the Italian espresso: Espresso | PRI’s The World. While every news outlet in America was regurgitating Starbucks‘ publicity over their token three-hour store closure for employee training, reporter David Leveille took a different approach by interviewing the art of the espresso from a distinctly Italian perspective.

(David Leveille tried to contact me for an interview for this story yesterday morning — he was particularly interested because this blog regularly cites the Gambero Rosso Bar d’Italia. But alas, that day job thing kept me from getting back to him in time for his deadline.)

The radio story gets a few details wrong — for example, a proper espresso is produced with near-boiling water, not steam as reported in the story. But the story outlines how Italian baristas “perfect their craft over the period of years, not hours”. It even includes an interview with the head barista at Sant’Eustachio il caffè, who is as comically arrogant and opaque about their methods and materials as you’d expect from this beloved café. (There’s something about Europeans and the ceremony of the safely guarded culinary secret, such as the Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon.)

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This just in from Italy: Putting EU Money to Good Use: Italian Scientists Unveil Coffee-Making Robot - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News. “A coffee-making robot?,” you ask? More than the specialized Swiss jobs we’ve talked about, we’re actually talking 1940’s Popular Mechanics/The Jetsons‘ Rosie … that kind of robot. The kind we’ve been promised for generations but only got lousy iPods instead.

OK, so it can only make instant coffee. (What kind of Italians are these people, anyway?!) Meaning: call Howard Schultz and call off next week’s barista retraining! We’ve got a solution for his Starbucks troubles.

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It’s a rather snarky press release, but we confess to being amused by it: Coffee Klatch Roasting Celebrates Starbucks Store Closures With Free Coffee for Everyone.

These days, Howard Schultz’s return to the CEO post at Starbucks has resembled nothing short of a panicked man caught on a runaway bulldozer, pulling every lever and knob he can find to steer the thing before it careens off a cliff. Last week, Starbucks announced that they were going to temporarily close some 7,100 cafés nationwide for three hours — to retrain some 135,000 in-store employees and people who oversee the stores.

Hopefully it’s to teach them what a proper espresso should really taste like. However, as San Dimas’ Coffee Klatch owner, Mike Perry, pointed out in his press release, “I’m not sure why it’s going to take them 3 hours to learn how to press a button.” Touché. We first met Mike at the 2006 Western Regional Barista Competition, and he knows good coffee. (His daughter, Heather, won that competition as well as last year’s U.S. Barista Championship.)

Hitting a company when it’s down smacks of a little schadenfreude, no matter how big the company. Starbucks did popularize better coffee in this country more than anyone else, even if today they are a lot like Mikhael Gorbachev’s relevance to Russian governance after perestroika. But if Howard Schultz were to take our advice for improving the espresso standards at Starbucks, and if he were truly serious about his commitment to quality, we would only close about 6,900 of those 7,100 cafés — but never reopen them.

UPDATE: Feb. 20, 2008
Not to be outdone, Seattle’s Caffé Vita (one of the famous ‘V’s of great Seattle espresso) is offering a similar promotion, according to a blog on today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Feb. 26: First No Coffee, Now Free Coffee.

UPDATE: Feb. 21, 2008
One successful press release can sometimes lead to another: Coffee Klatch Roasting Anti-Starbucks Promotion Sparks Nationwide Free Indie Coffee Uprising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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