As we posted last year, on the same day as the inaugural CoffeeCON 2012, we were instead attending the Grand Tasting of La Paulée de San Francisco: a $300-per-person consumer Burgundy appreciation event backed by a tremendous amount of wine industry support and name-brand chefs & restaurants. The event was packed.

And because who doesn’t love a good wine analogy, the closest consumer event that coffee has to offer is — well? — free admission to CoffeeCON in bustling, cosmopolitan Warrenville, IL. (Note: this year CoffeeCON introduced a $15 ticket price, so things are starting to get snooty.)

Coffee: Y U No Like Your Customers?

Not to throw the merits of CoffeeCON under the bus, but this very fact is outright shameful — a rather inexcusable embarrassment to the specialty coffee industry. We have legions of adoring coffee lovers who can hold their own waxing poetically alongside the world’s biggest wine snobs. We have many who work in specialty coffee giving plenty of lip service to phrases such as “consumer experience” and “educating the consumer.”

But heaven forbid that anybody employed in the biz open a legitimate dialog with their customers. Instead, coffee consumers have to take the reigns and do it themselves. Completely unlike the wine industry, the specialty coffee industry has been too incompetent, disorganized, and too focused on navel-gazing to hold an event about anything that ultimately isn’t directly about, or for, themselves.

Contrast this with the media coverage for events like the SCAA conference, which essentially operates as a bloated insider trade show. Magazine articles, blog posts, and tweets hype the event as the “center of the universe”, a don’t-you-wish-you-were-here type of thing. But mind you, it’s a universe that deliberately excludes the very customers who keep all the attendees employed. (Side note: CoffeeGeek’s Mark Prince recently showed off the long-defunct SCAA consumer membership on his Twitter feed. Mistake long since corrected.)

You could argue that coffee consumers shouldn’t take the industry’s apparent anti-social attitude so personally. Some people are just naturally too shy for eye contact, right? But meanwhile, some industry blogs promote a self-indulgent, Spring-Break-like image for the SCAA conference: complete with wannabe-frat-house tales of endless parties, binge drinking, and baristas covered in spray cheese. Yeah, party with Tina. How long before the competitive SCAA exhibitions offer up wet T-shirt contests in wet processing tanks? (Oh wait, we’re too late.)

All of us may tediously groan at the aloof and disgruntled barista stereotype, looking down on their customers. But unfortunately that stereotype is rooted in a little too much reality. Worse, it often seems deliberate and not just the result of a lack of social graces. Many customers can be self-entitled, acute hemorrhoids as well. But far too often than should ever happen, consumers feel the need to treat coffee professionals as necessary irritants that must be tolerated instead of allies and fellow coffee lovers. Can’t we all just get along?

More Coffee, Less Con

Coincidentally, my brother is a long-time resident of Warrenville, IL and a big fan of quality coffee. He’s also a former next-door neighbor of Kevin Sinnott — half of a husband-and-wife professional video production team, a Second City improv school graduate, and a dedicated coffee prosumer who is the impetus (and personal possessive name) behind CoffeeCON. I just happened to time a long-overdue visit with my brother over CoffeeCON weekend, last weekend, and thus had to check it out.

CoffeeCON bills itself as follows:

CoffeeCON is a consumer event featuring tastings of the world’s great coffees roasted by craft roasters and brewed by an assortment of different brewing methods. Our goal is to present every bean, every roast and every method. The second goal of CoffeeCON is to present classes on brewing and roasting methods at all skill levels.

Heavy emphasis here on the consumer part of the event, which is what makes it an oasis in a vast desert. One thing it professes not to be is a trade show. Last year Mike White over at ShotZombies called it The Dubious Anti-Trade Show Trade Show, but I can say first-hand the event is a refreshing contrast from the SCAA conference.

Kevin may have gradually earned a modicum of respect at trade shows like the SCAA, but he lamented over stories where consumers/prosumers are looked upon as time-sucking vermin by some of the industry types: too many questions and not enough five-figure purchase orders.

Kevin also told me the story of once entering the SCAA show floor with a few fellow prosumers a few years back and overhearing whispers of, “Here comes the animals.” Of all the legends about wine snobbery, you just never hear of stories like this when wine consumers interact with the wine industry.

CoffeeCON’s Coffee and Personalities

Back to what redeems CoffeeCON. Besides classes on everything from grinding to water to siphon brewing, plus a rear patio demoing various home roasting methods (even including the infamous “HGDB” method, a.k.a. “heat gun/dog bowl“), one of the aspects I much enjoyed about CoffeeCON was the opportunity to sample brewed coffee from many purveyors side-by-side.

The purveyors may have been primarily local, but they included River City Roasters, Dark Matter Coffee, FreshGround, Passion House, Counter Culture Coffee, Metropolis, I Have a Bean, Oren’s Daily Roast, Regular Coffee Company, Halfwit Coffee Roasters, and, well, Lavazza. Last year Starbucks operated a booth to coincide with the launch of their then-new “Blonde” roast. But to the credit of CoffeeCON attendees, word has it that the Starbucks booth was ignored like a leper colony. Starbucks didn’t show their faces at the event this year.

Our favorite coffee at the event had to be Oren’s Sumatra Mandheling — and we’re not normally Indonesian freaks — followed by their Burundi Kayanza Gatare. The best espresso on the day had to go to Counter Culture Coffee’s Finca El Puente Honduras pulled from a La Marzocco GS/3.

As for personalities at the event, George Howell lead an impressive 2-1/2-hour session on coffee from bean-to-cup with several breaks for interactive sensory evaluations along the way. He’s performed this routine many times before, but for lay consumers to soak in that wisdom is something special.

A couple of our favorite lines from his session? “Cupping is the only way to buy coffee, but it’s not the best way to taste coffee.” (Take that, Peter Giuliano!) His recommendation to freeze greens to allow a seasonal crop to last all year long runs counter to much of the conventional, “seasonal-only” wisdom of many coffee roasters. And I also liked his concept of “incredibly loud coffee” — i.e., coffee with flavors so acutely punctuated that they drown out any breadth or subtlety in the bean.

Last but not least, it was great to finally meet Jim Schulman in person. To most people in the coffee industry, where influential prosumers and home roasting are about as familiar as a Justin Bieber set list, Jim is probably only known as that troublemaker who got Extract Mojo inventor, Vince Fedele, worked up to a fine microfoam and threatening to sue him because Jim (somewhat justifiably) dismissed the device’s accuracy at measuring coffee extraction levels. Given that Jim was pioneering PID controller use in home espresso machines on Internet newsgroups over 20 years ago, Jim is a prosumer coffee legend when it comes to coffee science, invention, instrumentation, and measurement.

Would we travel hundreds of miles to attend the world’s biggest consumer coffee event? Definitely not. But we’re glad it exists. The event also manages to appeal to consumers at different levels of expertise and engagement. Kevin deserves a lot of credit for taking a big personal risk to help meet a gaping public need that the coffee industry has done nothing to address. And if we were in town visiting my brother again during the event, we would definitely attend again.

Fast forward to today, and you can’t swing a dead cat in most cities without hitting a local microroaster who deals in Direct Trade. In terms of this absurd coffee wave business, this made La Colombe something of a genetic missing link — a kind of coffee wave version number 2.6. Given that La Colombe has not succumbed to faddish trends of trying to make all coffee taste like hibiscus and blueberries (and worst of all: lawn clippings), this has sometimes made them seem a bit passé in the eyes of many who would rather fawn over coffee’s latest Young Turks/poster boys like the K-Pop idol band flavor of the month.

Thus while a lot of industry attention has focused obsessively on “what’s next”, as if in daily anticipation of a coming Ray-Kurzweil-inspired coffee singularity, La Colombe as fallen a bit off the radar — quietly building out coffeehouses in New York, Chicago, and Seoul and establishing wholesale operations.

La Colombe Chicago

Opening back in the Summer of 2011, the first Chicago outlet started in the transforming neighborhood of the West Loop on Randolph St. This is an old neighborhood of butchers and meat delivery trucks … of Greek markets where students at the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago knew they could buy alcohol without ever being carded. (I know this, because I was one of them.)

In the past decade, this neighborhood has transformed: giving way to luxury lofts, fine foods, dog care salons, and — shockingly — al fresco dining along the sidewalks. La Colombe is part of this new neighborhood breed. Though they also plan to open a second Chicago location in Bucktown.

This location is an open space with wood floors, wide windows that open in front, a large wooden bench, and a few café tables for seating. It’s a rather spacious place, with roasting operations taking place in the back with a sparkling, classic Officine Vittoria roaster from Bologna, Italy. La Colombe co-founder, JP Iberti, loves to roast on the same equipment put into popular use in the 1980s by Seattle’s Bizzarri family.

But that’s not the only curious device obsession here. They have a red, three-group La Marzocco FB/70 for espresso. And they recently replaced one of their grinders (for a second espresso option besides their Nizza blend) with a Alpha Dominche Steampunk 4.0 siphon brewer. La Colombe co-founder (and TV personality), Todd Carmichael, is a healthy skeptic when it comes to the latest coffee gadgetry, but he swears by the Steampunk brewer. He made a big point of it at the last SCAA conference, and all La Colombe locations are in the process of installing them.

Some coffee personalities, like Blue Bottle‘s James Freeman, are enamored with rare and elegant classics when it comes to their coffee machinery. Others, like the Morrison brothers behind Sightglass, gravitate to the newest fads available so that they may play around with them in their toyshop. Curiously, La Colombe seems to operate a little at both ends of the spectrum.

As for the Steampunk, it’s a bit of a throwback to the fleeting halcyon days of the Clover brewer. We personally found that it produces a clean cup, requires its own staffing plan, and generates a little grit at the bottom. However, it didn’t really change the filter coffee equation for us — at least for the trial we joined in with the staff that day. (Sorry, Steampunkers — we’re just not feeling the love yet.)

As for their Nizza espresso, they pull shots with an even layer of medium brown crema and a decent body. There’s an exceptional balance to the cup, with a flavor of spices, mellow pungency, and orange zest. That’s the thing so few North American roasters fail to achieve: the art and complexity of a well thought out, balanced blend. Roasters seem to forget that if you listen to a symphony, 98% of the instruments are wasted if something is screaming to the level that you can’t hear anything else.

Read the review of La Colombe in Chicago’s West Loop.

There is no indoor seating, but there are outdoor benches and parasols in front — just around the corner from main building of the Oxbow Market. Obviously, breads and baked goods are the big thing here.

Several years ago, they used a two-group Grimac La Valentina La Vittoria on their supply of Peet’s Coffee. They later upgraded to a two-group La Marzocco Linea and Caffé Vita beans, making it one of the few places in the entire Bay Area we knew to offer them at the time. But in a recent blow to regional roaster diversity, in 2013 they announced they couldn’t keep up with Vita’s import costs from Seattle and were switching to Blue Bottle Coffee, which is what they serve now.

Not that we have anything bad to say about the quality of Blue Bottle Coffee. But when the diversity of local espresso options shrinks, we see that as a step backwards.

The results were actually quite good dating back to their Peet’s setup, but they are even better now. The resulting shot has an even layer of medium brown crema (which was more of a swirl of a thicker layer with Vita beans), and the once-large pour sizes have fortunately become smaller. It is still sadly served primarily in paper cups, but the shot is served short and potent in the cup with a body to match and a flavor of brighter fruit. (With Vita beans, the shot offered more herbal pungency, some smoke, and molasses — something we miss.)

Brown ACF cups are now available for cappuccino-sized drinks, but even asking “for here” at the order counter doesn’t guarantee they’ll get your order right. The staff may not seem overly comfortable in their coffee-making, but the results deliver.

Milk-frothing here is not only decent, but when combined with the milk-friendlier Vita roasts of before, the cappuccino flavor here beat out the ones poured at the nearby Ritual (even if Ritual’s foam is more smoothly integrated into the cup). But now with Blue Bottle beans, the milk-espresso contrast is less dramatic. It’s still a solid cup.

Read the updated review of Model Bakery in Napa, CA.

They formerly served Four Barrel beans, but they have since switched to Stumptown (and sell the beans retail, along with Baratza grinders and Kalita drippers). This marks a bit of a reintroduction of Stumptown to the area — after having been replaced by a number of local roasters as they’ve spun up.

They serve Hairbender and a single origin espresso option (Costa Rica Valle de Los Santos at our time of visit). Plus Chemex offerings of Panama Duncan Estate and Ethiopia Nano Challa in multiple grinders, and a drip/brew bar with a scale and dueling Baratza Virtuoso grinders.

Using a red, two-group La Marzocco FB/70, they pull shots with a darker to medium brown, even crema of decent thickness and density. The cup is no Hairbender brightness bomb, but rather a mellower yet full-flavored soft melding of cocoa powder and a melding of spice and herbal elements. Served in EspressoParts black cups (and a mismatched ACF saucer).

Their milk-frothing shows decorative latte art and even bubbles, however the foam is of minimal thickness and the resulting cup is more than a little milky with little integration between the foam and the espresso. Unless you like your caps closer to a café au lait, the espresso is the star here.

Read the review of Jane on Fillmore.

This coffeehouse is located a short walk from where the SCAA conference was held in South Boston. Despite hosting a number of tie-in events, conference attendees were surprisingly few here. It seemed most conference attendees did not venture outside of the Boston Convention Center fortress except by car or cab, and then they were immediately exiting onto a freeway headed someplace else. Because cities place their newer convention centers in undesirable places where space is cheap, and Boston is no exception.

Hence the conference area in South Boston is pretty much an industrial empty lot with fencing, abandoned railways, and other obstacles discouraging most pedestrians from ever accessing it on foot. This much was a bit maddening about Boston: while the Boston Logan airport loudspeakers continually boasted of their “green airport” status with the heavy use of public transportation, walking up to the SCAA conference from my hotel in downtown Boston was a bit like crossing the barbed-wire-laden bits of the Korean DMZ.

It’s as if Boston willfully did everything it could to treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Moments like this give me guilty thanks for the Loma Prieta earthquake and how it got SF’s Embarcadero Freeway torn down.

But back to the coffee…

This café — located in the much less dismal parts on the north end of South Boston — opened as a retail beverage operation to complement their roasting. And they’ve done a stellar job of it. It’s a very open space, with tall ceilings, modern light fixtures, and an exposed concrete floor. There’s a large, round central table for standing at, a few side tables, and stool seating at the Congress St. tall windows.

They earn major points for offering three different choices of coffee for their espresso. At review time it was the Barrington Gold blend (their standard), a Brazil Conquista Reserve, or a Hawaiian Maui Mokka in Anfim grinders. And anybody supporting Maui Moka gets high praise in my book. A well-travelled Yemen mocha descendant, and a favorite of home roasters at the turn of the millenium for the intensely chocolate espresso it produces (and I was one of them), the bean almost went extinct in 2002 when its Ka’anapali Estates home was nearly paved over by Maui condo developers. Every time we can experience it, it’s like seeing a coelacanth.

Using a three-group Synesso (with naked portafilters, we might add), they pull shots of Barrington Gold (used in our rating linked at bottom) with an even, medium brown crema that dissipates, but it remains an integral, time-sensitive cup. It has a heavy mouthfeel and a dense body underlying flavors of tobacco smoke and molasses. Smooth, heavy, and very tasty. Though acid fruit bomb fanatics may want to steer clear.

Their milk-frothing is good, with detailed latte art, but it is a bit milky and lacks integration with the espresso.

Just to prove it can get even better than the ratings here for the Gold, their Maui Mokka shot has an even, darker brown crema, a bit of firewood in the nose, and that lovely, characteristic deep chocolate bomb flavor that made us fall in love with the bean well over a decade ago. One of our favorite shots in Boston — and one of our more favorite places to have it.

Read the review of Barrington Coffee Company in Boston.

The “main” Pavement — and there’s more than one in Back Bay — is located a couple blocks up Massachusetts Ave. from one of our favorite Boston landmarks, the Mapparium. (OK, it hasn’t hurt that we’re also big fans of the Unwound album, Challenge for a Civilized Society.) There’s patio seating along Boylston St. in front, three window counter seats along the entrance, exposed masonry painted white in back with silver, upholstered booths around many smaller tables.

While labelled a coffeeshop, they do a lot of business in meals (lunches, etc.) — making it more of a café. However, they prominently display their use of Counter Culture Coffee and also sell their beans. They additionally offer a “featured espresso” for $3 — which, when we visited, was Anyetsu from Denver’s Novo. (Thus Pavement did not opt in for Counter Culture Coffee’s exclusivity contracts for service and training.)

Using a three-group La Marzocco GB/5 and the Rustico blend from Counter Culture, they pull shots with a highly textured medium-to-darker-brown crema. For its looks, it has a surprisingly lighter body. But with a nice, balanced flavor of cinnamon, cardamom, and a light sweetness and no real smokiness. The flavor profile is very expressive in the midrange, but rather absent at either end of the flavor spectrum.

All-in-all, they serve a great shot. But for all the local and national praised heaped on this coffeehouse, we’ve found at least one place in the city we liked even better. (More in a future review.) Furthermore, we also found the busy vibe here a bit too busy. The environment can be a study in Brownian motion: a bit frenetic with customers always coming, going, and bumping into each other. It made us just want to grab our shot, drink it, and leave.

Read the review of Pavement Coffeehouse on Boylston St. in Boston.

This is an unusual spot: essentially what looks like a glass greenhouse turned into a café on the open grounds of Post Office Square/Norman Leventhal Park. There’s park bench seating outdoors for those who might brave the weather. Inside there’s a curved service counter with an assortment of black wooden tables in what does feel like a greenhouse — just without the plants.

They serve George Howell Coffee (Daterra Farms Brazil Calabria Roast Espresso for espresso, plus Tarrazu Costa Rica, etc.). They even offer the Yukro Ethiopia that was the de facto “winner” of the Dangerous Grounds cupping.

Using a three-group La Marzocco GB/5 off to the side, they pull shots with a dark brown, textured crema that’s served as a thinner layer on a body-forward shot. Its flavor shows chocolate notes, some caramel and minimal brightness. Curiously, it has the texture, body, and even a bit of flavor like a bittersweet hot chocolate. Served in green “Terra” ceramics with metallic detailing (as featured in their Web site‘s graphics).

We’d score their savvy a little higher, but their medium cappuccino is a disappointing vast, milky soup bowl – swimming in milk with a light layer of blurred latte art foam. We’re scared of what the latte must be like here.

Read the review of Sip Café in Boston.

This may have been a bit of Boston looking towards New York City for inspiration, even as NYC looked way out West themselves. But in Boston, as in other less “cosmopolitan” U.S. cities such as Philadelphia, justifying a $4.50 latte is a major leap of business faith. It’s also a surefire way to offend local sensibilities about what should remain a low-cost utilitarian beverage.

Thinking Cup offers window counter seating facing out across Tremont St., overlooking the Boston Massacre memorial in the Boston Common. There’s a lot of aged, exposed wood, brick, and many small, shared café tables with old newsprint themes inside. Inside you might hear multiple languages and lounge music like it’s still 1998, but it’s a good vibe.

The owner is proud of one of his baristas (Cabell Tice) for recently winning the World Latte Art competition at Coffee Fest NYC 2013. (There’s an award on display.) They have an assortment of (good) baked goods and sweets in front and the sale of Stumptown coffee, pour-over devices, and logo mugs in the back.

Using a three-group La Marzocco GB/5 in the back, they pull shots as default doppios with a thin layer of medium brown crema with little density. It’s a slightly larger pour, but it manages to keep a solid, proper body. It has flavors of caramel and tobacco, but for Hairbender it lacks the acid bomb sweetness and sharpness we’re used to — which isn’t entirely a bad thing.

Served in classic brown ACF cups. Milk-frothing is solid, and arguably some of the best in Boston — but that really isn’t saying much given what we’ve seen of the local standards. Despite the World Latte Art award.

Read the review of Thinking Cup in downtown Boston, MA.

September 11, 2001

Bruins fans in downtown Boston, returning from the game – 4/13/13

Of course, things didn’t exactly work out that way. What was originally announced in the SFO airport as an FAA delay caused by a small plane hitting the World Trade Center turned into something horrifically worse. No civilian aircraft in North America would become airborne again until a few days later.

With the fog of what just happened, who did it, and what’s coming next still on everyone’s minds, the HR department and a few coworkers told me to simply make the announcement over the phone — that my team would understand under the circumstances. But I was stubbornly determined to take personal responsibility for my decision, no matter how ugly it had to be. I owed them that much. So once air travel resumed, I caught the next flight I could get into Boston that following weekend.

Boston Logan’s 9/11 memorial

I had flown into Boston Logan multiple times before, but never like this. The airport was a ghost town, largely abandoned of people and planes with a skeleton crew left running things. The taxi driver who picked me up was desperate for a fare, as he told me that, “Boston Logan is still an active crime scene.” The two flights that struck the World Trade Center towers both departed from Boston, from gate areas I was eerily all too familiar with from previous travels.

I was fortunate that a few people on my newly-laid-off staff thanked me for giving them the news in person. But I did not again return to Boston until last week.

April 11, 2013

What brought me back to Boston after all these years wasn’t the SCAA Conference — at least directly. It was more an invitation from Todd Carmichael (of La Colombe) to do a shoot for the second season of his TV show, “Dangerous Grounds”. Todd was insistent on a scene in the new season that wasn’t just his “Tarzan bit” through wild coffee jungles, but rather a social cupping discussion among a few invited guests — which included the likes of Doug Zell of Intelligentsia, Aleco Chigounis of Coffee Shrub (a sort of sister to Sweet Maria’s), Mette Marie of 49th Parallel Roasters, Ryan Brown now at Tonx, Andrew Ballard of Forty Weight Coffee, and the entertaining JP Iberti (co-founder of La Colombe).

Everybody brought some coffee to showcase and discuss. (Special thanks to Justine Hollinger of Barefoot Coffee Roasters for helping me represent their great work.) Despite Todd’s worry that some snarky infighting could develop, a great camaraderie developed among the cuppers that will hopefully come out in the program when it airs later this year. (And for the record, the overall favorite was the Yukro Ethiopia coffee from George Howell Coffee, sourced by Aleco.)

With the shoot out of the way, I had a few days to check out the SCAA conference and get reacquainted with Boston. It had been years since I had set foot in either.

For those who haven’t been to the SCAA conference, I’ll offer a perspective of someone not in the industry — and rather of just someone who really loves coffee. Like all industry conferences, it’s a great occasion to meet people and network. If you’re slinging coffee at a retail location all day, or sourcing out in the wild corners of the world, there are few occasions where you can personally meet and greet many of those coffee “greats” — or just cool people — you otherwise only read about (or from).

And there’s a lot of great coffee to be had. A barista at a complimentary La Marzocco espresso station jumbled multiple bags of Intelligentsia beans to create an impromptu blend in his Mazzer grinder. While I was watching this, he culturally noted that, “The industry people come earlier and ask for espressos, but later the ‘show’ people come and they all drink caps.” (i.e., cappuccinos).

But there are things about the SCAA conference I am not as enamored with. For one, it’s primarily a commercial trade show with a big emphasis on an exhibition floor of people hawking their wares. Good for a lot in the industry, but often a bit tedious if you really are more into the coffee than the latest gadgetry.

There’s the symposium topics, which I had not attended but often sounded interesting. But there’s a huge “reindeer games” aspect to the highly repetitive, three-ring circus of the Barista Championship, the Brewer’s Cup, and the US Cup Tasters Championship. Even odder now, there are members of the Barista Guild of America strutting about the place, and the city, in their official logo jackets as if part of some mutant coffee geek biker gang.

The 117th Boston Marathon

But the longer I was in Boston, the more I came to appreciate and became more enamored with the even bigger event in town that weekend: the 117th Boston Marathon. There was a very positive, festive, international sports vibe to the event that I hadn’t quite experienced since the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Everywhere in town you ran into fit people in running gear — many not running the race but at least there in spirit and to support the other participants.

Last Saturday I walked down Boylston Street past Copley Square, just two days before the horrific bombings, soaking in the environment of fans, tourists, and the final touches of the stands and barricades being set up at the finish line for the event. Arriving back in SF only some 11 hours before those terrible events took place, the news was made all the more tragic for me having experienced just how much the Boston Marathon environment converted me into a fan.

The Boston Marathon will be back next year. Boston may not want me back, given my recent track record of tragic coincidence. But I can’t say enough to encourage those even modestly interested to attend. The coffee may not be anything near as good as at the SCAA, but it deserves every bit of your support.

As time passes, I promise to write more about the coffee. But right now, there are things far more important than coffee could ever be.

Dear Coffee, I Censor You

My reaction to the post split in two opposite directions. First, on the positive side, I always appreciate a good story of where someone is proving that you can make decent coffee at a restaurant. But on the negative side, I couldn’t get over the fact that here was the #1 ranked restaurant in the world that was essentially reinventing flavors and food, and yet the most thoughtful coffee service they could come up with is serving manual pour-over coffee from a Hario V60. Something you could quite readily do at home yourself, no imagination nor creativity required.

Noma: name your poison

Sir Brian W. Jones (posting on Facebook as DCILY) and a certain Devon Nullz (a Facebook-allowed variant of /dev/null) held a brief, but civil, exchange in Facebook comments. But just before I was able to respond to Mr. Jones’ last reply, something very odd happened: all the Facebook-hosted comments on the post disappeared. Not just my and/or his comments, all the Facebook comments on the post.

Yes, the nuclear option.

Fortunately, through the magic of Google caching, I’ve exhumed the discussion here because it is blog-topic-worthy. Bonus for the chance to perhaps continue to discussion … since Dear Coffee, I Love You pretty much abruptly announced last call at 9pm and threw everyone out of the bar.

The Noma Coffee Service Discussion That’s Too Hot For DCILY

The forbidden Facebook discussion on Dear Coffee, I Love You about the coffee service at Noma

And then it ended. Poof.

Of course, the Internet is all about the conversation that refuses to die…

To Mr. Jones’ credit, perhaps he quickly realized he was dealing with a complete nut job (on the Internet? Really?!) and thus he didn’t want to continue to the discussion any further. I can’t say that I blame him. But in doing so, a legitimate point has been completely whitewashed and dismissed: we readily give restaurants a pass for their coffee when it doesn’t live up to the standards set by their food. The #1 restaurant in the world serving pour-over V60 coffee might not be as bad as Nespresso, but it is still a culinary cop-out.

And when it comes to pouring wine from bottles, Sir Brian, might I remind you that coffee service isn’t merely the act of pulling a cork. Brewing coffee quite literally is cooking.

And there’s a deliberate reason why Noma’s wine list is curated for rare and special occasion wines — and not just what can be found on the shelves of any Bilka hypermarket in Denmark. Compared to a V60 pour-over, ironically a Clover brewer suddenly seems exotic again by today’s standards. Is it too much to ask to at least syphon brew for something just a little out of the ordinary?

Now we’re not saying that Korean tacos aren’t quite tasty, because they are. But they’re really not that special. (Well, at least here in California.)