Now is that rare time of year where being way out in the Avenues doesn’t feel like being a political prisoner living in exile. For a few weeks out of the year — before the blanket of cold fog transforms the western half of San Francisco into nature’s largest refrigerator — tourists and locals alike experience a brief hallucination where places like SF’s Richmond District seem like attractive, undervalued beachfront property.

Just above the ruins of the old Sutro Baths, the recently opened Lands End Lookout may serve the always-frightful Peerless Coffee in its mini café. But don’t let this neighborhood’s lack of Third Wave self-congratulation get your coffee taste buds down. Even if a bit of the Old West still seems alive here, it boasts some interesting — if not also eclectic — coffee bars.

Take Simple Pleasures Cafe. This coffeehouse claims to be the oldest in the Richmond District, in operation since 1978. Two doors down is their roasting facilities. It’s a social place that serves as an active community center. On these rare fair-weather days, the sidewalk out front can be populated with many of the eclectic local characters conversing on café tables and chairs.

Inside they have the typical colored chalkboard menus that characterized SF cafes in the 1980s. Seating is among big wooden tables in front on numerous odd chairs in back. They offer live music, beer on tap, and espresso shots pulled from a two-group La San Marco machine. The pour is a bit large with a dark to medium brown, healthy crema. Yet the body is robust, with a bold, body-forward flavor of earthiness, chocolate, and tobacco. It’s a flavor profile that practically says, “Screw you and your hipster coffee.” We like that once in a while.

The experience here may feel a bit like you transported yourself to an SF café circa 1987, but that’s not always such a bad thing. Especially when you come to expect a little bit of weird when hanging out near San Francisco’s normally tourist-repellant oceanfront.

Read the review of Simple Pleasures Cafe.

This bakery/café first opened in 2010 as a joint venture of the Goody Goodie bakery and John Quintos, who’s behind Cento, Special Xtra, and Vega. It was originally named “StarStream,” and the coffee routinely followed the Quintos rubber-stamp formula of small La Marzocco Linea espresso machines and Blue Bottle Coffee. However, as the location developed it became less a café and more the relocated headquarters of the Goody Goodie bakery from their sidewalk window — hence the name change.

Coinciding with that change, the coffee service also started taking on its own identity. They serve (dessert) waffles, cookies, and other goods that have earned the quirky bakery its deserved reputation, but the coffee here is no less serious — despite the flowery, heavy-on-pink flea market motif inside. There are two metal garden café tables and chairs along the front Harrison St. sidewalk and a collection of odd items in the interior: patio tables, a whimsical wooden bench, colorfully painted walls, and an odd collection of signage and curiosities that’s mildly reminiscent of Trouble Coffee.

Like Trouble Coffee, they deliberately toss sink shots that don’t measure up to their standards (always a good sign). But what’s particularly impressive is that they have a clear coffee philosophy that comes through: namely, with their switch to Emeryville’s Roast Coffee Co., they want to emphasize balance in their coffee flavor profile without all the overbearing citrus that’s become a tiresome trademark among many new coffee purveyors (see: brightness bomb).

Balance Lacking in the North American Coffee Palate?

Of course, seeing this philosophy in practice is music to our taste buds. Most North American coffee roasters of note have proven themselves incapable of creating dynamic coffee blends of much merit or finesse. It kills us how the typical Torino, Italy-based blend still runs circles around the Americans. Of all the new coffees we tried out in the past year for home espresso use, almost apologetically the imported Caffè Bomrad topped the lot of them.

But should we really be surprised that the brightness bomb has come to define the quality espresso in North America? To raise that specter of the ever-popular wine analogy again (hey, it’s been at least two weeks), North American wines have run a similar course. Over the past couple of decades, big, bold, fruit-driven, and overly oaky wines with the subtlety and grace of a ball-peen hammer have become the popular choice for American consumers. So much so that wine producers with a different palate in mind have had to circle the wagons with interest groups such as In Pursuit of Balance

Goody Goodie is still tuning in their custom blend with Roast, but for now it has a nice, restrained citric brightness that complements (rather than overwhelms) other notes like chocolate and caramel and some herbal pungency. (Perhaps very appropriate for a dessert café?) They pull modest-sized shots from a two-group Linea with a mottled medium and lighter brown crema in colorful Nuova Point cups. It’s great to witness someone trying to lead instead of following with their coffee.

Read the review of Goody Goodie cream & sugar Dessert Salon & Cafe.

My brother lived in Austin years ago, and the town has changed a lot since then. That is, besides the construction of a fence and pillars at the North Congress Ave. end of the Great Walk in front of the Texas state capitol — to prevent people like my brother from accidentally driving vehicles down the front steps and chipping the pavement.

Talking with the locals, the biggest attraction to living there seemed to be, “it’s fun and it’s cheap.” It certainly isn’t the surface-of-the-sun heat in summer.

But being a college down, Austin also seems to try to capitalize on its “Keep Austin Weird” vibe — and yes, they sell T-shirts that say that, just as in Santa Cruz. However, looking down on the Austin walk-of-fame sidewalk on Trinity St. between 4th & 5th Sts., you’ll find a star for Sandra Day O’Connor right next to a star for Mean Joe Greene. So who is going to argue?

Another change in Austin is the improvement of its coffee scene. Patika Coffee is one of several examples. Except this example is really a coffee cart that sits in an otherwise vacant-looking parking lot downtown, next to the beached trailers of a couple of other food purveyors. Think of it like Réveille Coffee Co. — just grittier, less mobile, and with sketchier neighbors.

The parking lot is separated from the sidewalk traffic by handrails, and there’s an outdoor table/picnic bench and an over-hanging tarp for shade.

Inside their two-person cart, two staffers run the operation with a two-group Synesso machine, using Cuvée Coffee. They are apologetically required to use paper cups by city ordinance, as they are classified as a “food truck” and thus have limitations on the vessels and utencils they can pass out. (Apparently, food trucks are required by Austin law to generate disposable waste.)

They pull shots with a rich, medium brown, even crema on a layer of a thinner-bodied, more acidic espresso than served by the Caffé Medici serving Cuvée across the street. It’s potent, narrower in flavor profile, and lighter on body: a stereotypical “third wave” North American espresso — you know, the kind that’s high on punch and low on balance and finesse.

Read the review of Patika Coffee in downtown Austin, TX.

Last week we were down in Austin, TX for the first time in over a decade. We managed to do just a little coffee exploration downtown. However, we were primarily there attending the SXSWedu conference. No, that’s not SXSW — once a cool independent music conference 20-25 years ago that’s now a bloated, corporate-sponsored wankfest that also sports “film” and “interactive” themes. SXSWedu is related to the main SXSW, but it is crawling with teachers and educators with no money and — in the spirit of teachers buying their class pencils and much unlike the gaudy entertainment bashes and freebies of SXSW — features a cash bar where attendees have to buy their own drip coffee.

Last Friday the conferences crossed over. Suddenly a cold, rainy wind kicked up as all the teachers left, and the town was invaded by an army of rich white people who dress like 8-year-olds and spend all day tweeting on Apple products about their food-trucks-for-dogs start-ups and their trips to Haiti. KMN. Arguably we couldn’t have left at a better time.

But before we did leave, we became quite enamored with the downtown location of Caffé Medici. It’s a small, three-shop chain of Austin coffee bars, and at the downtown location the coffee is excellent and the environment is also great.

They offer patio sidewalk seating in front on metal tables and chairs of what looks like a rather corporate office building. Inside, you can sit at the center bar where the barista works behind one of two red, three-group La Marzocco FB/80 MP machines. There are a few indoor tables, leather bench seating along one wall, and an upstairs for more seating. Order at the counter in back, beneath the massive red wall with Caffé Medici’s “Cosimo” on it, and your order will electronically beam over to the center barista area.

They mostly pull shots of local roaster Cuvée Coffee with a very even, medium brown crema. They serve it properly short and potent, with a rich body and a nice, blended flavor of spice, herbal pungency, even a little wood and yet a noticeable brightness over the top.

It has a complex flavor, though oddly served in cheap Delco cups and with a side of sparkling water. One day they brought in bags of Verve‘s Sermon blend, so they do a rotation at times. Though one word of warning: the Cuvée Coffee roasts sold at the bar were about three weeks old. But that’s more of a minor complaint.

Their milk-frothing is very wet and somewhat dense — there’s no real foam here — and it comes with decent rosetta latte art.

Read the review of Caffé Medici in downtown Austin, TX.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Saturday, February 25, 2012 offered a curious contrast between the very different worlds of consumer appreciation for wine and coffee. For the former, I attended La Paulée de San Francisco 2012 — arguably the most over-the-top consumer wine event in America. For the latter, my brother Vince simultaneously attended CoffeeCon 2012 — billed as the “first-ever international consumer coffee conference” — in the global coffee Mecca (and his hometown) of Warrenville, IL.

First off, I’d like to apologize for continuing to harp on the hackneyed wine analogy for coffee. However, I still often feel like one of the few people who knows just enough about both wine and coffee appreciation to make a comparison when attending events for either beverage.

Because the facts remain that we read plenty about how much coffee wants to be taken as seriously as wine. And yet the coffee industry still craps on its customers at virtually every opportunity. This weekend’s events provided evidence of that in great contrast.

CoffeeCon 2012

First up: the consumer coffee event. Kevin Sinnott has been a layman coffee enthusiast for years (and he also just so happens to a neighbor and friend of my brother back in the dark recesses of the Chicago suburbs). He may be an independent video production consultant for his “day job”, but coffee is far more than just a hobby for him. And more power to him, because he recognized the need for a consumer-oriented coffee event — which inspired him to put on the first ever CoffeeCon.

The best opportunity coffee consumers had to get involved with the coffee industry was to muscle in to events such as the SCAA’s annual conference — all under a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Since then, the policy has shifted towards outright consumer abolishment. But even if you buy the argument that the industry needs its own for its own, it has offered nothing even close to an olive branch. We hear the coffee industry give plenty of lip service to the importance of “educating the customer”, and yet opportunities to do so are turned into closed-door industry events where the consumer is treated like an unwelcome leper.

Slow Food Nation ’08 was perhaps another example, but it turned out to be a one-time event. Out of it came the Good Food Awards. But even if you look past coffee playing the red-headed stepchild under the “Food” banner, here the focus of a once-public event has again turned to industry insiders locking out consumer participation. Or take the related Coffee Common effort. Even putting my disdain for the shallowness and faux elitism of TED aside, public events that require over $1,000 in membership and registration fees to attend are hardly “consumer friendly”. This makes the steep $300 I shelled out to attend La Paulée’s Grand Tasting seem like a bargain by comparison.

CoffeeCon suffered from an almost accidental location (Warrenville’s “IBEW Local Union 701″) and virtually zero coverage among the coffee industry — most of the industry being preoccupied with the self-absorbed, industry navel-gazing going on at the Northeast Regional Barista Competition (or NERBC). But CoffeeCon managed to draw about 1,000 attendees and even pull a few coffee luminaries including the likes of George Howell, home espresso legend Jim Schulman, and Intelligentsia‘s Geoff Watts.

Attendees apparently got to taste a lot of different coffee, experiment with different brewing methods, meet a few others in the coffee industry, learn more about coffee farming and production, and even witness a poor tongue-in-cheek debate on coffee vs. wine. My brother reported that they had a huge crowd, a good representation from nationwide roasters and equipment manufacturers, and the unveiling of a new Bunn Trifecta at a “lab” event.

While not a bad event and certainly a promising attendance, this is, folks, about as good as it gets for coffee consumers today. And good luck getting anybody in the coffee industry to acknowledge that it existed.

On the coffee industry making consumers feel unwelcome…

One thing I like from the CoffeeCon FAQ — which flies in the face of Coffee Common’s “Exceptional coffee. No sugar.” byline — is this bit:

Can I take cream and sugar in my coffee or will I be asked to leave? No worries. Serious coffee lovers know how different everyone’s palate is. 80% of coffee consumed in the world is taken with milk and/or some sweetener.

This week I had dinner again at one of my favorite SF restaurants who also makes some of the best restaurant espresso in the entire city. The two owners, in their own polite and self-depreciating ways, each relayed to me the story of a recent visit to Sightglass where they were essentially made to feel as if they were both clueless about both coffee and their flavor palates. (I’ve omitted their names as they mentioned this in personal confidence.)

Interestingly, they both felt that Sightglass’ coffee tasted “too salty.” When they asked the Sightglass barista to cut the shot pour short, as a sort of ristretto, he replied that he could not interrupt the espresso machine from running its full cycle. And when they asked for sugar, they were looked upon as if they must have walked in thinking Sightglass was a Dunkin’ Donuts.

Here were two people who grew up with high coffee standards in Italy, developed a much-loved and highly regarded regional Italian restaurant in SF, serve some of the best espresso in the city at said restaurant (and I virtually never have coffee with sugar), where one of the owners previously served as a sommelier at another Michelin-starred SF restaurant with a legendary wine list — and they were basically told that they were coffee Philistines, purely because of coffee orthodoxy. As snobbish as you might think the wine world might get, this simply does not happen with wine.

How the wine world does a consumer event: La Paulée de San Francisco 2012

Speaking of sommeliers and a barista’s desire to become an equivalent of one, let’s contrast with La Paulée’s Grand Tasting at the Westin St. Francis. Daniel Johnnes, a noted wine director for noted New York restaurants that today includes Restaurant Daniel (read: a guy who works in the industry), started the event about a decade ago, alternating between New York an San Francisco. It is based in a traditional Burgundian event, and in Mr. Johnnes’ words for the SF event:

La Paulée is my homage to La Paulée de Meursault, a convivial Burgundian fête shared by growers and their guests. At La Paulée guests will sample current releases and older vintages from nearly thirty of the most sought after Domaines of Burgundy. The wine service will be led by fifty of our nation’s most noted sommeliers.

They ain’t messing around. (Here’s a magazine write-up [PDF] on last year’s La Paulée in New York.) The Grand Tasting may cost $300, but that’s cheap compared to the $1,400 Gala Dinner (or compared to the registration fee to experience Coffee Commons at TED2012 in Long Beach).

There are people in traditional Burgundian wear, regularly breaking into traditional Burgundian drinking songs, flown in from Burgundy for this event — Les Cadets de Bourgogne. And there are many booths of elite winemakers, offering wines that you could only be lucky enough to even access a bottle to purchase, all poured by notable sommeliers. In coffee terms, this is akin to an event featuring several of the world’s Cup of Excellence microlots for tasting, each served by award-winning baristas.

And they don’t skimp on the food either, with restaurant representation from the likes of Boulevard, Farralon, Gary Danko, Napa’s Meadowood and REDD, Quince, RN74, etc. You know that the food world takes the event seriously when not only are sommeliers from New York pouring at the event, but the likes of Traci des Jardins (of Jardinière and Top Chef Masters fame) is there personally cooking up and handing out plates of food.

As a consumer event, what’s not there? No hucksters promoting the latest technology in synthetic corks. No pitchmen telling you how to expand your revenue lines with wine coolers. No patent-pending bottle openers that promise to revolutionize wine consumption. Just a lot of people who want to share great wines and learn more about them and an industry that is trying to make that possible in ways it previously was not.

We can only hope just a fraction of that is possible with coffee — if only the industry would allow it, let alone participate in it. It’s beyond the time for quality coffee to get out of its insular ivory towers and to start reaching out to the many customers it so claims to love and adore.

With NFL fans facing a major void in their lives since the NY Giants won the NFL’s Survivor: Indianapolis competition, thankfully there are publications like Food Republic that have come up with their own “power rankings.” As if to prove just how much we’re not making this up, it took Food Republic less than two years of its short existence to apparently run out of material in the edibles category for their power rankings. Thus they have since started overreaching into beverages as “food” with “The 10 most influential people in coffee right now”: Food Republic Coffee Power Rankings | Food Republic.

Cue Casey Kasem…

Topping this dubious list is Blue Bottle Coffee‘s James Freeman at #1. Followed by Peter Giuliano — of Counter Culture Coffee (and consumers-must-cup-and-they-must-like-it) fame — and Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

Just how these people are considered “influential” is beyond anyone’s rational guess. Two more retweets than the other guys this month? James Hoffman took a few weeks off to see his family and thus dropped off the list? The guys at Food Republic ordered some coffee from Phil & Sebastian last week and also received a free plastic coffee scoop in the mail? Oh, the suspense is killing us. Just killing us!

Swedish chef and Top Chef Masters contestant Marcus Samuelsson founded Food Republic in 2010 as a food Web site “for men.” For a guy known for piling flowers on his TV dinners, he may not strike you as the voice of the machismo NASCAR set. But his publication does go out on a limb, managing to refute the Mayan calendar doomsday prophecy by citing their “previous ranking from our December 2012 [sic] rankings”.

Yesterday’s Seattle Times wrote up a decent piece on Kent Bakke of Seattle La Marzocco fame: Business & Technology | Local coffee world reveres this pioneer | Seattle Times Newspaper. Mr. Bakke’s history with espresso heralds back to the late 1970s when he began importing and distributing La Marzocco machines from Italy.

Things were quiet until 1984, when Starbucks came calling for his machines and a Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco soon followed suit. (Over the years, Seattle Times columnist Melissa Allison has proven herself unable to write an article about coffee without devoting large portions of it to Starbucks, and, well, this one is no different.)

After buying 90% of La Marzocco in 1994, he helped ramp up the local La Marzocco factory in Ballard, WA to the point where they were manufacturing 140 machines each month. Then in 2004, things came crashing down when Starbucks decided to throw in the towel on quality while trying to keep up with their rampant growth plans — ultimately replacing all their “grown up” espresso machines for push-button Verismo jobs that required little more than trained monkeys to operate.

La Marzocco has since recovered somewhat, even if it is currently under competitive pressure from the likes of Synesso (lead by former Bakke employee, Mark Barnett) and Slayer. The article also attempted to make out a La Marzocco controversy over the pricing of the GS/3 prosumer home machine in 2008. However, despite some rumblings from a few devoted loyalists with a lot of cash, that episode adds little weight to the story. In the world of espresso, the consumer market is virtually ignored if not outright dismissed by much of the professional espresso world.

Opening in May 2009, this Blue Bottle Coffee outlet is located inside the SFMOMA museum on the fifth-floor Rooftop Garden. It’s a rather elite affair, given the open space and the artworks that surround it. There’s seating on concrete floors and benches among modern sculptures, but there are also white metal café tables for seating.

They use Mazzer and Astoria grinders, offer Bonmac filters for single origin drip, and (quite unusual for Blue Bottle) a three-group Mistral Mirage Idrocompresso Triplette with manual levers.

They pull espresso shots with a medium brown crema and darker brown spots. It’s served quite short for a doppio, but it’s the right amount of potent: very well balanced, broad flavor profile of herbs, pungency, and some tobacco and honey. They use a special SFMOMA blend of five different beans, and it is a true blend — almost something of a rarity in the U.S. It’s one of the best homogenized examples of a blend that Blue Bottle offers. Hopefully they will make a blend like this more widely available.

Served in a Heath ceramics demitasse with a side of sparkling water. About as good as museum coffee can get.

Read the review of Blue Bottle Coffee Co. at the SFMOMA Rooftop Garden.

Opening in October 2011, this new location of the Mission/Potrero Hill’s Coffee Bar expands their reach downtown to something you can actually walk to. The space is small and can get quite packed in a rush, but it’s clean, well-lit, and has a lab-like feel with its white countertops and lower cabinets.

They offer no indoor seating, but there is a short stand-up window counter and a few wooden sidewalk chairs and a bench in front. Even without the seating, it’s a wise choice for a new location — filling a void that many downtown patrons of decent coffee have lacked since the closure of Caffè Amici nearby. And they should clearly see this opening as a major neighborhood upgrade.

The shop is set up to impress, as they offer scale-weighed hand pours — weighing being de rigeur for getting your TDS right in a shop since about 2010 — and espresso drinks from dueling two-group La Marzocco Strada machines. (To say nothing of the impressive baked goods from Sandbox Bakery.) To their credit, the menu is relatively simple and the options are focused.

They still seem to be dialing in on the quality of their espresso here, however, as it didn’t measure up yet to the standards at the Coffee Bar mothership. Using Mr. Espresso beans, they pull shots with a decent layer of a mixed medium and darker brown crema. The flavor is complex with an emphasis at the herbal pungency end. Served in black ACF cups.

Downtown SF not only again has good coffee, but the bar has been raised.

Read the review of Coffee Bar in the Financial District.

Some five years ago we wrote about the problem of espresso sameness in the SF Bay Area. At issue is the challenge for local communities to preserve a diversity of quality coffee purveyors. On that subject, today’s Washington D.C. City Paper posted an article on their city’s growing quality coffee monoculture: How Did Counter Culture Coffee Take Over D.C.? Freebies – Young & Hungry.

A regional diversity in roasting styles, bean sourcing, and even plain old philosophical approaches towards coffee (for example, industry-centric practices vs. being customer-centric) is a prerequisite for any vibrant coffee culture to exist. Too much of one philosophy or approach without a foil, and it becomes hegemony — if not also a little monotony.

Given this age of large corporate buy-outs and company financial failures — to which D.C. is no stranger — having all your eggs in one basket is also a recipe for disaster. The article also offers up some local purveyors that give hope for more of a balanced coffee economy in the area.