Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Two months ago we reported on our trials with a superautomatic home espresso machine representing much of the state-of-the-art: the Philips Saeco Syntia Focus. Reading Saeco’s product literature and marketing communications, you’d be led to believe that this machine made “the perfect espresso” every time. But to most people who read our original post two months back, the Saeco committed unforgivable crimes against coffee.

The truth lies somewhere between those polar opposites. And now that we’ve had two months of regular use to better explore the machine’s merits and limitations, here we revisit this topic in greater detail.

The Robots Aren’t Winning

First of all, it’s critical to note that there’s very little (if anything) uniquely problematic with the Saeco Synthia Focus that you won’t also find in many of its up-market, superautomatic home espresso machine bretheren — whether they are made by the likes of Jura, Capresso (and now Jura-Capresso), Nespresso, or the decidedly more dubious Breville, DeLonghi, or (*gag*) Krups.

However, when talking about superautomatics for the home, the source of their coffee is a major differentiator within these product lines: there are coffee pod machines, and there are machines that use real coffee. That we use the term “real” coffee — to differentiate what most people recognize as coffee from anything that comes packaged in a proprietary system of cartridges — is only partly facetious.

Pod machine coffee may be marketed and priced as if it were elite quality coffee, but in truth it is arguably just a step up from instant coffee. Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi may have signed on as ambassador to Nespresso. But since Nespresso is pre-ground coffee produced by the world’s largest food conglomerate, she may as well be the ambassador to Del Monte canned peas.

Any coffee brewing system with the option of using whole bean coffee, ground to order, and where the consumer can vouch for the coffee’s roast date, should theoretically have a massive freshness advantage over its pod machine competition. Except that’s not exactly what happens in practice. The Saeco Syntia Focus has this great advantage. But like many of its peers, it squanders it — producing espresso shots that hardly seem like an improvement over pod coffee. Most visibly notable is how sickly pale the crema is on the shots it produces.

The Sickly Pale Crema: Bane to All Superautomatic Home Machines

To improve the shots, we took advantage of several machine adjustments: setting the built-in grinder to its finest grind, setting the volume of coffee deposited in its filter basket to its maximum, and reducing the overall volume of the shots. The first shot the machine produces after powering up is always a ghostly pale blonde and is rather insipid. So we let its built-in “Adapting System” tune itself to the coffee with a few successive shots, which do noticeably improve to a crema that’s slightly fuller, darker, and with more texture that might even include microbubbles.

Hence one of the myths we discovered about superautomatic espresso machines: despite their promise of robotic consistency, the shots are somewhat variable.

Yet despite all of our improvement measures, the best shots we could muster with the Saeco Syntia Focus quite literally paled in comparison to the routine shots we pulled with our Gaggia G106 Factory (with a new brass piston) + Mazzer Mini home set-up. Once we fixed our old home machine, we used a four-day-old roast of The Boss from Barefoot Coffee Roasters to run side-by-side experiments. The flavor and body of the Saeco shots didn’t measure up to the Gaggia pulls, but the visual difference was even more dramatic.

As if the question isn’t rhetorical, which of the two espresso shots looks more appealing in the photo at left? Hint: a friend pointed out that the shot made with the Gaggia “looks like cocoa”. The other shot looks like weak drip coffee mixed with milk. Meanwhile, a brochure that comes with the Saeco (called a “Passport”) states that the crema “should be hazelnut brown with occasional darker shades.”

Despite our Saeco machine adjustments, clearly something is wrong with its extraction. We managed to rule out the Saeco’s built-in grinder as a major problem, as the Saeco offers an option to bypass its grinder with pre-ground coffee. Using our Mazzer Mini, we poured fresh grinds of the same coffee directly into the machine and didn’t notice a significant difference in the resulting shots.

After a lot of trial and error, we narrowed down the Saeco’s failures to brewing times. After a pre-infusion of around 4.5 seconds, the machine runs an extraction for only about 10.7-11.3 seconds. This is significantly less than the 20-second-plus extraction times recommended in most reputable espresso guides. And unfortunately, extraction time is one variable that the Saeco machine does not let you adjust. (A Saeco customer support woman in Ohio attempted to follow up with us to help “correct” our problems, but she never returned our call.)

While the pressure of espresso extraction certainly accelerates the necessary 3-4 minute brew times of proper coffee-to-water contact in a pour-over cup, a mere 11 seconds is far too little brewing time for espresso. We’ve recently seen reviews boasting of a coffee machine’s 45-second end-to-end brewing times, and here the Saeco Syntia Focus requires a mere 33 seconds from button-push to serving.

This is akin to a hospital’s maternity ward boasting that you can have your baby there in only 7 months. Premature babies are bad, and so is premature espresso. Is waiting 10 more seconds that unreasonable to get a properly extracted espresso? How is this a selling point?

And yet we continue to use the Saeco quite a lot

Despite its obvious quality limitations, we honestly like the Saeco machine and have even grown somewhat fond of it. We still use it quite a lot and even look forward to the so-so espresso that it produces. Why we still use it is largely a matter of push-button convenience. Call it “laziness” or less time spent making acceptable espresso.

Because time is money, despite what the home finance trolls keep telling us. Even the pod machines aren’t quite as convenient as the Saeco, because you can go through several rounds of push-button espresso before having to empty out the tray of spent pucks.

But speaking of spent grounds, the Saeco is far from “self-cleaning”. It’s a bit like automating your own sloppy minimum wage employee, given the internal mess you have to clean up every few days.

The Saeco’s product designers clearly took some shortcuts on keeping it clean back there: the black plastic and embedded compartment make visibility of any coffee ground mess particularly difficult to see without a small flashlight, and the stuff accumulates in the oddest random corners. Let it accumulate too long, and the machine will jam up like a printer — continually spitting perfectly fine ground coffee into its spent puck dumpster, with only a momentary warning light flashing just before nothing comes out of its brew head. Then the lights proudly tell you the machine is ready to brew another shot.

This is perhaps the most aggravating thing about the machine: the “Saeco Adapting System” will waste multiple shots of your best new coffee beans — immediately dumping them in the spent grounds litter bin without even extracting so much as an ounce of coffee — while it tries to adjust itself to the new coffee. There are few things more agonizingly wasteful than seeing your prized, expensive coffee beans being ground up and spit out in a wet, dirty waste bin for several cycles with no indication of when it might decide to produce any espresso.

One surprise was that its milk frothing, with its wacky pannarello wand attachment, is surprisingly good — blowing away my Gaggia G106 Factory in terms of steam pressure and foam consistency.

All things considered, we still wouldn’t pay more than $350 for the Saeco — despite its $1,000 retail price tag. And even for that money, we would rather have a simple, used Rancilio Silvia. Despite its obvious conveniences, we’re reluctant to put top-quality coffee in the Saeco. We certainly wouldn’t waste our best home roasting labors on the mediocre espresso it produces. Fresh roasted beans do make a difference, but beans of the highest quality are largely lost on this machine.

Thus there’s a sort of arrogant hubris to the Saeco Syntia Focus and virtually all of its $1,000 superautomatic home machine competitors. Consumers are promised the “perfect” espresso every time by these devices, and for a cool grand who wouldn’t expect that? But clearly these machines have not benchmarked themselves against what’s long been possible among home espresso enthusiasts.

Instead, what consumers get is closer to Starbucks‘ home Verismo machine — a home version of the automated push-button espresso experience that CEO Howard Schultz arguably said sucked the soul out of the company several years ago. Rather than offering technology and features that enable home consumers to enjoy the wealth of freshly roasted, top-quality coffee varieties now available on the market, consumers are given the bland, mass-produced experience common to any of 40,000 identical cafés. Worst of all, these home machine manufacturers tell consumers that this is perfection — and that consumers thus have no need to aspire for anything better than the mediocrity they offer.

UPDATE: November 16, 2012
Because we will still continue to experiment despite expecting the least encouraging results, we finally discovered a coffee that really excelled in the Saeco Syntia Focus: Stumptown Coffee Roasters‘ Grand Cru Guatemala Finca La Injerto – La Cima.

This was a bit of a shock, given previous underwhelming results. Grand Cru coffees mark one of the true differentiators for whole bean machines like the Syntia Focus over their pod-based brethren: the world’s elite coffees simply do not have the supply volume to make them a viable option for packaging, mass distribution, and mass production in coffee pods.

Tags: breville, capresso, consumer_marketing, DeLonghi, gaggia, home_espresso, jura, krups, mazzer, nespresso, premature_espresso, rancilio, saeco, Starbucks, superautomatic_espresso_machines, verismo

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Sometimes life surprises you when what seem like different compartmentalized aspects of it suddenly cross over. Such was the case today where, at one of the more famous technology start-up conferences here in San Francisco, I stumbled across a team building prototype coffeemaking equipment who were performing demonstrations. The company is SF-based Blossom Coffee Inc., and they’re building what they believe is the rightful successor to the Clover brewer — which just a few years back, over the period of several months, essentially entered and left the premium coffee world like a comet.

Does this “TechCrunch” stay crispy in milk?

First: a little background. You see, my “day job” is doing entrepreneurial work to get an education technology start-up off the ground. The coffee thing is largely a rather indulgent hobby with occasional fringe benefits. And the TechCrunch Disrupt conference focuses on technology start-ups with the lofty intent of “disrupting” many of the existing ways of doing business. Like Blossom Coffee, on Monday I was pitching my start-up on the conference showroom floor. But today (Wednesday) the conference devoted the floor to hardware companies of all kinds.

Attending a conference like this is a bit of a geek fest. Think of all the nerds in school who weren’t cool enough to start bands, so they started companies instead. Despite the thick layer of hubris at events like this, there are typically a few great ideas, many so-so ideas, and the majority are things none of us will probably ever see again in two years. And to peel off any self-important luster even further, you have to remember that building Web sites and mobile apps in SF today is a bit like building cars in Detroit was some 50 years ago.

That said, this year the conference attempted to emphasize both more international start-ups (I never knew so many Brazilian consumer wine Web sites existed) and start-ups featuring hardware products. Hence Blossom Coffee.

Doesn’t Blossom play Amy on The Big Bang Theory?

Coffee hardware start-ups are hardly new. The Clover Equipment Company was certainly one such example. Recent notable examples also include a Kickstarter project for a PID-controlled espresso machine and, like a bad acid flashback of 1998′s joke Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, an espresso machine that takes orders by SMS texts.

Talking with Blossom President, Jeremy Kuempel, we connected over our past experience taking thermodynamics classes in engineering college. Except when Jeremy learned the Ideal gas law equation of PV=nRT, often demonstrated by illustrations of pressurized gas in a piston, Jeremy immediately thought to put coffee in the cylindrical chamber. Pretty cool.

The primary goal of the Blossom Coffee brewer (the “Blossom One Limited”) is to succeed the Clover brewer in its degree of digitally configurable, stable temperature control. With a +/-2% accuracy from 160-212℉, it may not be coffee sous-vide just yet — but it’s getting there. Using two highly functional prototypes with La Marzocco group heads, Jeremy and team were experimenting for passersby at the event with some 16 pounds of coffee from Highwire Coffee Roasters. In addition to demonstrating some of the visual “romance” that’s important to high-end pressurized brewing equipment, Jeremy also hinted at some of the WiFi-enabled digital reading and control features planned for the brewer (recipe downloading, fleet management, etc.).

Alongside the working prototypes at their station was a rather sexy finished casing for the proposed end product, as they currently are only accepting pre-orders. They are initially targeting small, high quality coffee chains of some 5-10 stores each. And the taste in the resulting cup seemed promising.

We’ve seen attempted successors to the Clover brewer before — even from Clover. Now we may love our old school pour-over coffee, but anything that gets us to think once again about moving beyond the 104-year-old practice of manual pour-over brewing in today’s cutesy name of “slow coffee” (blech) is a welcome addition in our books. Traditions are good; having few viable alternatives after over a century is not. That’s not so much “slow coffee” as “inertia coffee.”

Thus we hope to find a Blossom brewer soon at a coffee shop near us.

UPDATE: Sept. 29, 2012
Quite a litany of newsfeeds picked up the story of Blossom today with this example bit of press from one of the feeders: What a drip! NASA and Apple alums engineer $11,111 coffee maker | Mail Online. Knowing that reporters are generally clueless about coffee and the prices of espresso machines — and thus they eat dollar-figures up given their lack of any other descriptive adjectives — the quoted $11,111 figure reads like deliberate idiot bait.

If so, these Blossom guys are more clever than we thought; they’ve made an insider’s joke that knows all too well what buttons to push for a news item to propel itself across the Internet via meme theory. Send in the trolls!

Tags: blossom_coffee, blossom_one_limited, clover, clover_brewer, clover_pour_over, inertia_coffee, la_marzocco, pour_over_coffee, slow_coffee

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Flying under our radar last month was a great cover story on the evolution and pitfalls of a quality local coffee business in Milwaukee Magazine: MilwaukeeMag.com – Coffee Wars.

As in many other mid-market cities across America over the past decade-plus, quality coffee has infiltrated even the most staunch communes of Starbucks drones. The Milwaukee coffee market is no exception, with Alterra Coffee serving as something of Milwaukee’s analogue to Blue Bottle.

But the story of Alterra Coffee could be the story of any pioneering quality coffee purveyor in America: local start-up business makes great coffee and changes local tastes and expectations, business success translates into growth of operations (roasting, retail, and distribution) and ambition, continued growth brings the company to a crossroads when they must answer where continued growth hurts product quality and company values, and the inspiration and spawning of newer, more nimble local competition.

That major crossroads for Alterra came in 2010 when Mars Corporation — the self-proclaimed “world’s leading petcare, chocolate, confection, food & drink company” (from their Web site) — approached them with an offer to include their coffee in Mars’ owned Flavia packets in exchange for revenue sharing and distribution rights.

Some 27 years ago in nearby Minneapolis, The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg croaked the words, “Time for decisions to be made: crack up in the sun, or lose it in the shade.” Do you reach for greater distribution and more revenues to expand your mission of good coffee? Or are you diluting your product and your brand, all the while inviting customer criticisms of going too “corporate” and selling out? (As the article quotes the local criticisms: “Alterra is the ‘Microsoft of coffee in Milwaukee’.”)

Like the Facebook status says: it’s complicated. And a cautionary tale worth the read.

Tags: alterra, blue_bottle, flavia, mars, milwaukee_cafes, milwaukee_coffee, quality_standards

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The sad state of home espresso machines is a topic we’ve tried to avoid for long stretches. After our last depressing installment in 2009, we’ve been blissfully ignorant — ratcheting up the solid-but-rarely-outstanding shot pulls on our relatively decent home espresso setup of a Gaggia G106 Factory manual lever machine and a Mazzer Mini grinder.

That is until May, when disaster struck. After 10 years of abuse — where I tuned the coffee grind to the limits of what my “one-armed bandit” could handle before it choked — the central piston finally gave out with one fateful pull. Feeling the physical resistance of its lever vanish in one quick slip, I knew right away it was more than just the final, releasing grasp of an dying gasket.

Upon disassembly and inspection, part of the otherwise-durable Ryton plastic molding that holds the piston gaskets in place had clearly broken away. It’s no surprise that Gaggia discontinued this part and now only produces a brass version. While replacement parts are easy to look up, my replacement piston was put on back-order from Italy until who-knows-when.

The Saeco Challenge

Now I like my Hario V60 or Chemex as much as the next guy. But a steady and exclusive diet of coffee masquerading as tea — i.e., tasting primarily of berries and flower gardens and lawn clippings — is most unsatisfying. Sure, I had the perfect excuse to have more espresso out again, but sometimes you want your quality espresso without leaving the house. Fortunately, life’s misfortune sometimes creates the occasional unexpected opportunity. It arrived in June in the form of an email to coffeeratings.com from a Philips Saeco rep, with the subject-line come-on of “The Perfect Espresso from Philips Saeco”:

Dear Greg,

Searching for the perfect espresso? We believe you can make it yourself, in the convenience of your home. I’m working closely with my client, Philips Saeco, to share their espresso machines with coffee experts like you. If it’s a good fit, we’d like for you to send you one of these machines.

The normal Greg would have spewed out his home-roasted espresso blend across the kitchen table upon reading that. (“Perfect espresso“? Have they read my blog?) But home espresso beggars can’t be choosers. And if there was ever an opportunity where I could dedicate my time and attention to make an honest attempt at decent espresso with one of these dubious, hulking plastic, overpriced, and underachieving superautomatic home espresso machines, this was it.

So last week, without notice, a giant Saeco box arrived on my front porch. Opening it up, I felt a little like Darren McGavin in A Christmas Story. But inside wasn’t a glowing leg lamp. Rather, it was a Saeco Syntia HD8833. To my surprise, rather than sending a throwaway economy job, Saeco sent one of their better models — listing for about $1,000 retail.

If we are going to be outraged about the poor espresso quality from a superautomatic home machine, all the better not to dismiss the verdict on the basis of a cheap machine. We may have seen some of this machine’s siblings in the showroom at the Saeco Caffè in Cape Town, South Africa — and the espresso there may not have been too shabby. But our experience with superautomatic home espresso machines like it has been flattering to the Nespresso machine, and we don’t like Nespresso.

The Alien from Planet ‘Brain-Dead Espresso’

While I am no home espresso novice, the contents of the Saeco box seemed practically alien. What’s with all the plastic? Where’s the metal? You mean there’s more to today’s home espresso machine electronics than a heating element? And what’s that vibrating noise that sounds like a cheap home aquarium filter?

The device seems large, and yet it’s considered “compact” by many of today’s standards. Its side opens up like an ink jet printer — not exactly the mental analogy you want to be making for consumables. And it’s ridiculously robotic. Everything has been automated to death: coffee grinding, dosing, tamping, extraction. Hope still lied in the fact that a number of its automated tasks were adjustable: fineness of the grind, the volume of coffee, and the extraction time. But I am leery of any coffee machine that tries to be smarter than you.

I gained back a little confidence when much of its accompanying printed documentation emphasized the importance of descaling and cleaning. I’ve lost count of how many horrific, Exxon-Valdez-sized coffee oil Superfund sites we’ve stumbled upon in various Nespresso machine kitchens — with their delusional, convenience-obsessed owners believing that these devices also automated their cleaning and maintenance.

The machine required an extended “priming” operation, where the machine went through a series of button pushes, water cycles, and its display performed its best rendition of a Pink Floyd laser light show. Once primed and good beans (a nice Full City+ roast on Guatemala Antigua beans with ~ 1 week since roasting) were added to the hopper, we pushed the button for out first shot — with the maximum dosing (“aroma” in its manual’s parlance) and the smallest-sized shot from the factory presets.

Results in the tazza

The resulting shot was very large (at the rim of a regulation IPA demitasse), with a shockingly white thin crema, and a watery body. It tasted like what most horrible espresso shots tasted like in San Francisco back in the 1980s: overdrawn, over-extracted, and lacking any potency, body, or creaminess. The spent puck it spewed out was well-shaped but thoroughly soggy; gently touching the puck caused it to disintegrate into wet sludge.

Our immediate reaction was to head to the “Troubleshooting” section of the manual. It said much about the “Saeco Adapting System” and why your first shots might, well, suck. For example: “coffee is too weak” states that it is a “Rare event that occurs when the machine is automatically adjusting the dose. Brew a few coffees as described in section ‘Saeco Adapting System’.” Another measure of assurance was in the notes: “Note: These problems can be considered normal if the coffee blend has been changed or if the machine has just been installed.”

The first shot was followed by a second identical espresso shot … followed by a third identical shot. Yes, superautomatic consistency alright. Which is great if the espresso is good, but it’s a horrible curse and a waste of good coffee beans when the espresso sucks. We barely resisted the compelling urge to change practically every possible adjustment right away. Part of the reason was to let the machine invoke its “Adapting System” as advertised, and another part was to minimize the chaos of changing multiple variables at the same time.

Even so, how could an Italian company claim that such a machine is normally factory-tuned to produce “the perfect Italian espresso” right out of the box? I’ve been to Italy numerous times, and the espresso is never close to this bad — anywhere. Worse, Saeco’s documentation warns that you might find some residual coffee grounds on your new machine, as they have been put through testing before packaging. Testing for what? The taste of watery 1980s San Francisco espresso made by clueless minimum-wage employees?

It’s not just Saeco: we’ve found every other manufacturer of four-figure superautomatic home espresso machines guilty of the exact same failures. Yet despite this distasteful — but not unexpected — start, in our next installment we will write about the adjustments we made and how it may, or may not, have affected the quality of the resulting espresso shots.

“Secret, secret, I’ve got a secret. And it’s how to make decent espresso out of me.”

Tags: chemex, gaggia, hario_v60_dripper, home_espresso, ipa_cups, mazzer, nespresso, saeco, superautomatic_espresso_machines

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Copy-editors are strange beasts. They can take a perfectly valid story, dress it up with titles and subheds, and transform it into something that sounds completely irrelevant to the contents within. Take yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece on efforts seeking the genetic diversification of consumable coffee: The Indiana Jones of Coffee – WSJ.com (subhed: “Companies Go Deep Into Africa in Search of Perfect Bean”).

No, it’s not a bio piece about some swashbuckling snake-charmer in search of lost coffee gold. The Orchid Thief would be a more appropriate movie reference for just one of the characters in the article. It’s also not about Africa, as the genetic diversification effort is global. It’s not even about the ever-abused mythical “perfect bean” — as any single genetic coffee bean lineage would be just as susceptible to a mass extinction event as the limited coffee progeny we enjoy today.

But peel back the superficial layers of Hollywood pomp, general cluelessness, and deceit, and you’ll discover a decent article on efforts to develop more genetically robust and diverse options for our drinkable coffee stocks — something of a follow-up to a post we wrote six years ago. Of some 26 documented coffee species, only two are cultivated to produce something humans would actually pay money to consume. And of those two, many consider only one of them as drinkable.

Tags: arabica, coffee_beans, coffee_genetics, coffee_tech, Robusta

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The Internet is so overstuffed with information, it suffers from a kind of amnesia. Something may have been posted 20,000 times before, but that 20,001st time — as if we all really needed it — might still be worth a mention because Internet users have either forgotten or have yet to notice.

Which explains the endless rehashing of tired, old coffee topics on brain-dead sites like SeriousEats and LifeHacker: Should you freeze coffee for storage? How to steam milk at home? How do you draw rosetta latte art? How does coffee go from cherry to bean? Basically, a plagiarized recycling of stale information written more for search engines than for any human reader yet to succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.

But just because we crave original thought once in a while doesn’t mean that history has no value. However, if you’re digging up old bodies, who better than The Smithsonian? — who recently published this great piece on the history of the espresso machine: The Long History of the Espresso Machine | Design Decoded. Angelo Moriondo, Luigi Bezzerri, Desiderio Pavoni, Pier Teresio Arduino, Achille Gaggia, and Ernesto Valente’s Faema E61 — it’s all there, just as we like it.

Tags: coffee_history, espresso_machines, faema, gaggia, la_pavoni, victoria_arduino

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What a fantastic find on the fringes of Monterey city. This location, open for a few years now, is mostly a roastery (with a roaster in back supplied by Roasters Exchange) who supplies a number of area restaurants and cafés, however they also offer kiosk-like walk-up retail beverage service.

The address will take you to their non-descript garage entrance, so you need to head around the corner to an alley with a cyclone-fence-enclosed parking lot. Even if there’s no place to sit here, there are plenty of locals who frequent this spot and all seem to know each other: women in exercise pants, hipsters, old guys with pick-ups, former employees, etc. There are two short metal counters to stand against and drink your brew, however.

There are various stickers against the front counter, plus various odd collectables on the walls and a general homage to the odd and unusual. It feels a lot like the Barefoot Coffee Roasters Coffee Works and Roll-UP Bar in San Jose, just with a lot more quirk. (And how many places do you know sell straight chicory for $3.50 a half pound?)

For coffee service they offer a pour-over bar, a two-group, turquoise Rancilio Z9 lever machine, and a very rare and less-used three-group orange Brugnetti Aurora lever machine. In addition to espresso shots with their Motor City Espresso blend, they were offering single origin shots of Guatemala Hue Hue Tenango.

They serve shots with a mottled, swirled dark and medium brown crema, a potent aroma, a rich body, and a complex, well-blended flavor of fresh spice, some tobacco, and sweeter notes. Served in a mismatched collection of ceramic espresso cups. This is one of the finest new espresso shots we’ve had in a year.

The milk-frothing leaves a lot to be desired, however, as they serve cappuccino in only paper cups and with too much coffee volume – making it more of a latte with some stiff froth. Monterey’s Café Lumiere makes a much better cap with latte art.

Read the review of Acme Coffee Roasting Co. in Seaside, CA.

Tags: acme_roasting, barefoot_roasters, brugnetti, coffee_roasting, espresso_review, lever_machine, monterey_cafes, rancilio

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Opening around Thanksgiving of 2011, this downtown location of Verve clearly ups the design aesthetics and sends a signal across the street of the venerable Lulu Carpenters. If only the coffee service could live up to everything else promised by visual pageantry here.

It’s a beautiful, open space with a prime location. A former curiosity shop (fruit baskets, etc.) called “Best of Everything Santa Cruz”, this space remained vacant for a number of years prior to Verve’s move-in. There’s a lot of exposed, unfinished wood integrated in its interior design (though less wood than, say, Sightglass) and bare, decorative hanging lightbulbs.

It’s an airy space with seating concentrated at stools and window counters along Pacific Ave. and Front St. There’s also larger wooden tables with affixed, movable seating that suggests a strange cross between a McDonald’s and a German biergarten. There’s a wall of merchandising, which includes a variety of freshly roasted coffees. And not that we’re big fans of marketing literature, but they oddly offer nothing for potential consumers to discriminate their different coffees. This becomes particularly perplexing when they offer roasts from four different El Salvador farms as when we visited. (For the record, we tried some of their El Salvador La Benedición, which we randomly purchased and recommend after some home trials.)

They showcase two gleaming three-group La Marzocco Strada machines, each accompanied by three Mazzer grinders featuring three different bean stocks. It’s not like their service counter doesn’t take the appropriate time — waits for an espresso shot can be 5-10 minutes even at 3pm on a Saturday. But the resulting shot, using their Sermon blend, had a tepid serving temperature, a thin medium brown crema with some limited texture, and a watered-down body that tastes of wet tobacco leaves. Served in notNeutral cups with a side of sparkling water.

It is surprisingly disappointing, given the quality at their mothership location, although not inconsistent with most places that opt to showcase modern pressure-control machines like the Strada or Slayer. (Too often we find that new toys or aesthetics can matter more than a good end product.) It certainly could be an off barista or one that refused to sink shot when they should have. But the overall experience leaves you with the impression that the emphasis and expense here are focused on the wrong, superficial things.

A setup like this with the results they produce are as wastefully aggrevating as the guy with the $60,000 Porsche roadster driving 55mph in a 65mph zone along US 101 — using the passing lane instead as a retirement lane to mentally check-out and avoid making any driving decisions. We will take a storebought roast with a cheap, used La Spaziale machine and a barista obsessive about perfecting his/her shot — and who knows how to use the equipment properly — over this puffed-up experience anyday. It may cost a mere $2.75, but when you can get comparable quality shots for $1.25, Verve is letting their standards and their customers down. Verve is clearly capable of much better, so a revisit is mandatory.

Read the review of Verve Coffee Roasters in downtown Santa Cruz.

Tags: espresso_review, la_marzocco, mazzer, notNeutral, santa_cruz_coffee, sightglass, slayer_espresso_machine, strada, verve

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We’ve ranted against the Medical Infotainment industrial complex more than enough times here on this blog. You know the weekly stream of pop medical news headlines: alternating manic depressive cycles of “coffee kills”, then “coffee gives you immortality”, then lather, rinse, repeat. Billions of dollars wasted on decades of coffee medical research, and all we have to show for it is a see-saw of paranoid news bites and the sneaking suspicion that, after a millenium of epidemiological evidence, coffee really doesn’t matter to your health.

This week we witnessed media coverage of a New England Journal of Medicine study that suggested a “lower risk of death for coffee lovers.” Misleading false conclusions aside, no sooner did this news fill media columns and airtime than we were bombarded by press releases emailed from Big Coffee — with various purveyors citing this study as a rationale to sell more of their product.

In other words: drink our coffee, or you will die. Call it ultimatum marketing.

When did coffee become so horrible that its consumption had to be driven by death threats? Instead of appealing to a sensory enjoyment of coffee, we’ve reduced it to the utility (and sexiness) of cod liver oil. Rather than treat coffee as a reward, it is now a self-inflicted punishment. Do these coffee companies really want customers who think, “I don’t like coffee and would never drink it before, but since I don’t want to die…”

Meanwhile, the wine industry can only look on in wonder at just how badly the coffee industry can screw itself over.

Tags: coffee_health, coffee_marketing, media-medical-research-complex, medical_journalism, press_releases

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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. Its name might suggest a sex toy store if it were in some SF neighborhood a few miles East. Here it is a coffeehouse that 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.

Tags: coffee_roasting, espresso_review, la_san_marco, outer_richmond, third_wave, trouble_coffee

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