Media profiles of Illycaffè‘s Andrea Illy are commonplace. But this one from today’s The Guardian (UK) is better than most: Andrea Illy: family businessman who’s raising the bar for premium coffee | Business | The Guardian.

For one, Mr. Illy talks about the importance of pricing and brand positioning. Regardless of what you think of Illy coffee, offering discount promotions and specials is incongruous with establishing it as a luxury item. You don’t lure customers with a come-on for a cheap fix; you lure them because they want to treat themselves. Discounts cheapen that image and position you for the coffee misery market.

He also notes how Illycaffè ensures that resellers of its coffee have the right equipment and are making it properly, retraining staff if necessary. While this is critical for the perceived quality of any roaster whose coffee beans are served in third-party establishments, our data suggests that Illycaffè has fallen far short of living up to these ideals — at least in the U.S.

Back in 2009 we made a comparison of our espresso scores among cafés with common machines, common roasters, or common chain brands, and we used the standard deviation of these scores as a measure of inconsistency. Illy coffee rated much more inconsistently than different Starbucks chain stores — which are notorious themselves for their very poor consistency.

“[Fairtrade] is about paying a higher price for the same goods” — Andrea Illy

Consistent with an interview four years ago, Mr. Illy finishes the article with a couple of good contrarian, somewhat incendiary quotes about Fair Trade. For one: “[Fairtrade] is about paying a higher price for the same goods. That is against the laws of supply and demand.” Another: “consumers pay more for Fairtrade because they want to feel good. It’s about solidarity not quality. Why not give to the Red Cross?”

All of which echoes many of our thoughts about the rather trendy role of “Corporate Social Responsibility” in business today, where consumers seem to prefer to outsource their charitable giving to third-party businesses rather than donate directly themselves. As we always ask: don’t tell us you’re going to donate 10% of the sales proceeds to charity. Give us that 10% off, and let us take responsibility and decide who and how much to donate with the extra savings. You’re my coffee roaster, not my Foundation.

Among coffee aficionados in town, quality artisan coffee originates with Origin. Opening in 2006 in a more modest space, this place changed the face of coffee in Cape Town if not South Africa. Since its expansion, it is now three transparent levels of coffee, café, roasting, regional Synesso distributor, and barista training labs. If that wasn’t enough, there’s even a Nigiro Tea salon inside that will wow any tea lover. (“Nigiro” being “Origin” backwards.) It’s no mistake that the three core people behind the cool South African coffee blog, I Love Coffee, chose to meet me at this very place to discuss the local coffee culture.

One of the striking things about this three-level church of coffee is its level of transparency and open access. Through efforts such as Fair Trade, Direct Trade, and the organic coffee movement, transparency in the industry has become an operative word. Here that transparency comes to life — as visitors are welcome to walk throughout the building, check out their roasting operations, inspect their bags of imported beans, and tour their barista training facilities.

Level 1

The service area downstairs is dark with wood slat walls — sporting an array of Hario vac pots, moka pots, drippers, home espresso machines, and beans. Sure, you could say that this place has all the same fad-driven coffee trappings at Truth., but for some reason it seems more genuine in this environment. There is plenty of seating and a two-group La Marzocco Linea at the ready for espresso drinks. Though this Hudson-Street-level downstairs entrance is a bit clubby with a lounge-like feel.

Signs announce the more interesting fresh roasts from Origin’s roasting operations, with a heavier emphasis on African-sourced-beans (Tanzania, etc.) but also some single origins from familiar terroir in Central and South America plus the occasional El Salvador Cup of Excellence. Signs also announce Origin’s place as the home of the 2007 & 2008 South African barista champions.

Level 2

Up the stairs past the Nigiro Tea salon, you enter their second level which consists of offices and a series of benches that form an espresso machine lab. Here, with barista certifications of employees hung on the wall, you can work with a Synesso machine, a WEGA, or a variety of other machines for training (or repair) services. Five years ago we recall Eton Tsuno of the defunct Café Organica espousing his vision for an espresso bar that offers home barista training, showcases home espresso machine models, etc. It’s been five years, and San Francisco still has yet to deliver on that vision. But here it is in Cape Town, South Africa — almost exactly as Eton described.

Level 3

Upstairs to the top floor, you encounter their main roasting operations, a lot of in-process bagging for shipment, and a soul food café. Towards the rear of the floor, there’s a brighter, glass-enclosed seating area that opens out to patio tables and chairs under parasols across from nearby modeling agencies. There’s plenty of café seating there behind the bright panes of glass with a chalkboard wall that’s something of a community chat space.

Like a few other quality places in the area, they serve their espresso shots as default doubles. There are no cappuccinos on the drink menu: only flat whites. There’s even a “3/4 flat white” for this who like theirs with less steamed milk. Staff wearing Origin “Some Like It Black” T-shirts use another two-group La Marzocco Linea machine to pull their double shots in 30ml shotglasses (for R14), placed on a saucer with a short glass of mineral water on the side. Origin used to offer ceramic demitasses for their espresso, but they’ve run out and are awaiting a new supply (they complained that those from the previous supplier chipped too easily).

The Taste Test

Their espresso has a hefty, darker brown crema that persists, a robust body (one of the better examples in Cape Town), and a rounded, pungent, herbal-based flavor with spices and sweetness at the bottom of the cup. They also produce excellent microfoam: it’s even and not overly generous on their cappuccino (OK, “flat white”). You can readily see how inspirational Origin is — any town would be lucky to have it.

Read the review of Origin Coffee Roasting in Cape Town, South Africa.

Coffee talk in the mainstream press these days looks a bit like the telenovela: short-lived serials from specific writers with an individual point of view. One of said serials comes from Giorgio Milos of illycaffè in The Atlantic, and his installment today is on milk frothing: All You Need to Know About Steaming Milk – Food – The Atlantic.

Mr. Milos injects a bit of World Cup mania in his article — which is appropriate, given that soccer (football) is unquestionably the official sport of the coffee world. (As an aside, we’ll be spending a little time ourselves in South Africa next month. Stay tuned for upcoming reviews of espresso bars and reports on the coffee culture specifically around Cape Town.)

Now there’s nothing in Mr. Milos’ short article that you couldn’t find in a standard barista book. But given that “milk” is the flavored coffee of choice in America, it’s a critical set of details for the local coffee culture. In our own home barista experience, we’ve found consistency much harder to achieve with milk frothing than with espresso shots.

Mr. Milos closes his article with an ode to latte art and a video demonstration at Mammarella’s in Napa. While we have yet to visit Mammarella’s, yesterday we were at Francis Ford Coppola’s sister café, Cafe Zoetrope. Let’s just say we were about as disappointed with their espresso as fans of Les Blues were with their 2-0 loss to Mexico.

Is there anything the The Huffington Post won’t publish these days? Fortunately, this includes one of the better summaries of the US Barista Championship, completed yesterday: Todd Burbo: Intelligentsia Wins National Title, then Throws it Back. Congratulations are in order for Mike Phillips of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Chicago, now the winner for two years running.

The article was written by Todd Burbo, himself the Director of Coffee at Intelligentsia‘s Monadnock location in downtown Chicago. But don’t mistake it for an Intelligentsia cheerleader piece, even if Intelligentsia baristas claimed half of the top six finalist spots at this year’s competition — a not uncommon occurrence, and a frequent source of competitive grumbling. The last part of the article deals with Intelligentsia’s internal decision to field no one in the 2011 competition.

Despite the shortcomings of the barista competition format, and professional coffee’s curious promotion of the Cult of the Barista, barista competitions are one of the best public celebrations of coffee knowledge, skill, and enjoyment. And full credit goes to the Intelligentsia team for figuring out what the judges want, as they have it down in spades. We can’t blame them for wanting to move on.

But while the SCAA heavily promotes the USBC as a kind of ultimate chef’s competition for the coffee world, you also have to remember that two-time champion Mike Phillips has only been a barista for just two years [pdf, 173k]. You could say he’s a boy genius, but this is not all that unusual for what is essentially an entry level position among coffee pros. Meanwhile, for comparison, it takes a budding sushi chef a good 7-8 years just to first learn how to make sushi rice properly. What do you do next when you’ve mastered your craft in the second year on the job?

We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963.

In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are slowly creeping in. Yet the gap is still exceedingly large: of the current Top 28 on CoffeeRatings.com, only one location, Bar Bambino, is an actual restaurant.

There is a litany of reasons for why this is. Unfortunately, much of the food service/restaurant industry seems clueless about them. Case and point is a recent article published on the culinary Web site, Behind the Burner: Interview With a Coffee Roaster – Article – Behind the Burner TM.

The author, John Grossmann, interviews Alex Roberts, master roaster at Emeryville-based Roast Coffee Co.. Roast opened in early 2008 as part of the Bacchus Management Group (love the Web site, btw), a small management team behind a handful of eclectic Bay Area restaurants. Mr. Grossmann calls Roast an “unusual startup” that’s performing a “new twist in dining” by sourcing and roasting its own beans. And that’s where the naïveté starts spilling out.

Bean there, done that

For one, roasters offering restaurants custom roasts and blends has been a common practice for decades. One potentially different angle could be in custom bean sourcing, but market economics would prevent Roast from directly sourcing beans from different farms for a single restaurant — which would be the only new ground there. Bacchus Management Group promotes Roast as unique because it is “by the restaurants, for the restaurants”, but exclusively servicing the industry’s least discriminating business customers hardly seems like a virtue.

The interview then succumbs to the ever-popular wine analogy. (It’s quite ironic that they should then do that, given that we cannot think of any restaurant-operated wineries worthy of note.) Mr. Grossmann asks, “Has the day of the coffee sommelier dawned?” To which Mr. Roberts replies:

I think so. I’d love to have the first job as a coffeelier, let’s call it. This would be somebody who understands all the single origins. All the specifications of the farm it came from, all the nuances of the coffee. Is it high grown, low grown? If there’s a blend, what each coffee in the blend contributes. The coffeelier would also suggest coffee and dessert pairings.

What’s so wrong about a restaurant coffee sommelier?

And therein lies the rub. Any restaurant mention of a coffee sommelier invariably glosses over the fact that a successful coffee service isn’t as simple as merely pulling a cork on a bottle of roasted beans. Just a couple weeks ago, we posted an article with the common opinion that a great barista can make magic of weak bean sources, and that superior beans and roasts can go to rot in untrained hands and poorly maintained equipment. Machine maintenance and “barista” training standards at restaurants are still woefully inadequate at best.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with dreaming of the day that restaurants offer a variety of coffee options and a guide, or coffeelier, to walk patrons through them. But while Roast can tweak their fresh bean formula until the cows come home, any lofty designs for restaurant coffee appreciation will fail miserably if they’re built upon a rotten foundation of poor training, faulty equipment maintenance, and shoddy brewing practices.

An article from last year does suggest that training is an integral part of Roast’s engagement with restaurants. However, elite Bay Area roasters have long expressed immense frustration at getting training compliance out of cafés, let alone the scattered attention of restaurants. (Some have even expressed using CoffeeRatings.com for business intelligence — to identify retailers doing unmerciful things to their roasts, pointing to our site’s reviews as evidence of the need for training.) Roast Coffee Co.’s three-person operation is hardly poised to succeed where so many larger organizations have failed.

Until these fundamentals are addressed, Mr. Roberts’s dream of being a coffeelier rings about as hollow as a dentist who waxes poetic about the latest laser teeth whitening technology but cannot be bothered with the mundane task of actually cleaning and polishing your teeth. What good are white teeth if plaque and gum disease cause them to fall out? Coffee sourcing, roasting, and a lack of coffeeliers aren’t the problem. Restaurant coffee standards will not improve until the basics of training, maintenance, storage, and a commitment to quality are fixed.

One way to learn how important coffee is to some people is to sit in a jury room under bailiff lock & key without coffee for 7 1/2 hours. This pretty much describes my current existence at the aforementioned SF Glamour Slammer. I’m tempted to sneak in my own personal French press — if not for facing down 11 other irritable jurors who might use me to re-enact violent criminal conduct. Purely for demonstration purposes, and not necessarily to get at my coffee, of course. After all, there will be 11 witnesses.

Living in a claustrophobic box where the walls block out all possible physical and electronic contact with the outside world hasn’t afforded many opportunities to read, let alone report on, some of the latest coffee news. But this one blog post oddity from The Weekly Standard caught our eye today: More Bad News for Starbucks – The Weekly Standard.

Starbucks and the Death of the Shotglass

Originally reported as a rumor by one of our readers last February (and later verified in The Washington Post), Starbucks management (read: CEO Howard Schultz) decided to introduce shotglasses in the production of their espresso drinks. Their idea was to add a little showmanship for the customer by introducing a practice we frowned upon as “anti-quality”.

The Weekly Standard‘s post suggests the practice was a quality measure. But they now cite Starbucks Gossip (a site that seems about as pointless as “Wal-Mart Gossip”) with a new corporate directive: cut out the extra five seconds of showmanship, the extra labor is costing us. The blog post interprets this shift as a move further away from quality towards cost savings, saying, “The company has decided that the quality of its product isn’t what has hurt them. Instead, the new espresso regime is an admission that it’s the economic environment that is weighing on SBUX.”

While the cited reasoning is credible — even if a jury room full of deprived caffeine addicts is direct evidence for the definition of “recession proof” — the great irony here is that eliminating another pointless device used as a “middleman” in the delivery of an espresso drink actually improves the beverage. It’s one less heat sink; it’s one less step to manhandle the espresso’s crema. So it sounds that Starbucks is unwittingly making a move towards better espresso, and they don’t even realize it.

As if there was any question left that Starbucks wasn’t already bankrupt in the quality espresso department.

Yesterday’s The Age (Melbourne, Australia) published an article on the growing business of home espresso education: Short, strong grounding in espresso – Epicure – Entertainment – theage.com.au. The author noted how cafés, roasters, and other retail locations are creating “coffee classrooms” for instructing consumers on how to “create the perfect coffee at home”. The reason for this? Citing the article: “Many of the classes around town grew from pressure by consumers who were disappointed with their home espresso making.” The Age has published essentially the same story before — so this was more of an update.

On the one hand, that consumers are seeking out better quality espresso is good news. It means they are becoming more aware of its potential beyond the bitter, over-extracted dreck that’s an American staple. And for many home espresso enthusiasts, scouring the Internet for forums and blogs isn’t their favorite method of self-education, so more formal training courses make sense.

However, there are multiple reasons why home espresso consumers are disappointed. For one, most home machines are ineffective slabs of future landfill that produce lame espresso. For another, there is a home espresso industrial complex actively convincing consumers that they all need their own home setup — when it’s actually inappropriate for many people. And they are luring consumers with false promises of convenience, quality, and cost savings as part of their pitch.

Although it is true that just about anyone can make great espresso at home, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It depends on the person. For most consumers, we believe good home espresso is possible but impractical — as it requires a special combination of financial investment, time commitment, and a willingness to learn for the home espresso hobbyist to make it all worthwhile.

So what are your best options?

Option 1: Stick with the “costly” coffee shop habit

This option gets dismissed most often by personal finance columnists and home espresso machine hawkers, but it’s still one of the best options out there. Even those of us with decent home set ups still want the occasional retail espresso (CoffeeRatings.com is ample evidence of this) — for convenience when on the road or for the variety of trying something different.

Pros:

• It’s convenient. Someone professionally makes your coffee for you.
• It’s mobile. No need to carry your own set up with you wherever you go.
• It’s usually of a decent quality. The pros typically make a living off of better machines, more regular system maintenance, and supplies in heavier rotation than most home setups.

Cons:

• The recurring costs add up over time, and they are all quite visible once you look for them.
• The typical American retail espresso still has a long way to go on quality standards.

Option 2: Buy a home espresso set up

New homes are regularly sold today with these ubiquitous appliances built into their kitchens — even if the appliances themselves are built more for convenience than quality. And the convenience vs. quality question is the major theme with this option — as consumers must pick one, and only one, of the two for it to work.

This is also really the only option if you are seeking the God shot. But for every home espresso zealot committed to the religious cause, there are dozens who are merely window shoppers enamored with the concept. (You know the type: copper pots in the kitchen that are never used, etc.)

Pros:

• Potentially cheaper over the long run. But then if you want cheaper, so is changing your own motor oil.
• Potential quality. It’s a great choice for “prosumers”. If quality is what you’re after, with a bit of time and money you can easily beat over 95% of the retail cafés out there. But if you’re buying a superautomatic machine for the convenience, Starbucks starts to look pretty good.

Cons:

• People readily devalue the costs of their own labor.
• Major up-front costs. If you do not commit to a lot of regular, repeat usage, you’re throwing money away relative to buying your coffee out every morning. Even if you discount your own labor, many machines require hundreds of drinks just to break even.
• Most home espresso machines produce inferior espresso. The most readily available machines on the market are frequently made by general appliance manufacturers (“garbage disposals, toasters, ice cream makers, and espresso machines” — that sort of thing) looking to cash in on the Starbucks craze.
• Potentially exploding costs and loss of counterspace. Even among those that do manage to get a lot of use out of the up-front investment, many are soon tempted to upgrade and spend even more money.

For these reasons, this is the option we absolutely recommend least out of the three.

Option 3: Buy a Stovetop Moka Pot

This is the option we recommend most often for people interested in a home espresso set up. Oh, sure, it’s not really espresso (as if the SCAA-awarded “Red Espresso” [sic] is any more so). But neither is some of the stuff poured at a lot of retail cafés — and even less so for what a lot of home machines produce.

This is the Italian family’s home coffee staple. Though in Italy, good retail espresso is around every corner. And if you’re buying a Moka pot larger than the 4-cup variety, you must either like stale brewed coffee or you’re throwing a Bar Mitzvah.

Pros:

• Typically costs less than $20
• No need for stale, pre-ground coffee and ridiculous environmental waste as with coffee pods.

Cons:

• It isn’t espresso.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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