For as long as I’ve lived in San Francisco — over two decades now — I’ve lived with laments over the sorry state of local newspapers. Living in a large Victorian shared among Berkeley graduate students many years ago, I grew accustomed to a daily house copy of one of the Timeses (i.e., either the New York or L.A. varietals) for serious news reading. The SF Chronicle, on the other hand, was always relegated to local movie times and for lining bird cages.

Fast forward to today, and my how those once-greats have fallen. The New York Times may have performed a bit of peacock strutting last year, proclaiming, “No, New York City coffee is good. We really, really mean it this time!” But the NY Times can be forgiven compared to the sloth-like L.A. Times, who came out with this special feature just today, in freaking 2011: More refined coffee culture in L.A. is percolating – latimes.com. This more than a year after L.A.-area baristas — after cleaning up on so many awards at the regional and national barista championships — decided to quit the competition program to give someone else a try for a change.

This is akin to a 1961 L.A. Times article proclaiming that quality baseball has arrived in town — merely two seasons after the L.A. Dodgers had already won the World Series. Even so, the L.A. Times does add some useful listings of regional coffeeshops worth checking out: Specialty coffeeshops in the L.A. area – latimes.com. Plus the obligatory coffee map.

Just please don’t call ‘em “craft”.

As many of you may know, we started CoffeeRatings.com in 2003 with the idea of making a printed, local, quantitative guide to San Francisco’s best coffee. Our fair city still lacks its own printed guide, but that hasn’t stopped cities such as Sydney and Melbourne in Australia from forging ahead: Mecca Espresso Ultimo Cafe of the Year In SMH Good Cafe Guide 2011, and The winners of The Age Good Cafe Guide Awards 2011.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) have each just released inaugural Good Cafe Guide publications to promote the best coffeeshops in their respective hometowns. In Sydney, Mecca Espresso in Ultimo took top café honors while Auction Rooms in North Melbourne did the same for its mother city. Coffee Alchemy in Marrickville and Seven Seeds in Carlton each took their city’s respective top coffee prizes. (Note to Californians: Melbourne is sometimes referred as San Francisco to Sydney’s L.A.)

Each guide boasts around 250 reviewed cafés that make the cut, awarding points primarily for coffee quality. But the guides also reward a “café’s commitment to quality beans and a great experience.” As noted in the SMH article cited above, a number of cafés are rated with one, two, or three stars. In the printed guide, they are rated up to three “coffee cups” (rather than stars) — making them not unlike the chicchi awarded in the Gambero Rosso’s annual Bar d’Italia. (The Bar d’Italia uses up to three chicchi, or coffee beans, to rate an establishment’s coffee. Not to confuse things, but it additionally uses up to three coffee cups to rate these places for qualities other than their coffee.)

The SMH article also mentions some emerging trends for area coffeeshops, including naked portafilters, local microroasting, tasting rooms/cupping schools, new contraptions to showcase single origins, bone china cups (here here!), and economy-sized drinks such as the piccolo latte or mezzo-mezzo. In other words: today’s Sydney coffee culture sounds a lot like San Francisco circa 2008. But you have to forgive them, considering that Australia lacks a filter-brewed coffee culture and history.

While both of these printed guides are new, they enter a saturating market for printed city coffee guides in Australia.

Growing up as a teenager, I always hated those “Battle of the Bands” contests. Because — despite my odd musical tastes, from the Dream Syndicate to Mötorhead, at a time when most teens wanted the inoffensive sounds of Huey Lewis & the News — I quickly learned that these contests were never about talent. They always ended up awarding whomever could best rally their peeps in what was really a rather cliquish popularity contest.

As I got older, I noticed that the same popularity contest problem was at work behind every “America’s favorite” marketing campaign. Seriously — like how could McDonald’s honestly be the best meal money can buy in this country? Quality and volume rarely go hand-in-hand.

Which brings us to this bit of an SF popularity contest for coffeehouses: SF’s best coffeehouse winner(s)! : On The Block: SFGate. TheFrontSteps.com, essentially a real estate sales blog, received some critical mass attention for their contest. For a more complete list of the top 65, minus a couple dozen places with single votes: Winner: The Best Coffee (House) In San Francisco, And The Rest | theFrontSteps.

Just as entertaining, perhaps, is seeing how many commenters on either post fit into our “The 10 Types of Commenters on Coffee Articles.”

The Philniks pay their tithes

The contest winner? Philz Coffee — a local chain of pour-over bars long fronted by Phil Jaber, whose shtick of fashioning himself as the Willie Wonka of coffee has long earned him something of a cult following. But despite making some of the most notoriously wretched and vile espresso in the city, we’ve always thought they made a good cup of coffee.

Is Philz the best coffeehouse in the city? The answer sort of depends on whether you think Scientology is the best religion. But at 27.87% of the votes, with the distant #2 at 8.04%, Philz clearly mopped up the place.

Even so, part of us secretly roots for Philz — despite a cult-like atmosphere that creeps us out and keeps us from setting foot in them anymore. They’ve been a kind of MySpace to the Facebook of the self-annointed Third Wave coffee set — i.e., an out-of-favor rebel that serves as a foil to the many copy-cats who fashion themselves as the true coffee rebels and revolutionaries.

Philz has been doing the hand-made, individual pour-over coffee thing for years before many of the independent coffeeshops even acknowledged the existence of filter drip coffee. And to this date, Philz oddly sticks to their black magic blends — a stark contrast from the many aspiring coffeeshops that (mistakenly) believe coffee quality is directly proportional to the number of ethics descriptors and isolated geographic designations associated with their green beans.

“The more you can isolate a genetic strain to a handful of coffee plants, the better the cup.” Or so goes the prevailing logic at many of Philz’ competitors — and it’s a complete crock that even the ever-popular wine analogy doesn’t live up to.

Weekend at Bernie’s

Heading further down the list we encounter Bernie’s at #2. We like Bernie’s, even if we only rate their espresso as tied for 89th out of 683 rated SF coffeehouses. But going back to the Battle of the Bands analogy to start this post, anyone who knows anything about Bernie’s knows their #2 ranking has more to do about Bernie herself and the neighborhood than it does about their coffee.

We’re perhaps more perplexed by the extinguished campfires often served as espresso by Martha & Bros, listed at #6…

Opinions are like… Well, let’s just say that everyone’s got one. And when it comes to America’s best coffee cities, Travel + Leisure magazine recently published theirs: America’s Best Coffee Cities – Articles | Travel + Leisure.

The article opens with a rather puzzlng personal endorsement of Steps of Rome in SF’s North Beach, where a traveler is quoted as saying, “their espresso is the gold standard.” Just to prove that everybody’s different, Steps of Rome is currently ranked tied for #186 out of 677 SF coffee shops on CoffeeRatings.com.

This might help explain why a place like Los Angeles — with its Intelligentsia dominance and boutique shops like Lamill — didn’t rate relative to the likes of Savannah, GA. To spare you having to flip 20-some Web pages, here’s their ranked ordered list:

1. Seattle, WA
2. Portland, OR
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Providence, RI
5. New York, NY
6. Denver, CO
7. Savannah, GA
8. New Orleans, LA
9. Austin, TX
10. Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN
11. Portland, ME
12. San Diego, CA
13. Charleston, SC
14. San Juan, PR
15. Chicago, IL
16. Nashville, TN
17. Boston, MA
18. Anchorage, AK
19. Washington, DC
20. Los Angeles, CA

Like Yelp, where ratings are often based on the cuteness of the baristas or perceived hipster douchiness of the staff, Travel + Leisure makes some odd nods to barista friendliness, comfortable chairs, and free Wi-Fi when talking about what makes a great coffee city. Of course, none of this is of concern to coffee geeks who cannot leave home without packing their own coffee luggage.

Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal features an article on the Lisbon espresso, the bica: The Best Cafes in Lisbon – WSJ.com. It touches on Lisboeta coffee culture — e.g., drinking many shots each day at the local pasteleria (a sort of pastry shop/bar); a dependence on slower roasts, good quality coffee from Brazil, but also a proportion of robusta from former African colonies; and 40ml espresso shots instead of the Italian standard of 20ml (something we never saw as a positive, btw).

The article’s title is something of a misnomer, as it overlooks some of the best and most notable cafés in town. In part, this is due to the article’s focus on Delta Cafés coffee. Cafés such as Pastéis de Belém and A Brasileira are mentioned. But then again, our definition of quintessential Portuguese/Lisbon experiences includes headbanging to Da Weasel in Praça do Comércio whereas it probably doesn’t rank with the Journal.

Something strange about the human condition requires us to finish the year by sorting, filtering, and ranking things in order. This perhaps only seems odd to us because we do it continuously. Whether or not you think the world could do without another year-end top 10 list, the coffee consultants behind New York City’s TampTamp have put together their third annual Best-of-NYC: NYC’s Top 10 of 2010 | TampTamp Inc..

Compare and contrast this year’s list with their listings for 2009 and 2008. Although seven of this year’s top 10 use coffee roasted somewhere else, this means that three are actually roasting within the greater NYC area — perhaps suggesting something of a small trend there. (For comparison, 30 of the current top 31 coffee bars on CoffeeRatings.com use coffee roasted in the Bay Area — if you include the Berkeley-raised and Santa-Cruz-based Verve Coffee Roasters.)

A few coffee spots have repeated placing on their list over the years, and the consultants have noted how difficult it is now to break into their Top 10. This suggests New York City is experiencing its own evolutionary slowdown, just as we’ve noticed how hard it’s become to crack to Top 20 in SF in the past couple of years.

In any case, this Top 10 list is bound to make New Yorkers happier than their other #10 these days: Eli Manning, the NFL’s leading interception thrower for the 10-game-winning yet once-again playoff-missing New York Giants. Well, they could be the 49ers…

It had been eleven years since I last visited the Azores. A remote archipelago of Portugal, this small group of volcanic islands — isolated in the middle of the Atlantic — is the very verdant-but-austere birthplace of my in-laws. Since my last visit, Portugal converted from the escudo to the Euro, tying the country more closely to other Western European standards of living. A number of Azorean emigrants to America found its spartan island lifestyle of stone houses and no utilities now forgiving and modern enough to move back. And I started coffee ratings Web site.

A blog post was inevitable.

“I think the Azores must be very little known in America. Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them.”
–Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), 1877

“You’re going to the Ozarks”?

Mention the Azores to most people, and they might think you’re talking about the Ozarks. Discovered in the 1400s by Portuguese explorers, the isolation and remoteness of these islands gave rise to resilient settlers and, later, some value as a transatlantic weigh station. Some locals still speak Portuguese with an accent that might be more familiar to a 15th century Portuguese explorer than a 21st century lisboeta.

However, there are a few references to these islands in popular culture. Besides an economy predominantly based on agriculture and fishing, the Azores once supported an active open-boat whaling economy until the practice was outlawed in 1984. Herman Melville, in his infamous 1851 novel Moby-Dick, wrote about the many hardy whalers from these islands aboard Capt. Ahab’s Pequod — a ship that almost gave Starbucks its name until a co-founder vetoed it in favor of the Pequod’s first mate. (You knew there had to be a coffee tie-in somewhere.)

“No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores.”
– Herman Mellville on the crew of the Pequod, Moby-Dick, Chapter XXVII

Turning their underdeveloped remoteness in the Atlantic to an advantage, these islands have more recently begun to focus on ecotourism. One can often think of the Azores as Portugal’s equivalent to Hawai’i, but a Hawai’i long before its tourist economy appeared. In one of the world’s better examples of economy conversion, open-boat whaling has given way to open-boat whale watching. Meanwhile, the maritime themes that inspired Moby-Dick still live on in local imagery, the names of commercial establishments, and even a local version of the mobile coffee cart.

Of Pico Island & São Jorge Island

The presence of whales and the history of whaling is most acutely felt on the Azores’ Pico Island. In addition to visiting Pico (a first for me), I spent more extensive time eleven miles across the ocean channel on my return to nearby São Jorge Island (aka, Land of My In-Laws). This narrow, 35-mile-long island has only about twice the land mass of San Francisco and is home to a mere 10,000 residents — plus some 20,000 cows who contribute to the island’s famous cheese production.

If the Azores are remote to begin with, the quiet island of São Jorge is even more isolated — even if some bloggers might unknowingly recognize its distinctive landscape from a semi-popular WordPress theme. In the previous season of his food/travel TV show No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain visited São Jorge and dined in the tiny fishing community of Fajã da Caldeira de Santo Christo — a town that is still only accessible by foot, by fishing boat, and (only just recently) by ATV. Mr. Bourdain wrote of the village, “Totally remote, no power, no running water, no TV, no phone … gorgeous. Best meal of the trip but hairy getting there.”

“When I say this place is isolated, I mean end-of-the-world isolated … 2100 miles from New York City, 900 miles from Portugal, and God only knows how far from anything resembling civilization. It feels about as far from any place as you can possibly be.”
–Anthony Bourdain on Fajã da Caldeira de Santo Christo, São Jorge Island; No Reservations, Season 6, Episode 4

Changes since 1999

For centuries, São Jorge, like the rest of the Azores, has been characterized by austere, maritime frontier living carved into rock and sea … and by its self-sufficient country folk living in simple-but-immaculate dwellings overlooking beautiful green cliffs and blue ocean. But there were noticeable changes since my last stay. Some of these changes were welcome progress. Other changes — particularly those from expats returning from America with a little too much cash to flaunt — weren’t as good.

In 1999, many buildings in the main village of Velas looked worn and run down. Today they show signs of reconstruction and a fresh coat of paint. A number of municipal buildings and facilities have been either modernized or recently constructed — newly paved roads, modernized island airports with free Wi-Fi (sometimes the only place on the island), investments in wind power, etc. In 1999, the Fajã da Caldeira de Santo Christo looked largely abandoned, in slow decay, and “governed” by feral children (Lord of the Flies style) whom I then jokingly called “The Children of the Clams” — in reference to the locally famed amêijoas de São Jorge clams that come only from its tiny lake. Today there’s an influx of people, adults even, with a number of surfers who have since spruced things up a bit and made it their home.

From the same seaside cabin I stayed in 11 years ago along the tiny Porto dos Terreiros, I again heard the familiar yet bizarre nighttime call of the cagarro, a regional seabird. But on Friday nights that sound is now mixed with the sounds of Portuguese karaoke down at the new unnamed bar at the shore.

Surprisingly, the food has gotten much better here too. Dining in the Azores has always been a regular repeat of the same, limited, local-but-good menu items. However, this time I got the sense that the global standards and awareness for food quality have somehow made their way ashore here: the food seems more flavorful and slightly more varied than it did 11 years ago. I even encountered the publicized concept of do prado ao prato — or “from the meadow to the plate”.

Island Coffee Standards

The coffee, on the other hand, has not changed much at all. You can look at this as either good or not so good. Combine this with the islands’ isolation, and exploring the coffee here becomes a bit of an anthropological study — not entirely unlike chain-free Carmel-by-the-Sea. There are virtually no chain stores of any kind on the Azores.

The coffee stasis here can be considered “good” because the local standards were never half-bad to begin with. This is Portugal, after all, where the tradition of good coffee and a public obsession over it is almost as strong as Italy’s. The stasis here is also good because the convenient, quality-stunted, environmentally regressive consumer fad of single serving coffeemakers has not yet arrived from continental Europe.

Yet clear opportunities for improvement exist. While the Azoreans drink their café several times a day as a fact of life and a matter of social discourse like any other good Portuguese citizen, there is something of a cultural split over milder coffee served at home in the morning and the more serious, big pants coffee served in the afternoon or evening. Morning coffee at home is often café cevada (café de cebada in Spanish) — a sort of mild, granular instant coffee made primarily from grain (literally: barley) and typically served with larger quantities of milk. While not terrible, it’s not at all like the serious coffee served in homes from Moka pots (and the occasional pour-over) later in the day. All separate from the many commercial cafés selling the various Portuguese coffee drink staples — from the bica (the typical espresso shot cost €0.50, or about $0.70) to café pingado to the garoto to the galão.

The more cautionary tale when being invited to someone’s Azorean home is that it’s customary to break out delicious pastries but also the family moonshine — typically a homemade angelica fortified wine or an aguardente brandy. Often very good, often served from a re-purposed liter-sized plastic soda bottle, and often something to make one pace themselves and their social calendar.

Azorean espresso machines and coffees

Like any other import, the distribution of roasted coffee and espresso machines is severely limited in the Azores. Portuguese machine manufacturers, such as Fiamma, were far more prevalent than in continental Portugal — despite the occasional two-group La Spaziale. And while we’re huge fans of Portugal’s Café Nicola coffee, it is essentially unavailable on the islands of Pico and São Jorge. The much busier, more cosmopolitan Azorean island of Terçeira hosts a number of Nicola-branded cafés — plus the lone international airport in the area — but that almost seems wasted on the locals; as a local saying goes, “Terçeira drinks tea, São Jorge drinks coffee.”

On the islands, Sical is the king of coffee — both in cafés and on retail store shelves, in whole bean and ground forms (5 Estrellas Clássico at €6.90/kg, or about $4.35/lb). I repeatedly came across Sical so often that I got music stuck in my head — disturbingly, it was the otherwise-unintelligible opening chants in the French Tecktonik remixes, and 2007 Eurotrash fad, of Yelle’s “A Cause Des Garçons.” While not necessarily poor coffee, Nestlé acquired Sical in 1987, and nothing of artisan value has ever survived in Nestlé’s mass production clutches. Otherwise, there were a number of Torrié cafés and the occasional Delta Café.

While it is generally quite difficult to find poor espresso on the Azores, it is next to impossible to find a café that stands out from the crowd as anything exemplary. Hence why all the café reviews are left here as a list rather than individual blog posts. About the only stand-out you might find are the places that end-to-end grow their own green coffee (rather unique for Europe), process the beans, roast them, and serve them to their café customers — a true bean-to-cup example, as it were. Café Nunes, in São Jorge’s tiny Fajã dos Vimes, being one such example.

Name	Address	Island	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
Aeroporto de São Jorge Café	Aeroporto de São Jorge, Estrada Regional R1-2a, Fajã de Santo Amaro	São Jorge	6.50	6.00	6.250
Águas Cristalinas	Rua das Poças, São Roque do Pico	Pico	5.80	6.20	6.000
Café Ilhéis	Estrada Regional M 1-2a, Urzelina	São Jorge	6.90	6.80	6.700
Café Nunes	Estrada Regional M 1-2a, Fajã dos Vimes	São Jorge	6.70	6.50	6.600
Cafe Restaurante Velense	Rua Conselheiro Doutor José Pereira, 5, Velas	São Jorge	5.40	6.00	5.700
Compre Bem de Almeida & Azevedo	Largo do Cais, 4, Calheta	São Jorge	6.00	6.20	6.100
Compre Bem de Almeida & Azevedo	Av. do Livramento, Velas	São Jorge	6.40	5.20	5.800
Fornos de Lava	Travessa de São Tiago, 46, Santo Amaro	São Jorge	6.60	6.20	6.400
Lajes Airport Café	Aerogare Civil das Lajes, Pedreira – Lajes	Terçeira	7.30	6.20	6.750
Manézinho Restaurante	Caminho do Açougue, Urzelina	São Jorge	6.40	7.00	6.700
Moby Dick II	Rua Manuel Vieira Soares & Rua Engenheiro Arantes Oliveira, Lajes do Pico	Pico	7.20	6.80	7.000
O Milénio Snack-Bar	Rua do Corpo Santo, 21, Velas	São Jorge	6.70	7.00	6.850
Pastelaria Aroma & Sabores	Rua do Capitão-Mor, 9, Lajes do Pico	Pico	7.10	7.00	7.050
Restaurante Castelinho	Caminho das Ávores, Urzelina	São Jorge	6.70	6.80	6.750
Restaurante Lagos	Largo de São Pedro, 2, Lajes do Pico	Pico	6.70	7.20	6.950
Restaurante “O Baleeiro”	Rua São Pedro, Topo	São Jorge	6.70	6.80	6.750

Particularly since the late 1980s, the plight of the coffee farmer has not been a pleasant one. Public awareness of this major problem gave rise to mitigation strategies such as Fair Trade and Direct Trade. A couple months ago, you may have seen the press releases for Traceable Coffee.org — a project of Pachamama, a global cooperative of coffee farmers, that enables consumers to trace their purchased coffee to the farmer, to hear their stories, and to offer them additional financial support in the form of a virtual tip jar.

In their own words, “TraceableCoffee.org brings consumers face-to-face with coffee farmers and lets them tip their farmer for a job well done.” While the cause is noble and the intentions are good, TraceableCoffee.org symbolizes another gross oversimplification of bean-to-cup philosophy and how the coffee industry actually works.

Of origin nations and consuming nations

Much like the Tyranny of the Barista effect, which oversimplifies the coffee supply chain in consuming nations by identifying almost exclusively with the barista, there is a sort of corollary in coffee producing nations that identifies almost exclusively with the farmer. So instead of bean-to-cup, what we end up with is bean-and-cup — or an obsessive focus at both ends of the supply chain but a complete blindness to everything that goes on between the two.

On the one hand, this blindness might not seem any more harmful than creating a family tree with only yourself and Adam & Eve on it. But there are potentially harmful effects. A documentary like Black Gold laments that a farmer receives only $0.03 on a $3 cup of coffee, and the implication is that all the other contributors of coffee’s supply chain — from coffee pickers, sorters, washers, truck drivers, dockworkers, etc. — are merely parasites out to starve the noble farmer. “Let’s bypass the evil, greedy middlemen,” the Fair Trade cry implies.

Of course, a major percentage of the cost of a cup of coffee comes from the consuming country after the green beans arrive in shipping containers. But before we demonize all these shippers, dockworkers, truck drivers, buyers, roasters, and baristas, we must acknowledge the enormous cost-of-living gap between origin and consumer countries and how that affects labor costs. In fact, the very existence of this gap is a major reason why we even import coffee to begin with. Longshoremen in Guatemala and America may have vastly different costs of living and the salaries to match — even if their quality of living isn’t all that different.

With just a 1% share of the retail price on a cup of coffee, coffee farmers clearly don’t get a fair shake. But the story of the global coffee trade is much, much more than just farmers and baristas. Even if we don’t expect to see virtual tip jars for Colombian truck drivers anytime soon.

Quick!: name a city that’s surrounded by the exquisite natural beauty of mountains and seas, with brightly painted houses that decorate quaint neighborhoods, with great food everywhere you turn, with a nearby wine country consisting of hundreds of vineyards and many nationally renowned restaurants, with hipsters who frequent farmers’ markets in transitional neighborhoods, with a diverse racial mix from black to white to Indian to Southeast Asian, with the nation’s most vibrant gay population, with a touristy waterfront featuring seals on piers and a ferry that takes you to a famous prison island, and with a whole lot of really good coffee.

Why, it could only be Cape Town, South Africa.

Alright, that was a trick question: San Francisco’s Pier 39 has sea lions, not seals per se. But the point being that for anyone from our fair city, many aspects of Cape Town will seem very familiar. But there are also significant differences.

Familiar and not

If you’re talking liberal laws, it’s probably not a major surprise that gay marriage is legal in South Africa. What may be more of a surprise is that, for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the South African constitution had to be temporarily suspended around the soccer stadiums for FIFA security purposes. (We can’t say enough good things for how festive the South Africans were as hosts to the World Cup, btw.) Years of abuses under Apartheid made many personal searches — ones we’re quite accustomed to in the U.S. — illegal. The 14-year-old South African constitution is one of the most liberal in the world.

On the other hand, there’s the old local joke that rock and roll never dies, it just tours South Africa. (“Hey, was that really Bryan Adams I just saw in town the other day?”) And given the nation’s history of economic disparity and its 25% unemployment rate, there are the major issues of poverty and security.

Some expected us to witness crushing poverty and aggressive homelessness in Cape Town, but it’s hard to say that it is any worse than SF. In the month we spent around Cape Town’s central business district (CBD) — a.k.a. the City Bowl — we were approached by all of one person for money. Yet security is a big concern among the locals and it’s an even bigger industry.

Even with all the truly great options in town to satisfy any SF food snob, food is handled a bit differently here. Some of the best sushi in town can be found in Italian restaurants — sushi being a decidedly California thing in Cape Town, and less of a Japanese thing. Which also explains why the grocery stores sell flour tortillas under the name “California wraps”. (To make matters worse, in turn, one of the more famous Italian restaurants in town has a German name.) This theme of playing a bit fast and loose with labels and names will again come up with coffee later in this post.

Coffee standards in Cape Town

Speaking of coffee, like Italy or Australia or New Zealand, the baseline quality standards in South Africa are clearly better than in the U.S. You can walk into just about any random store and trust that you’ll get a rather acceptable espresso, whereas this practice is still ill-advised even in San Francisco. But, as in places such as Italy, examples of very good espresso are a rarer find — even in the biggest cosmopolitan cities. But with a little research and a few contacts, we were able to identify some of the best places in Cape Town.

A few things come to mind specifically about the espresso here. WEGA machines are ubiquitous. The coffees tend to emphasize more rich-bodied flavor than the wilder, bright coffees you may come to expect from Africa, but there are exceptions. And the cappuccino here almost always comes with a very Portuguese dusting of cocoa powder; you quite literally ask to have for one without it.

And somewhat contrary to an earlier post of ours, you can find the cappuccino quite often on café menus — even perhaps moreso than flat whites, and especially at the cafés that are a little less obsessed about their coffee. However, most places do treat the cappuccino and flat white interchangeably. Which leads us to our next topic of discussion…

South Africa’s wine analogy: coffee-flavored wines

After spending a month in South Africa, it made sense that this is the nation that gave us “red espresso” — or Roobios tea. Even if you like the tea, as we do, the term “red espresso” comes off as unnecessarily deceptive and has never sat well with us. Just because you can stick something into an espresso machine does not make it espresso. Which reminds us a little of eggspresso — or should that be “yellow espresso”? And yet “Red Cappuccino” is also a registered trademark.

Now if you thought coffee’s wine analogy was a bit over the top, over the past several years South Africa has developed something of a niche market for coffee-flavored wine. They’ve been growing wine grapes around Cape Town since 1655, but it wasn’t until 1925 that a Stellenbosch professor crossed the fragile pinot noir grape with the heartier cinsault (known locally as hermitage) to create a local cultivar called pinotage.

In 2001, noted pinotage maker Diemersfontein Wines came out with the original “coffee chocolate pinotage”, and they’ve popularly released one every year since. Meanwhile, imitators came to the fore in the form of Cappupinoccinotage from Boland Cellars, Café Culture from KWV, the Vrede en Lust Mocholate (a malbec), etc. The original Diemersfontein coffee pinotage wine maker, Bertus Fourie — literally nicknamed “Starbucks” for that reason — has moved on to Café Culture and now Barista Wine (we are not making this up), where he holds the title of “Head Barista” and their Web site offers a Nespresso Le Cube D180 sweepstakes.

Coffee pinotage is sometimes called the red wine for coffee addicts, and it certainly doesn’t come without some controversy from the purists, but it’s really more the red wine for coffee drinkers who don’t like red wine. That said, there’s room for everybody’s tastes. We’ve long stated that Starbucks’ stroke of genius was in convincing millions of customers who don’t like the taste of coffee that they actually do. While coffee pinotage doesn’t use any actual coffee for flavoring, the taste aims for the consumer are the same.

Now despite all the wine-growing activity around Cape Town and a number of its very good wines, many South African wines are still (IMO) global underachievers and/or acquired tastes. Having tried a 2007 Diemersfontein coffee pinotage and a 2009 Barista pinotage, we were reminded of all the beer + coffee combinations that have failed over the years … the “coffee stouts” where the results were second-rate as a beer and second-rate as coffee, rather than something better than the sum of its parts.

Of course, we live in a diverse, global culture that sometimes wants their wine (or beer) to taste like coffee, their coffee to taste like chocolate and hazelnuts, and their chocolate to taste like bacon. So why not skip the middleman and market bacon wine? Sure, it might be a curious novelty to hear Céline Dion perform an album of songs by fellow Canadians Death from Above 1979, but it’s no stretch to presume that it will optimally satisfy neither fans of Céline nor Death from Above 1979.

As Oscar Wilde famously once said, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” This South African dimension to the coffee-wine analogy largely fails coming from a different angle.

Now why don’t we do that?

A little more towards the authentic in the African continent, in the category of “now why don’t we do that in America?”, we did enjoy the occasional Ethiopian coffee ceremony — even if it originates on the continent’s opposite side of the equator. At a restaurant such as Cape Town’s Addis in Cape, we enjoyed an odd mix of Frankincense, popcorn (?!), and coffee served from a Jabena pot.

While the coffee undergoes some of the oldest and crudest handling and brewing known to man, the resulting cup is quite flavorful. Perhaps more importantly, the ceremony uniquely resonates with coffee culture, capturing much of the wonder that’s truly native to coffee without the creatively lazy marketing contortionists who squeeze coffee’s square peg into wine tasting’s round hole through the mutant coffee cupping fad in America. But alas, Californication applies to coffee cupping here just as it does to sushi and flour tortillas in South Africa.

At the coffee chain level, Vida e Caffè serves as an example of how Starbucks and even Peet’s fall short. Even Woolworths W Café serves both espresso and cappuccino in a paper cup that run circles around Starbucks.

While at the “artisan” end, there are places like TRUTH. that seem to go through the Third Wave motions, but with much success. And then there are places like Origin Coffee Roasting, who not only broke quality coffee ground in Africa in 2006, but they established a roasting and training operation that most American coffee entrepreneurs have only talked about. And then there’s Espresso Lab Microroasters, who show some of the most cohesive and comprehensive vision for what a quality coffee operation could be — while making espresso as good as anything in SF.

The wine may have room for improvement compared to what San Franciscans are used to, but everything else about Cape Town makes it a fantastic and compelling place to be — including the coffee.

Name	Address	Neighborhood	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
95 Keerom	95 Keerom St.	Gardens	6.40	7.00	6.700
Blue Cat Cafe	Shop 10a, Gardens Shopping Centre, Mill St.	Gardens	6.60	5.00	5.800
Bread Milk & Honey	10 Spin St.	Gardens	7.30	7.50	7.400
Café Chic	7 Breda St.	Gardens	3.40	4.50	3.950
Cookshop	117 Hatfield St.	Gardens	7.10	7.80	7.450
Crème Café & Espresso Bar	Shop 11, Gardens Shopping Centre, Mill St.	Gardens	4.60	5.00	4.800
Deluxe Coffeeworks	25 Church St.	City Bowl	7.40	7.80	7.600
Depasco Café Bakery	Shop 5, Buitenkloof Studios, 8 Kloof St.	Gardens	6.80	7.00	6.900
Espressamente	Shop number F&B1, Cape Town International Airport	Cape Town Intl Airport	6.90	7.20	7.050
Espresso Lab Microroasters	373-375 Albert Rd.	Woodstock	8.60	8.80	8.700
Fego Caffé	Shop No. 6160, Lower Level, Victoria Wharf	V&A Waterfront	5.80	6.00	5.900
Jardine Bakery	185 Bree St.	City Bowl	6.70	6.80	6.750
Jardine Restaurant	185 Bree St.	City Bowl	6.90	7.00	6.950
Melissa’s The Food Shop	Shop 6195, Lower Level, Victoria Wharf	V&A Waterfront	5.20	5.50	5.350
Mugged Style Cafe (aka “Mugged on Roeland”)	Shop 1, Perspectives Building, 37 Roeland St.	East City	6.70	7.00	6.850
Origin Coffee Roasting	28 Hudson St.	De Waterkant	8.20	8.00	8.100
Osumo	49 Kloof St.	Gardens	6.80	7.00	6.900
Saeco Caffè	15 Orange St.	Gardens	6.70	7.50	7.100
Sevruga Restaurant	Shop 4, Quay 5, Victoria Wharf, V&A Waterfront	V&A Waterfront	6.80	7.00	7.200
Tribeca Bakery	106 Main Rd.	Kalk Bay	7.40	8.00	7.700
TRUTH.coffeecult Depot	Dock Rd., V&A Waterfront	V&A Waterfront	7.60	5.50	6.550
TRUTH.coffeecult Roasterspace	1 Somerset Rd.	Green Point	7.40	7.20	7.300
Vida e Caffè	Wembley Square	Gardens	7.00	7.50	7.250
Vida e Caffè	Shop 6100, V&A Waterfront	V&A Waterfront	7.00	6.80	6.900
Vida e Caffè	Shop 1, Mooikloof, 34 Kloof St.	Gardens	7.00	6.80	6.900
W Café	72 Longmarket St.	City Bowl	8.00	6.20	7.100

A long time ago we decided that coffee maps were an odd Internet fetish. Over the years we’ve been approached by people with special Internet maps APIs (call it Internet software for short), requests for Google maps views, and people building just about every coffee map variant under the sun. More recently, we have the local SF rag, 7×7, promoting their own “Third Wave” coffee map: Fully Caffeinated: A Citywide Map of Third Wave Coffee | 7×7. Never mind what arbitrary standards 7×7 uses to determine whether a place is “Third Wave” or not. (Arbitrary standards being one of our oldest pet peeves about anything published about coffee.)

And yet when it comes to coffee maps, this is still the only thing CoffeeRatings.com supports. Why is that? Are we just lazy? In a word, yes. It is minimal effort to export our database to link to mapping software. In fact, every one of our review pages have addresses auto-linked to Google maps.

But quality-ranked views of coffee shops, few and far between on the Internet, have always been more important to us than something that favors geographic proximity. Because if you are primarily driven by proximity, quality becomes secondary at best by definition. You can color-code the café markers in some mapping APIs — so that you can introduce an additional dimension of quality in a coffee map — but our experiments with that did not produce satisfying results. Furthermore, a city map with over 650 data points is information overload — and takes forever to load in a Web browser, let alone a mobile phone.

Are coffee maps useful beyond a visual exercise?

Coffee maps are far more ubiquitous on the Internet than quality-driven listings, and the criteria for including a café or not in these maps are typically arbitrary. (This is another reason why we wanted the café rankings on CoffeeRatings.com to be inclusive, to the tune of 650+ data points, rather than exclusive.) Case and point with 7×7: here some bizarrely subjective measure of “third waveness” is supposed to be a surrogate for coffee quality. And in the end, we are looking for good coffee, not good branding. We honestly don’t care what self-ordained wave a coffee shop belongs to.

Then take the typical San Francisco experience, where even the definition of proximity gets warped by things like parking availability and public transit lines. And while there are a lot of Internet beer maps for pub crawls, coffee crawls? Seriously? Who can honestly make a day of a dozen espresso drinks?

Lastly, we just don’t get the coffee map obsession. Sure, we know it exists. We just don’t understand the point beyond a visual exercise, rather than one of appreciating good coffee. In a way, we liken it to something Ian McKaye, founding guitarist of the seminal D.C. straight-edge band Fugazi, once told us long ago: “People are always asking us for Fugazi T-shirts. I honestly don’t understand the connection between music and a T-shirt.” (A position which spawned a number of unauthorized “This is not a Fugazi T-shirt” peddlers.)