We wrap up our brief series on Seattle’s espresso and coffee culture with a few observations.

First, it had been way, way too long since our last visit. Twelve years in fact. Which is all the more ridiculous given the kind of coffee tourists we’ve become. It was 15 years ago that I attended graduate summer classes on the UW campus (in the U District), and for the occasion I grew a goatee to mock many a stereotyped Starbucks barista in its birthplace. (Ultimately the joke was on me, as 15 years later I still sport that goatee.)

Is Seattle still relevant to great coffee?

Back in 1995, despite its availability elsewhere at the time, espresso and espresso drinks (lattes, etc.) were a quintessential Seattle thing. Espresso Vivace already had 7 years of experimentation and innovation under its belt, and Starbucks had opened its first East Coast outlet just two years prior in Washington, D.C.

But just a decade later, people started looking to cities such as Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles for the next shiny new thing in coffee — with Seattle suddenly treated like some quaint, outdated reminder of coffee’s past. Interest in good coffee mutated into something that today looks more like interest in the next gimmick or fad for making good coffee: single origin espressos, the Clover, naked portafilters, cuppings, toys and gadgets, etc.

Today it isn’t enough to make good coffee. You have to invent something, or be new to the market, to get noticed — which isn’t something always equated with Seattle’s coffee culture. Restaurants suffer the same fate, as a quality stalwart like Masa’s is almost always passed up for the hot new place that opened last month or for a kitchen that starts cooking with liquid nitrogen and lasers. (Though given Masa’s espresso quality, perhaps lasers and liquid nitrogen might improve their coffee service.)

Ironically, it was Trish Rothgeb (née Skeie) roasting over at Seattle’s Zoka who first coined the term “Third Wave“. But within just a few years, the coffee industry largely hijacked its meaning for marketing purposes, shoving Seattle out of any potential spotlight once again. Meanwhile, Seattle found its coffee relevancy publicly questioned as “second waver” Starbucks convinced more and more reluctant believers that it became just another mass-production fast food chain.

Sure, Seattle as a city earned a reputation for coffee quality that was not commensurate with the typical place down the street. Because, let’s face it, most of the coffee served in Seattle is godawful. But this is essentially true for any city outside of, say, Italy and Portugal. What matters for our reviewing purposes is what’s available at the top end.

And from what little we recently tested, Seattle isn’t missing a beat. With the exception of maybe Zoka and, understandably, Caffè Umbria, most of the espresso shots we had exhibited a rather “modern” New World flavor profile. Oddly, it was the local invasion of Portland’s Stumptown that was a no show — with a larger, weaker shot that didn’t quite make the grade, given expectations.

The Seattle espresso bar habitat

Synesso machines were all the rage in town — not surprising, given that Synesso is a Seattle-based manufacturer. And Melitta/pour-over bars were quite common. However, single origin espresso shots — and even the option for different roasts for your shot — seemed underrepresented in Seattle compared to what you find at the top end in San Francisco.

The quality at the top end is on par with SF. Yet Seattle still has the coffee culture down in spades by comparison: baristas regularly know their customers by name (and more importantly: know their preferences), and so many of the top places in town roast their own. And Seattle has Vivace, which is truly a cultural treasure for the American espresso lover.

We wish we could have reviewed many more places in our short time in Seattle, but long ago we made it a policy to never sample more than four espresso shots in one given morning or afternoon. Anything more than that, and the flavor profiles start blending together and we stop trusting our senses. Not to mention the caffeine jitters. But Seattle was so tempting that we had to bend our rules a bit, reviewing shots in two separate “shifts” on the same day.

Readers may be surprised that I typically consume an average of only about two espresso shots per day. So after the first shift, I literally developed an eye twitch. But it was nothing like my first visit to the (long gone) Café Organica in 2005, where I downed four successive shots to sample all their blends and paid dearly the rest of the day. This time, after a few hours and some hydration therapy, I was rather proud of my caffeine tolerance after being so out of practice.

Name	Address	Neighborhood	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
Cafe Juanita	9702 NE 120th Pl.	Kirkland, WA	7.30	7.20	7.250
Caffè Umbria	320 Occidental Ave. S	Pioneer Square	7.10	8.20	7.650
Caffé Vita	1005 E Pike St.	Capitol Hill	8.30	8.00	8.150
Espresso Vivace Brix	532 Broadway Ave. E	Capitol Hill	8.60	8.80	8.700
Espresso Vivace Sidewalk Bar	321 Broadway Ave. E	Capitol Hill	8.80	7.00	7.900
Stumptown Coffee Roasters	616 E Pine St.	Capitol Hill	7.40	8.00	7.700
Trabant Coffee & Chai	602 2nd Ave.	Pioneer Square	8.10	7.50	7.800
Victrola Coffee and Art	411 15th Ave. E	Capitol Hill	8.20	8.20	8.200
Zoka Coffee Roasters & Tea	129 Central Way	Kirkland, WA	8.10	8.20	8.150

On the continuing theme of New Yorkers being years behind on their coffee trends, yesterday the New York Times published an article on the improving quality of decaffeinated coffees: New Breed of Brewers of No Buzz – NYTimes.com. It is a slightly updated and expanded version of an L.A. Times piece we wrote about in November 2006: Demand is growing for rich decaf coffee. Of particular relevance here is the article’s emphasis on Bay Area roasters.

Caffeine is clearly a drug, as it makes people say and do stupid things. We don’t just mean all the people who give up caffeine “cold turkey” and, like Born Again preachers, feel obligated to tell everyone how much better their life is and how they too should forgo their sinful caffeinated ways.

In fact, most of the stupid things said about coffee usually have something to do with caffeine. But while we never understood the point of a vegetarian restaurant that fashioned non-meat to look and taste like chicken, consumers who don’t get the point of decaffeinated coffee always struck us as fake coffee lovers.

The article quotes Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee as saying, “Those guys are the true believers. They’re not drinking coffee because they need to wake up. They’re only drinking coffee because they like the taste.” Last summer, this sentiment was echoed by Starbucks co-founder Jerry Baldwin in The Atlantic: In Defense of Decaf – Food – The Atlantic. Decaf coffee drinkers may be much maligned and considered traitors to their kind, but we’ve always considered them among the beverage’s truest fans.

The one main drawback to decaf for us, however, has always been flavor. The sub-optimal sourcing of beans and the effects of the decaffeination process aside, caffeine does play a direct role in flavor enhancement. The nation’s chocolate cake mix manufacturers — who rank among some of the biggest purchasers of purified caffeine in the world — learned this lesson many decades ago.

This past week, most of the coffee discussion around the Internet involved the subject of caffeine. Talk about caffeine seems to bring out the worst in people. Too many act as if coffee and caffeine are synonymous and interchangeable — whether it’s scientific research on the effects of caffeine or some lame riff on coffee lovers being “caffeine junkies”.

By the same token, why wine lovers aren’t so readily called “alcoholics” is beyond us. But in the medical research on caffeine category, the study-de-la-semaine involved a mix of mice, caffeine, and Alzheimer’s symptoms: Caffeine Reverses Memory Impairment In Mice With Alzheimer’s Symptoms. So, naturally, this triggers bad science reporting in the mainstream media with unsupported conclusions based on leaps of faith, as in this headline from the otherwise-respectful BBC News: BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee ‘may reverse Alzheimer’s’.

It’s the same old story: lab mice are equated to humans, caffeine is equated to coffee, and the next thing you know we have media companies insinuating that Maxwell House cures Alzheimer’s Disease. If only this were one instance — this type of thing happens on an almost weekly basis.

Why would it take over 1,000 years to notice any real health effects?

We have some 1,000 years of epidemiological evidence to prove out any nominal linkages between coffee consumption and human health. Despite the study-de-la-semaine drumbeat of the past few decades — a mystical health obsession that Western civilization has not experienced since Europeans wrested the bean from the hands of Ottoman Turks in the 17th century — there’s little or no evidence to show over the past 1,000 years that coffee has any significant relevance to our health. That includes good or bad health implications. So why the continued, obsessive curiosity?

The myth that there is somehow a meaningful connection is largely perpetuated by two groups, each which stands to benefit most from the continued belief that there’s any real debate about this:

1. Media companies. They profit from readership. Any time the evening news can tell you, “That everyday product can kill you: details at 11,” it’s good for business. Add an audience that subtly recognizes caffeine as a drug (as if alcohol wasn’t?): they’re either looking for personal validation that their habits are OK — or they are desperate for a sense of personal control, worshiping at the altar of micronutrients with the vain hopes that it will unlock the magic combination to eternal life.
2. Grant-based medical researchers. Well, of course. The more there’s an insatiable public appetite for this information, as irrelevant as it may be, the more likely researchers can secure corporate and other funds to keep them employed. Even if it means working on trite projects that add less to the public good.

Telling us that normal coffee consumption really doesn’t make a difference to human health would be killing the golden goose.

If coffee = caffeine, what do you call decaf?

Over the past few months, Jerry Baldwin, co-founder of Starbucks, has authored an interesting series of articles on coffee in The Atlantic. This month he took up the topic of decaffeinated coffee: In Defense of Decaf – The Atlantic Food Channel.

Like Mr. Baldwin, we question those who don’t see a point to coffee without the caffeine. Because we see two kinds of coffee drinkers: people who are driven more to the taste of coffee, or coffee enjoyers, and people who depend exclusively on its chemical effects, or coffee users. (Really, go straight to the vein if you must.)

We even used to think that decaf coffee fans were the truer fans of the beverage. But given the role caffeine plays in heightening the awareness of taste receptors, and how Duncan Hines got to become one of the largest corporate purchasers of purified caffeine, we’ve come to the conclusion that coffee’s caffeine and taste are not entirely separable.

Mr. Baldwin goes on in the article to mention Swiss Water-process decaffeination, its namesake company’s current consumer scare tactics, and other decaffeination processes.

We’ve been harping on the ethically and intellectually bankrupt medical infotainment industry for years now. Publicity stunts masked as science are bad enough (see: Tuesday’s example). But bad science transformed into a publicity stunt is far more irresponsible. A textbook example came to us all this week in the form of a flawed study linking heavy caffeine consumption to hallucinations: Bad Science » Drink coffee, see dead people..

Newspapers, Web sites, and bloggers went ga-ga over the story. And when stuff like this inevitably happens, there are no two blogs we value more than the UK’s Bad Science and Neuroskeptic. In the U.S., we’ve been encouraged by a special weekly feature in Discover Magazine online, who once again didn’t get caught napping: Worst Science Article Of The Week: Too Much Coffee Will Make You Hallucinate? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine.

Rather than beat that dead horse further, we strongly encourage anyone even remotely curious about the “Drink coffee, see dead people” study to read the above-cited article. It’s a bit of an eyeful, depending on your tolerance for statistical analysis and critique. But it provides insight on the fraudulent underpinnings behind much of the study-based medical reporting we read — and willingly share as if it were fact — today.

UPDATE: March 7, 2009
We cannot believe our eyes. Finally, a news article that tells readers how to tell the difference between good and bad health studies. But it gets much better than that. They also confess that pretty much all medical research and news reporting on the health-related effects of coffee are essentially useless: Health | Get smart about science news: Sorting through health studies | Seattle Times Newspaper.

And we quote:

According to experts who study disease and risk: You can pretty much ignore almost all of these health bulletins, with a few exceptions:

Exercise, eat a balanced diet, don’t be fat, drink only in moderation and, whatever you do, don’t smoke.

There’s nothing more to see here, folks. Everyone, please go back to your homes and worry about something else worth worrying about.

Why we entertain the unscientific musings of a discount health care company is beyond us. It’s probably because we’d rather report on it before much of the local press undoubtedly picks this bubblegum lifestyle piece up and makes it out to be something remotely substantial: Caffeine Survey Reveals Most, Least Caffeinated Cities.

A year ago we reported on their “first [sic] annual” survey, and we surprisingly get a second. Whereas San Francisco was ranked the least caffeinated city in America in 2007, we’ve apparently dropped off the Top 5 list in 2008. Curiously enough, we are now ranked #3 for the most coffee consumption after being unranked in 2007.

Of course the real question — after checking out the survey’s home page — is why Peggy Fleming got the can as their spokesperson. Apparently nobody’s job is safe in this economy.

Two days ago, the New York Times ran another pop piece of medical journalism about coffee. However, this time they disguised it as a critique of medical journalism: Personal Health – Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions – NYTimes.com. Now we’ve managed to survive a six-month moratorium on pointless medical research articles about coffee — which is about six months longer than just about every major media outlet, including the New York Times. So why break the blissful silence now?

As the article clearly notes, “hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers.” However, it disingenuously adds to the very same feeding frenzy of confusing medical information that it reportedly criticizes. The real clue is in the article’s lower right hand column: since its publication on August 5th, this article has been the most e-mailed story on the New York Times‘ Web site — and its most blogged Health story.

But those statistics are not unique to this article; this is actually quite a common phenomenon for many articles on this topic. Media companies, medical researchers, and those who underwrite their research grants all know this. Most consumers, however, do not know this. Therein lies the root of the problem…

The “media-medical-research complex”?!?

As much as I have a distaste for conspiracy theorists (i.e., “never presume conspiracy where incompetence will suffice”), over the years I have started to believe in the existence of a not entirely benign, self-sustaining media-medical-research complex — analogous to that favorite villain of paranoids everywhere, the military-industrial complex. Although I am no official expert, my credentials at drawing such seemingly silly conclusions are rooted in my experience as a graduate student medical researcher/journal-paper-publisher at UCSF and a twelve-year career working for Internet media companies.

So why such a ridiculous conclusion? As the New York Times article alludes, much of the medical research behind these studies is quite sloppy (poorly constructed scientific studies, etc.). This contributes to the inconsistencies of their conclusions: these studies always seem to suggest that coffee will either kill you or make you live to 150, alternating as regularly as San Francisco’s street sweeping schedules.

However, as is often the case, the truth most certainly lies somewhere in the middle. In fact, it’s been lying there for about 1,000 years — given how that is the volume of epidemiological evidence we have to prove that coffee consumption in moderation is pretty much irrelevant to human health. Case closed, right? The intense scrutiny of modern medicine combined with 1,000 years of data — so why are there always new studies and new controversies over coffee as if it were just invented yesterday?

When ad sales drive medical research priorities

First and foremost, as the New York Times most e-mailed/blogged numbers attest, these medical studies of a beverage that dates back to the Dark Ages keep coming because people read stories about these studies in earnest. They sell newspapers and online advertising. And yes, they even generate enough regular and reliable public interest that they ensure funding for what essentially is a futile medical research effort to continually flog a dead horse. The day we see a final conclusion about coffee and your health will be the day that newspapers give up a reliable supply of potential readers and medical researchers give up an easy stream of potential research grants.

So what’s the harm, you ask? For one, instead of aiding the public good, we are committing significant medical research resources to essentially pointless, Sisyphean exercises. Another major harm is that it essentially gives rise to the fledgling field of medical infotainment: many of the same economic forces and guiding principles that have made media companies turn evening newscasts into “infotainment” are now bearing down on medical research policy.

Honest — do we really need so many studies about coffee, given all the other medical challenges and concerns we have as a society? If the health-related impacts of coffee were anything close to, say, cigarettes — something humans have consumed for only half as long — shouldn’t we have clearly known by now?

Apparently, who cares as long as there is news to sell and research funding to be had. What’s science got to do with it?

UPDATE: Oct. 28, 2008
To illustrate this very point, we offer up Discover Magazine‘s “Worst Science Article of the Week”: Worst Science Article of the Week: Drinking Coffee Shrinks Your Breasts? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine. In effect, a wildly sensationalist and wholly inaccurate story spread throughout the Internet like wildfire over the past week from news media site to blogger and back again. The story suggested scientific research linked coffee consumption to the shrinking of women’s breasts.

As the Discover Magazine article illustrates, the actual science and statistics behind the cited research suggested something far more mundane and generated few, if any, useful conclusions. However, the mad rush to leap to scientifically sensationalist/ignorant conclusions outweighed any checks and balances. In short: who cares if the story is real as long as you get readers?

Starbucks Coffee has spent the last decade squandering away whatever market leadership they had in the world of quality coffee, and it’s no secret that they are now trying to regain some of these losses. But to do so in recent months, Starbucks has bizarrely looked to McDonald’s for inspiration: introducing $1 “daily coffee”, free refills, and their Pike Place Blend (the latter of which has become a source of disingenuous product marketing).

But even if you can forgive them for that McMisstep towards regaining some coffee leadership, turning to the likes of 7-Eleven and their fortified coffee drinks is even more bewildering: Energy Examiner – Starbucks to increase their caffeine content in coffee shops – Examiner.com (also, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Starbucks hopes new drinks can lift profits).

Yes, Starbucks’ desperation has now led them to co-opting 7-Eleven’s coffee strategy, which is about the lowest common coffee denominator you can get. Starting this week, Starbucks has begun selling “+Energy as a special ingredient in their coffee drinks,” which includes “extra B-vitamins, guarana and ginseng” — all things 7-Eleven promoted in their Fusion Energy Coffee over a year ago. By stooping to “healthy coffee” pandering pioneered by the “sophisticated” Super Big Gulp® purveyor, Starbucks is only further debasing their brand as just another commodity. Can Starbucks-branded Slim Jims be far behind?

UPDATE: June 2, 2008
It’s not often we’re inspired to link to citations in GQ Magazine, but this rant on Starbucks’ current sad state is an absolute winner: OPEN LETTER – Dear Starbucks – GQ Articles, Fashion Features, and Pics on men.style.com. We particularly liked, “When we’re in the mood for a twenty-four-ounce cup of pumpkin-pie-flavored Cool Whip… Here’s the thing, though: We’re never, ever in that mood.”

As we hinted in a previous post, San Francisco magazine just published Josh Sens’ story on the more recent evolution of San Francisco’s local coffee scene in its most recent issue: A new buzz | San Francisco online. (There’s even an article featuring CoffeeRatings.com on the back page: The coffee bard | San Francisco online.)

The article features Coffee Bar, Blue Bottle Cafe, Ritual Coffee Roasters (including some great quotes from one of our favorite area baristas and coffee writers, Gabe Boscana), and Trouble Coffee. A couple of interesting points Mr. Sens raises in his article include:

• “It’s just coffee” — Running a business that really cares about the details involved with good coffee often requires a thick skin — especially in the face of the many knee-jerk reactionaries who ridicule what they see as coffee elitism. (I.e., “Folgers’ Crystals was good enough for my parents, and it should be good enough for you too.”)
• The Caffeine Factor — Trouble Coffee’s Giulietta Carrelli directly addressed the role caffeine plays in good coffee, which Mr. Sens found unorthodox and refreshing. In many ways, we appreciate the decaffeinated coffee drinker as a sort of “true” lover of coffee, independent of its psycho-chemical effects (i.e., its about “enjoyment” rather than “usage”). But there’s a reason why Duncan Hines is the #3 consumer of purified caffeine: the caffeine enhances the “mouth-watering taste” (OK, that’s a bit subjective) of their brownie mixes.

We should all feel thankful that, once in a rare while, the confusing morass of pop medical journalism is broken by the occasional intelligent voice of informed reason. Last month, the media had a feeding frenzy over a lone medical study linking caffeine to increased risk of miscarriage: Pregnancy Problems Tied to Caffeine. Today’s New York Times published a doctor’s rebuttal to this study, admonishing the media for their unbridled circulation of unmerited medical scares: Coffee and Pregnancy – New York Times.

The inexcusable state of medical journalism is a long, old rant of ours: rooted in the media’s egregious lack of knowledge or understanding of the scientific method, statistical analysis, and comprehension of the holistic health implications for any one-off, myopic study. Without any real capacity for this, the media simply spits out whatever medical research comes at them. An unquestioning public then treats this flawed information as gospel. The bloggers spread it. The general public responds with exaggerated binging or purging alterations to their diets. And then we complain that we don’t know what to trust when the next reported study comes along.

Peter Klatsky wrote the New York Times:

As practicing obstetricians, we are concerned about the extensive reporting of a small study that linked caffeine with miscarriages (“Pregnancy Problems Tied to Caffeine,” news article, Jan. 21).

Unfortunately, findings like these generate more media coverage because of the interest and fear they generate, rather than the quality of the evidence (this study has profound methodological limitations).

A more robust and better designed study was also released this month that found no association with coffee consumption and the risk of miscarriage. Sadly, the press ignored this study while every major news outlet aired the less rigorous, but frightening findings.

Together this practice scares our patients, misinforms the public, and places physicians in a difficult position in counseling our patients.

The result is a freaked out public that now worries that their double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato may as well be a dose of RU486 for inducing the abortion of their fetuses.

Sweating to the Small Stuff

Not that we feel a reason to defend coffee or caffeine. More to the point, we feel a reason to defend reason. And for some reason, the obsessive preoccupation with coffee in pop medical journalism remains a hot topic even after hundreds of years of safe human consumption of the beverage.

Meanwhile, in the past couple of decades we’ve witnessed the American diet overtaken by unprecedented, massive doses of high-fructose corn syrup and other processed foods. All of which has been been linked to our obesity epidemic and implicated in the first-time decline of the average American’s life expectancy.

But never mind that. Keep an eye on that morning cup of coffee. Clearly, that’s our real concern. Now please pass the corn flakes.

When PR flacks try to get their clients noticed above the crowd noise, a common and effective tactic is the city rivalry vanity/voyeurism survey. Hey, it worked for us. Which is why we’re reporting on the “news” that San Francisco/Oakland ranked #1 among least caffeinated cities in the country: Caffeine Survey Reveals Most, Least Caffeinated Cities.

OK, so their methods are completely unscientific, there were only 20 cities total under consideration, and they had the audacity to call this survey a “first annual” (talk about an oxymoron). I won’t even ask why some Mickey Mouse health care operation is behind it with quotes from their spokesperson, 1968 Olympic gold medalist and 1980s Trident gum queen Peggy Fleming.

But while Seattlites reportedly down more coffee than anyone — and Chicagoans are more amped on caffeine than anyone (largely the product of unrivaled cola and chocolate consumption) — the citizens of our fair standard metropolitan statistical area are the least caffeinated of the lot. We still drink coffee around these parts but apparently give comparatively little love to tea and energy drinks.

You know, San Francisco, I never quite understood how beverage companies could seriously market their products like alkaline batteries either…