Pardon the sensationalist headline. (Like nobody has ever done that before.) But here’s something from yesterday’s L.A. Weekly on Demitasse, one of the more anticipated new coffeeshops in the L.A. area, that questions/provokes some of the conventional coffee wisdom of the month: Demitasse Will Not Have Pourover Coffee + Other Twists on the Third Wave Coffee Shop – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink.

So what’s different here? Anticipated “Third Wave” (ugh) coffeeshop openings have been fodder for the local presses for several years now, so it only makes sense that each might attempt to differentiate themselves from the hoard with a slightly different angle now and then. But what we have with Demitasse is yet another coffeeshop identifying itself (at least in the article) more by what it doesn’t do than by what it does do. And what it doesn’t do is pour-over coffee.

Or does it? Per the article, clearly they’re fans of the Clever full-immersion coffee dripper — which some circles might say isn’t pour-over coffee by only a slight technicality. But the reason the owner, Bobak Roshan, gives for not offering pour-over coffee is telling: “Roshan adamantly is against the method as far too dependent on the skills and utmost attention of the barista, too often to the detriment of the coffee drinker looking to have the cleanest, tastiest cup possible.”

There you have it. The method requires too much concentrated attention, for too long, of an easily distracted barista in a retail environment. There is some truth to this, even suggesting a bit of retail reality folly in the nascent Brewers Cup. Of the few coffeeshops that have offered vac pot coffee over the years, most would only do so after the morning caffeine rush-hour. And yet vac pot brewing requires much less constant attention than pour-over brewing. And then there’s the reality that the biggest expense in retail coffee is labor.

Which isn’t to say that pour-over brewing is going away anytime soon. Despite the many efforts to convince us otherwise, retail pour-over brewing has been around for decades. However, this might suggest that many coffeeshops are starting to learn the dismissed conventional wisdom behind the once-novel-now-passé Clover brewer: that individually hand-crafted, manual brewing processes make a great cup of coffee, but they fail to scale in a retail environment supporting any kind of volume at a competitive price.

Now if only we understood the semi-conventional wisdom behind using Equator Estate Coffees — despite only a single notable retail example of it in the face of dozens of underachievers.

It’s a good thing we’re no longer monitoring signs of the impending Apocalypse. But in perhaps yet another sign that quality coffee is at the end of a Golden Age, rumors today of a Stumptown Coffee Roasters buyout: Stumptown Sold Out – The Selling of Stumptown Coffee Roasters – Esquire.

Unlike the article’s author (and La Colombe staple), Todd Carmichael, we’re not exactly taking the news as reason to mourn the death of a coffee great. Despite the very un-Portlandia image of such a Wall Street buyout, a Stumptown ownership change is perhaps less of a sad loss for the quality coffee world and more of a necessary step in its progressive legitimization.

Mr. Carmichael calls Stumptown’s founder, Duane Sorenson, “the Che Guevara of the rock-star barista movement.” Coincidentally, today Mr. Guevara is known far more for his T-shirt iconography than for his political treatises. Similarly, Stumptown helped usher in the era of the Clover brewer, only for Clover to sell out to Starbucks less than two years later — ultimately inspiring today’s throwback to decades-old pour-over brewing technology.

Any reasonably successful counter-cultural movement ultimately gets co-opted by the mainstream as part of its natural evolution. And if the rumors are indeed true, Mr. Sorenson has busted his tail for many years and has earned a break. Should we feel sad?

Eight years ago, we lamented the demise of Torrefazione Italia when it sold its soul to Starbucks. And yet out of those ashes, two employees who met while working at a San Francisco Torrefazione Italia, Eileen Hassi and Jeremy Tooker, would soon go on to found Ritual Coffee Roasters. Ritual, and later Mr. Tooker’s Four Barrel Coffee, would play instrumental roles as San Francisco experienced one of the greatest quality coffee booms in its history. Instead of lamenting the end of the coffee world as we know it, a la Family Radio International, perhaps a better model is the Hindu god Shiva — who simultaneously plays roles as both the destroyer and the creator of the universe.

ADDENDUM
Meanwhile, Mr. Carmichael received some interesting coverage today in his hometown paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer: Haiti’s incredible coffee | Philadelphia Inquirer | 05/31/2011. Did you know that Haiti grew 45% of the world’s coffee back in the 1800s?

UPDATE: June 1, 2011
The plot thins?: Founder still owns Stumptown Coffee | OregonLive.com. (Also this.)

UPDATE: June 5, 2011
…and yet thickens once again: Rumors of Stumptown Coffee Sale Gain Strength | An Exploration of Portland Oregon Food and Drink ; Stumptown Coffee Has Been Sold, Industry Sources Tell WW.

This week the pipes and tubes of the Internetz delivered a couple of noteworthy articles on local coffee scenes. The first is a cover story in Portland’s Willamette Week (“Drip City: Everything old is new again in Portland’s coffee scene”). The other is a next-generation rehash of a “favorite coffeehouses” list from the Toronto Star (“Espresso yourself: Find your perfect café – thestar.com“).

Portland = Drip City?!

First, Portland. Can we call Portland “the capital of American coffee culture” as the article claims? The idea has its merits. But “Drip City“? Or the even worse subtitle, “The Rise of Nerd Coffee.” Huh? What nerd wouldn’t prefer working with machines that cost as much as a Toyota Prius over playing with plastic cups and paper cut-outs like a poor man’s woodshop class?

But they are right about the claim that “old is new again.” (Didn’t we just write that piece a couple months ago?) Does that make the current pour-over fad akin to bell-bottoms making another comeback, albeit made with very 21st century recycled materials? That might also explain the unfashionables who have been sporting their coffee “bell-bottoms” (i.e., offering individual pour-over coffee) since the 1970s, such as Monmouth Coffee in London, only to discover that they are suddenly in fashion again.

More telling is perhaps this quote from the piece: “I think a huge part of its value is that it’s just fun.” There you have it. One of the greatest motivators behind pressure-profiling machines that add little in the cup and the exhuming of decades-old pour-over technology: never underestimate the power of barista boredom. Given the repetitive stress injuries they risk in a given day, day after day, who can really blame them?

We’d have sued Willamette Week for plagiarism, given how it finishes the piece with a rehash of the evolution from Clover brewer -> Hario V60 -> Williams-Sonoma -> Precision Pour Over — something we posted New Years Day earlier this year. But given how much the rest of the piece is overwrought with Martha Stewartesque abuse of the word “perfect,” we’re distancing ourselves as much as possible.

However, we could use another dose of 90′s rehashed bell-bottoms, JSBX style. Anthony Bourdain need not apply.

Blame Toronto

Speaking of Martha Stewartesque abuse of the word “perfect,” the Toronto Star gave us another groan for the coffee industry with the article title “Espresso yourself: Find your perfect café.”

What is it with coffee and coffeeshop names? Coffee must have more bad puns per capita than any other industry this side of porno movies. The words latte, grind, brew, bean, perk, and grounds should all be banned from coffeeshop names. Though we just might change our minds if someone flaunted it by naming a café “Grounds for Divorce” or something of that ilk.

We’ve probably given Toronto a bit more coffee love here than they’ve deserved — likely because the squeaky media wheel gets the grease, and the Toronto Star has needed a chassis lube for years now. But despite having rehashed the local Toronto café round-up for more times than we can count, the article does a nice job of starting its latest incarnation with the vital baseball card statistics: listing coffeeshops with their opening dates, machines, beans, costs, and specialties.

It gets a bit flowery by qualifying things such as “impressions” and “music,” but that matters to many customers too. They also went a little doll house design crazy by building their ultimate coffee bar in this related article: Raising the bar: Toronto’s ultimate café – thestar.com.

“No, no, no. Alright? No coffee places with names involving metaphors, jokes, or any wordplay whatsoever. No ‘Sufficient Grounds’. No ‘Sacred Grounds’. No ‘Espresso Yourself’.
– Officer John Cooper, Southland (TV), “Identity” (Season 4, Episode 4)

In what’s starting to look like a Spy-vs-Spy-like dance between a Starbucks acquisition and the unStarbucks set, Starbucks’ Clover Equipment Company’s latest move is the Precision Pour Over: Clover Pour Over « Why Not? Coffee. (Courtesy of Seattle’s Why Not? Coffee.)

As we left off in our story, the once-independent Clover Equipment Company made waves with its brewer back in 2007. With its splashy introduction on the market, half lead by its fictitious price tag, lot of people bored with the espresso routine saw brewed coffee as fertile new ground for coffee exploration. But then Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz discovered it, got his hands on it in 2008, and said he was taking all the toys for himself and didn’t want to share.

Many independent cafés were suddenly locked out of the device, and others still thumbed their nose at the machine’s “sell-out” to Starbucks. In retaliation, many independent cafés replaced thoughts of the Clover brewer with an obsession over Hario V-60s drippers — essentially exhuming the 1908 invention of the Melitta coffee filter with a little spit shine.

Clover’s latest move is a prototype that co-opts the Hario V60 in a new design that stay’s true to Clover’s hands-off, mass-production mission. Between that and even Williams-Sonoma now carrying the Hario drippers (a jump the shark moment?), we can only wait and see how the unStarbucks set will counter.

Any way it goes, there’s still no end in sight for the filter drip faux arms race — with coffee consumers caught in the crossfire.

Thanks to friend of this blog, Shawn Steiman, for pointing out this somewhat amusing article from today’s New York Times: Loving Coffee Without Being a Drip – NYTimes.com. In something of an ode to the Mr. Coffee automatic filter drip machine, the author — Times food critic, Frank Bruni — laments the many overly precious methods of coffee-making he experiences as friends try to raise his coffee game.

We’re still at a loss for how someone could spray themselves in the eye with a Chemex brewer. The physics defies anything we can diagram and anything we have ever received in a college physics exam. (You know the kind: “Person A is driving a car at 55 mph on a surface with a coefficient of friction of 0.78. What color is his tie?”)

But even if you can make the argument that your choice of brewing method should factor in proportionate personal risks of scalding and blindness, far be it from us to dispute that coffee has become too fussy for its own good. Mr. Bruni cites “just how much self-identity and self-definition go into every aspect of ingestion these days.” He’s singing our song.

When does tricking out a Honda Civic imply a defective car?

Personal coffee travel suitcases aside, another telling example comes from a friend of ours who just returned after living a few years in London. He’s no coffee slouch, having used French presses for decades and a manual La Pavoni Europiccola while in London. In asking me about a home espresso machine, we concluded that a standard Rancilio Silvia would be a good fit.

What made him hesitate about purchasing one? All the Web pages dedicated to Silvia owners who outfitted their machines with PID controllers. A simple Google search produces 256,000 results. Here the coffee geek ethos of graduating from temperature surfing to PID-fitting created a potential customer who believed something was horribly wrong with the Silvia machine’s temperature control — something so defective that he wondered why it did not go through a necessary and massive product recall.

They say that good is the enemy of great, and that’s certainly true if you’re trying to improve your standards. However, that’s not the same as having an intolerance for good — which ironically, by definition, isn’t always a good thing. We love improved standards. But how enjoyable is a walk in the park when you’re always measuring it against Olympic speed records?

Lately we’ve been thinking about quality coffee’s current obsession with all-things-technology. While there’s arguably more science than art to making good coffee, the current climate seems to have pushed any art aside. It reminds us of civilization at the turn of the 20th century, when society held a common belief that technology was going to solve all our problems. Right before the mechanized killing of World War I, the Industrial Revolution giving way to the Great Depression, and the invention of the atomic bomb.

So today we witness a lot of obsession over incessant measurement — sometimes merely in the pursuit of more measurement, and even to the level of confusing the act of measurement for actual science. This technological obsession also manifests itself by a holy-grail-like belief in the new espresso machine that will revolutionize coffee. All of which creates a lot of interest in coffee but has rarely created better coffee — or at least better coffee experiences.

As a result, quality coffee feels a bit soulless and sterile these days. This sterility has even gone mainstream in a mass-produced way, at least at the general consumer end, most notably in the form of espresso pods, single-serving coffee devices, and superautomatic espresso machines. Hence this reactionary article in last week’s New York Times: In Defense of Old-Fashioned Espresso – NYTimes.com.

Can good coffee be saved from itself?

How might we overcome this clinical obsession and save the soul of good coffee? A few months ago, Ben over at Chemically Imbalanced proposed a very thought-provoking (and discussion-provoking) idea of Le Coffeeing — a sort of coffee variant on France’s recent and reactionary Le Fooding culinary movement. Le Fooding may be a weak analog for what coffee needs, but the inspiration behind Le Coffeeing carries a lot of merit.

We’ve recently been thinking about the potentially constructive parallels between the wine and coffee industries (at least where they make sense), and today’s coffee vanguard has a lot more in common with Napa winemakers than they do with the stodgy-but-vaunted restaurant establishment of France. This is why we caught a glimpse of potential quality coffee salvation in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article on Napa Valley Wine’s Retro Dudes | Jay McInerney on Wine – WSJ.com.

The Retro Dudes of Napa are more than familiar with Napa’s cathedrals to perfectly manipulated premium wines — for example, high-performance Cabernets that smack you in the face like a plumber’s wrench made of fruit and oak. What makes the The Retro Dudes interesting is their “passion for quirky, individualistic, artisanal wines” — pursuing neglected wine varietals, blending their wines in Old World ways, keeping the skins on their grapes for natural fermentation rather than the modern technology of controlled yeast additions, and generally “rejecting some of the technological winemaking of the modern era in search of wine authenticity (and presumably, drinkability)”.

Today coffee lovers are bombarded with hype about the pressure profiling technology of new $18,000 espresso machines, $20,000 Japanese siphon bars, $11,000 superautomatic Clover brewers (i.e., until Starbucks purchase of the company made them uncool), disproportionate fawning over $100-per-pound Cup of Excellence microlot winners that devalues all runners-up, and $400+ gadgets providing digital readouts of your total dissolved solids and extraction yields that risk making statistical gymnastics the ends rather than the means to better coffee. The pursuit of the mythical perfect coffee may be giving us more to learn and experience, but it’s also sapping the soul and even the enjoyment out of the beverage.

Here’s to hoping that a generation of Coffee Retro Dudes can come to the rescue before its too late.

Don’t spro me, bro.

That ridiculous sentence kept going through our heads when we visited Trabant Coffee & Chai near Pioneer Square. (Their other, mothership location is in the University District.) From afar, Trabant seems like they are trying to do some interesting things. They were voted Best Coffee in Seattle on CitySearch.com in 2005, 2007, and 2008. But they also seem to suffer from a bit of over-earnest “we gots da phattest spro in da hood” posturing that blurs the lines between cute and stupid.

This space — opened in 2007 — is for coffee nerds, no question. It’s part vacant art space, part café, and part retail coffee lab. They have a few cheap sidewalk chairs out front along 2nd Ave. But inside it is a sparse, stark space with a tall ceiling and a lot of echoes. The tables and benches are excessively wobbly.

Contrast this bare-bones ambiance with the coffee investments on display, and it comes off a little like dope house for coffee addicts. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the staff here are regularly sampling and experimenting with the goods — always a positive sign. They were testing out a new Brazilian roast in their Clover machine when we visited. They also use Anfim grinders, 49th Parallel Coffee, and a three-group Synesso for espresso. They are pretty much pedigreed.

They pull shots with a mottled medium and darker brown crema in white Nuova Point cups. It has good brightness without being a sour brightness bomb, and it carries a potent herbal to tobacco flavor. Maybe not the best espresso in Seattle, and it’s definitely not the best environment to drink it in. But we didn’t find much of the annoying spro-titude here that we originally feared. And it’s definitely a good place to test and sample coffee from a great Canadian roaster on this side of the Maple Curtain.

Read the review of Trabant Coffee & Chai in Pioneer Square, Seattle.

Today the New York Times Magazine blog posted a mini bio-piece on James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame: The Nifty 50 | James Freeman, Coffee Maker – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The story behind their “Nifty 50″ (did they hire a former 1960′s editor from Tiger Beat for that?) is to highlight “America’s up-and-coming talent.”

Since Mr. Freeman is not likely making an appearance on American Idol anytime soon — and since there’s still no word on the pilot for Clarineting With the Stars — the Bay Area coffee world fortunately can still celebrate him as one of our own talents. Of course, New York City has supposedly been calling for a while now, and the article claims James still holds some Gotham interest.

Sitting in James’ Blue Bottle Cafe this afternoon with visiting Hawaii coffee author and consultant, Shawn Steiman, we discussed Hawaii’s laggard status at quality retail coffee despite its notable coffee growing credentials. The conversation then turned to New York City’s laggard quality coffee status and how much its quality coffee culture had to be imported from places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — including a number of coffee professionals who hail from these towns.

We previously knew of New York City’s challenges in establishing local roasters — given its commercial real estate environment and zoning laws. But what we didn’t know, and learned from Shawn today, was something he once heard from Gimme! in Ithaca, NY: that Manhattan has no roasters because the island has insufficient gas pressure to support them.

Today’s Times piece also exhumed the old $20,000 figure on Mr. Freeman’s Japanese siphon bar. Whenever journalists turn to price tags for coffee headlines, it reminds us of the old Oscar Wilde quote about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. $11,000 Clovers, $18,000 Slayer machines included. (Do they expect commercial coffee-brewing equipment to cost about as much as their $200 Krups home espresso machine?)

UPDATE: Jan. 23, 2010
As if we needed another example of New York City’s laggard coffee culture, the New York Times yesterday published an article on the New York arrival of pour-over coffee: Ristretto | Pour-Over Coffee Drips Into New York – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com.

Yes, pour-over coffee: essentially the same process prosthelytized by Philz’ Coffee for the better part of the past decade — and available in Bay Area outposts as remote as Monterey’s Plumes Coffee House since the previous decade. They obviously need a James Freeman in New York City fast, because at this rate Japanese siphon bars should arrive there around the year 2018.


UPDATE: Feb. 22, 2010
Sure enough, according to today’s New York Times, it looks like Blue Bottle Coffee will open in New York City with a Japanese slow-dripper bar: Blue Bottle Coffee to Open in Williamsburg – Diner’s Journal Blog – NYTimes.com. The siphon bar may still not arrive until 2018, however.

UPDATE: Sep. 23, 2011
This time it is Fortune magazine’s turn for the profile: Blue Bottle: The best coffee you may ever drink – Fortune Features.

Ever since Starbucks announced their outright purchase of the Clover brewer supply, it was a mere matter of time before replacement filter-coffee-brewing setups were anointed by the coffeeshop elite. From the Chicagoist today, at least Intelligentsia seems settled on the Hario ceramic coffee dripper and kettle: More Change Brewing at Intelligentsia – Chicagoist.

Ah, yes. The Clover brewer: what got everyone excited about filter coffee again — with countless citations of its $11,000 MSRP price tag that not a single café (at least to our knowledge) actually paid — was suddenly reclassified as “Oh-so-second-wave” by proxy of ownership. So some coffee shops are turning to a Japanese twist on the old Melitta bar. (And yes, this is the same Japanese company behind the siphon brewing systems you can find at Blue Bottle Cafe, for example.)

Another upside to the Hario? The home version of this game show doesn’t require car payments and dedicated plumbing — so your favorite café doesn’t have to tell you, “Don’t try this at home, folks.”

Call us a little jaded, but we haven’t jumped the bandwagon on these just yet — despite how much they have permeated the coffeesphere since Black Wednesday. But in due time, even with so much coffee to consume, we’ll be sure to give one a test drive. At Chicago’s Millennium Park Intelligentsia if nothing else…

UPDATE: Oct. 13, 2009
It seems that even Starbucks is getting in on the act of phasing out the Clover brewer. According to boston.com today, Starbucks is removing Clover machines from seven of its Boston area stores: Starbucks tweaks test of Clover brewing system – Daily Business Update – The Boston Globe.

Over the years, we’ve dropped notes about New York City’s coffee culture: from its origins as a desolate wasteland through its more recent redemption. Like the awkward and homely tomboy who first gussies herself up for the debutant ball, in the past year New York City has been running a major publicity campaign to promote their coffee “arrival”. (“We matter! Really!”) One of the latest examples is Edible Manhattan’s recent article, “Coffee Groundswell”, penned by Liz Clayton: Bean Scene | May-June 2009.

The article is a pretty good recap of the story we all already know: New York prides itself as the center of everything cultural; for decades the provincial corners of the country sipped fine espresso while New Yorkers were forced to chug swill; and after the turn of the millennium things started to turn around. We can overlook Ms. Clayton’s telling use of the word “coffeerati” and a little too much focus on the gadgetry of the Clover brewer as a proxy for good coffee. But we couldn’t overlook the main focus of the piece, which is clearly reflected in its subtitle: “Gotham joe finally catches up”.

Why? Because it hasn’t caught up. For the most part, New York is still the wagging tail of coffee dogs from the more provincial parts of America: Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Durham, etc.

We can sympathize with the regional shame that must exist when a post-Communist reconstruction Prague served quality “Seattle style” coffee from independent cafés years before New York City seemed to even consider it. But the anxious desire to wash away that shame could conceivably create a skewed state of self-perception. Ms. Clayton’s piece very much rings a “we have arrived!” bell to the rest of the country, putting us all on notice that we have no reason to snicker and sneer over that backwoods on the Hudson.

“The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. “

But to have truly arrived, you need to have a coffee culture of your own — and quality coffee solidly remains an import, not an export, market in New York. So instead of New York’s true arrival on the coffee scene, what we have more is a city that’s akin to a sunken ship being exhumed from its watery grave through the mutual aid of foreign prospectors.

The New York coffee “Gold Rush” is dominated by an invasion of professionals from the aforementioned provincial cities and towns, looking to fill NY’s great coffee void while seizing potentially great business opportunities. New York has become to coffee what China became to Western product marketers when economic trade barriers first opened up: an opportunity to access millions of potential new customers, long shielded from the outside, and the corresponding promise of potential riches.

Sure, with the likes of Gimmie! and Ninth Street Espresso, New York can claim a few years of native influence. It’s also good to see New York roasters doing more to boost their local relevance. But to make a crude comparison using Seattle’s two most notable 1990s cultural exports, quality coffee and grunge, Seattle can boast Nirvana, the Melvins, and Pearl Jam while New York has the Stone Temple Pilots (OK, they were from San Diego) — but yet little else to show for themselves.

And it’s not just that people expect New York City to lead cultural trends, rather than to dawdle in following them. For a city of its size and population, the market penetration of quality coffee is still lousy. (Or, as we put it in a recent post, the ratio of quality coffee shops to New York residents rivals that of Toby Keith fans in North Korea.) New York residents deserve to have good coffee in the same per-capita abundance currently available in, say, Los Angeles — which itself was a coffee wasteland until a few years ago.

I may be able to now find quality coffee in New York, but I wouldn’t put Gotham on my list of coffee destinations anytime soon. Until at least that much happens, any “catching up” is still a work in progress.