This has long been considered something of a San Luis Obispo County establishment. In the early 1990s, a couple friends of the owner, Randy Coates, operated the original Uptown Espresso in Seattle. Mr. Coates later paid $1 for the rights to slap that name on his own SLO café. He has since renamed his chain Black Horse and kept the Uptown name for this location.

The location is a former automotive repair shop, and the front patio offers a bit of seating at a few large tables. ‘Large’ is the operative word here, as inside and out they regularly seem to pull in tables of 10 people or more. (Welcome to a college town.) Inside there’s a fireplace and some window counter seating as well — plus a “Wall of Fame” consisting of photos of celebrities (from Peter Fonda to members of Hanson) and tourists around the world sporting paper cups with the café’s logo. Even if we feel that branding yourself as a quality product with paper cups seems more than a bit backwards.

Also inside is a shiny red three-group La Marzocco FB/70, so you think they’d take their coffee seriously here. They serve and sell a branded blend from Santa Barbara’s Caribbean Coffee.

Ordering a single shot, they give you the second half in the double basket for free. But bizarrely, they serve it in a large, black coffee mug. They even call it a “mug”. Espresso in mugs? Talk about unclear on the concept.

The resulting shot looks it: it’s of a large volume, with a medium brown, relatively even crema. It tastes of mellow pepper and a little malt even, but you could make the case that it tastes more like good filter coffee than a true espresso. Since our visit, we came across a review by the 2 Espressos blog that pretty much came to the same conclusion.

Despite winning numerous Best-of awards from the San Luis Obispo New Times, we found it to be good — but honestly no better than the Peet’s Coffee & Tea tucked in a pedestrian mall a block to the west. A statement like that won’t float well with locals who would like to discredit chain store interlopers, but it is a fair statement.

Read the review of Black Horse at Uptown in San Luis Obispo, CA.

We’re rather shameless about our love for the espresso and cafés in Torino, Italy. So we could not pass on today’s travel article in The Guardian (UK): Lose the froth: Turin’s best cafes | Travel | The Guardian.

So why do we love the espresso and cafés in Torino so much? To start with: grand locations and a long cultural tradition dedicated to killer espresso. To quote the article:

Even more astonishing, however, especially if you’re used to the rip-off prices in England, a coffee at San Carlo (and just about everywhere else in Turin) costs a flat €1, be it an espresso, a cappuccino or anything in between. And by cappuccino I don’t mean a vaguely coffee-flavoured polystyrene bucket of milky froth from Starbucks and co. For one thing, the morning cappuccino comes in what in Britain is fast becoming a dainty relic of the past – a coffee cup, rather than a super-sized mug. For another, and no less radical, it tastes of coffee.

Also included in the piece are mentions of Caffè San Carlo, Caffè Torino, Neuv Caval’d Brôns, Baratti e Milano, and Caffè Mulassano.

A couple months ago, we kicked up a bit of dust when we dressed down the Gibraltar, an espresso beverage created by accident when Blue Bottle Coffee Co. was opening their first SF café in 2005. We called it the fool’s cappuccino — essentially the same beverage, but poured in a cheap restaurant supply glass and gushed over by those who questionably valued faddishness and faux exclusivity over beverage quality. Blue Bottle’s follow-up act in the restaurant-supply-glassware-as-drink-name category is the SG-120, and we put it to the CoffeeRatings.com sensory test.

As many a curious customer asks, what is an SG-120? And why does an espresso drink have a name that sounds more like a license plate number, a Soviet rocket launcher, or a brand of synthetic motor oil? Searching for “SG-120″ on Google, we found that it is also the name of a single door steam jacketed gravity sterilizer and a rotation mill for “viscous or sticky products”. More to the point, as with the Gibraltar, the SG-120 is named after a restaurant supply glass the beverage is served in — this time a shotglass from Japanese glass maker, Hairo.

The SG-120 sensory test

Unlike the Gibraltar, Blue Bottle Cafe actually lists the SG-120 on their coffee menu. They typically offer it for about $3.50 from their single origin Bosco machine — along with the options of the less-milk macchiato ($3.25) and a straight double shot ($3).

Blue Bottle Cafe had been producing SG-120s from their Misty Valley Ethiopia beans until their Bosco had to be sent out for repairs. The machine returned from the shop this week — along with their Chapada Diamantina Brasil as the featured single origin coffee (which shares its name with a national park in Brasil’s state of Bahia). On Wednesday they served us an SG-120 with a smooth, integrated, and well-blended emulsion of coffee and frothed milk. Oddly, it was so smooth it almost didn’t taste much like coffee — more akin to a liquid candy bar.

Despite its non-coffee-like qualities, it was an impressive beverage. But given the SG-120 it came in, it begged the obvious question: would we have enjoyed it more if it were served in a demitasse? Our answer was a definitive “absolutely”. The SG-120 detracted from the experience with some poor glass aesthetics: the SG-120 is thin-lipped, much flimsier than the Gibraltar, it felt “cheap” and almost disposable, and its thinness and materials added no real thermal properties. So once again, we were convinced by the beverage — but not the suboptimal serving format.

(As an aside, Ben, an Apple employee from Vancouver who was visiting the nearby Apple developer’s conference, showed me photos of Chapada Diamantina national park on his iPhone while sampling the same coffee in a siphon pot. His take was that it was very clean, bright, and straightforward — lacking any buttery characteristics, etc. We picked up some beans to test the home version ourselves.)

One of the worst kept secrets on this site is our disdain for paper cups — and the places that insist upon them. Sure, some of our beef is with living in a disposable culture. But if you’re going to offer us some of the freshest coffee beans around, have it carefully roasted to perfection, serve it by skilled baristas, and then charge us $1.65 for the experience — why make us feel like we’re taking a pregnancy test down at the free clinic?

(We don’t even want to contemplate the possibility of espresso consumers that would willingly ask for such an experience. We’re clearly in denial here.)

Last Friday, The Daily Hype blog visually compared the experience of what you get when ordering “one espresso, please” at a typical San Francisco café (a Tully’s) and at a Swiss hotel (the Café Gourmet in Zürich): The Daily Hype: FOODHYPE: One Espresso, Please. The former looks like something spat out of a vending machine. The latter came with “a sterling silver tray with paper doilies, the cup, saucer and cream pitcher in china, a real spoon (also sterling silver), a sweet (coconut macaroons were on offer this day), and a small glass of water”.

Sure, in their respective nations, the latter experience will set you back three times as much as the “economy” version (though less if you tip). But let’s be serious. These days, a Swiss franc can buy most of Vermont, whereas the U.S. dollar won’t even get you a tourist photo taken with a yodeler in lederhosen.

UPDATE: April 4, 2008
And if adults drinking coffee out of cups designed for the birthday parties of four-year-olds wasn’t bad enough, we may soon see cups suggestive of toddlers. According to KRON-4 news today, the planned installation of Peet’s Coffee kiosks in BART stations may make Bay Area adults regress even further to no-spill “sippy cups” for drinking their coffee: BART May Allow Adults to Drink Coffee on Trains from Sippy Cups. No word yet on whether drinking coffee out of baby bottles is the next developing trend.

We’ve long lamented over being served good coffee in ridiculous paper cups. But not everyone is coffee obsessive enough to review most of the espresso shots available in the city — and particularly the expectedly nasty ones. But today the Journal of Consumer Research published results from a study that asked, “Does coffee in a flimsy cup taste worse than coffee in a more substantial cup?”: Study Shows Touch Does Affect Flavor – Science – redOrbit. The answer to that question was “yes”. (Also: Does Touch Affect Flavor? Study Finds That How A Container Feels Can Affect Taste, Touch Can Trump Taste, According to New Retail Research from Rutgers School of Business.)

In a series of four experiments, the researchers discovered that people’s judgments of a drink’s taste and quality were influenced by the container in which it was served. The firmness of the cup was apparently a big indicator of quality and a better perceived taste, with people most sensitive to touch being influenced the most by the choice of cups.

To everyone who insists on serving their coffee in paper cups designed for the birthday parties of four-year-olds: stick that in your Solo and shake it. And to the cabal of inspirational quote spammers on the blogosphere: enough of that fake life yarn about so-called professors telling students that it’s the coffee, not the cup, that matters. Professors, of all people, are among the first to cite the research published in journals.
UPDATE: March 22, 2008
“That morning shot of espresso probably tastes better in an Italian, thick-walled cup than in a burn-your-fingers paper one,” opens this L.A. Times article on the same study: How’s that coffee feel? – Los Angeles Times.

From today’s Edmonton Journal, a café co-owner, Antonio Bilotta, has said “enough is enough” to the environmental waste of paper cups for take-out coffee beverages: A cup of coffee to go — and hold the cup. Quoting the article and Mr. Bilotta:

“If your product is so good, then force the customers.”

Bilotta wants to see people relax long enough to sit down in his cafe and drink their coffee from proper cups. Alternately, he’d like to see them bring in their own mugs.

He’s my hero. And I don’t care if it saves killer bees — at least give me the option to drink my espresso out of an adult cup once in a while, and I’m all for it.

San Francisco also gets a special citation in the article: even the Canadians are aware of city efforts to abolish bottled water.

It’s old news. We’ve repeated this story many times, and every news agency seems to run it when the editorial board gets desperate, but it bears repeating. Today Reuters published an article from Torino (the world’s espresso café motherland, in my book) on the rules for making a proper espresso: Art of making espresso lies in following the rules | Lifestyle | Reuters.

This time, these familiar rules were provided by Luca Mastantuoni, who trains foreign clients at Torino-based Lavazza. Most of those rules are violated with each American espresso on a regular basis.

The online magazine American Chronicle featured an article yesterday that covered the recent rise of the designer espresso cup: American Chronicle: History Of Espresso Coffee Cups. (Though calling it a “history” is a bit of a misstatement.) In 1992, Illycaffè decided that art and design should be better woven into the espresso-sipping experience, and the result was the first modern designer espresso cups.

The originals were first designed by commissioned artist Matteo Thun. Today a number of cup manufacturers design and produce these as collectors items — commissioning new designs on a frequent basis. Sometimes they even number the cups produced in a series. While the cups themselves can be quite exquisite, the prices some collectors will pay for these limited edition cups can be outrageous.

(Note: This American Chronicle piece was written as part of an article-writing PR campaign by a shadow Web site, which sells Saeco machines through Amazon.com. All these articles are mysteriously attributed to a site owner named either “Ricky Lee” or “Ricky Lim”. Blogger payola is alive and well.)

A local, homespun, philosophical yarn in today’s Gulf Breeze News (Gulf Breeze, FL … why do all the crackpots seem to come from Florida?) noted how our approach to life can failingly be like concentrating on the cup and not the coffee within it: The coffee, not the cup that holds it, is what matters. It’s a nice, trite, Prarie-Home-Companion-way of looking at life. The author even relates this analogy to the untimely death of Anna Nicole Smith (huh?!?). The only problem with the author’s analogy is that it’s an ignorant and delusional pack of lies.

Cups do matter when it comes to coffee. Unfortunately, most cafés have no concept of this, and most coffee drinkers are far too intent on drinking their coffee like runners at a marathon refreshment station to notice. As the Espresso Italiano Tasting manual puts it…

The design of the cup affects:

• the appearance of the coffee and thus our appreciation of its creamy head (or crema),
• our olfactive appreciation by dispersing or concentrating the aroma,
• the taste because of its contact with our lips,
• the sensation of heat, and
• the quantity of coffee allowed into the mouth.

There’s a reason quality restaurants present their food on warmed china instead of paper plates. If drinking vessels truly didn’t matter, we’d all be sipping fine wines out of disposable plastic beer cups. And if I’m shelling out $2 a cup for beans that cost less than $2 per pound as greens, you had better believe I expect to be treated as if I’m at something other than a three-year-old’s birthday party.

Maybe Chuck Randle likes to brew his morning coffee through his grandson’s old gym socks, but coffee drinking shouldn’t taste of paper. It’s enough when I have to lick envelopes. Chuck, if you’re going to pick on something as “superfluous,” why couldn’t you have instead chosen something like bloggers and columnists in Podunk local weeklies?

In case you thought last week’s coffee lifestyle article was something of a joke, a headline from today’s Muncie, IN The Star Press might convince you otherwise: Coffee: Drink or lifestyle? How about both? | The Star Press – www.thestarpress.com – Muncie, IN. Except here your lifestyle statement isn’t so much in your choice of what you drink, but rather in where you drink it.

And when you’re living in Muncie, IN, anything this side of Denny’s Bunn-warmer drip coffee is emancipating. (And as a guest speaker at Ball State University, I have actually been to Muncie and sampled the local coffee.) Thus the article predictably offers a good dose of middle America’s cult-like worship of Starbucks. Here there are more platitudes about the “third place” in our lives — and how Starbucks set the standard for speciality coffee. And yet Starbucks remains the standard, despite the explosive growth of better alternatives.

But when you check all the references, you quickly come to the realization that much of the cult of Starbucks and its ‘Buckniks has little to do with their coffee. More often, it’s about brand coziness with a clean, approachable, predictable, and convenient location and their variety of high-calorie milkshakes (with coffee added for flavoring). When you come down to it, the great irony is that a lot of people really don’t like the taste of coffee. Yet Starbucks thrives under a coffee identity by making the otherwise unpallatable pallatable for millions of consumers, serving it under various disguises.

Today’s The Star Press also offers a capsule on Muncie’s four best coffee options: Caffeine addicts sing the praises of Muncie’s growing collection of shops | The Star Press – www.thestarpress.com – Muncie, IN (pardon my gagging over the title: another cliché caffeine riff that plagues so many unimaginative writers). In case you should ever find yourself lost in northeast Indiana.