Next month Berkeley hosts its first ever coffee and tea festival, and the SF Chronicle used the opportunity to mention Berkeley’s coffee and espresso roots: Berkeley perks up for Coffee and Tea Festival. The piece adds a bit of worthy Berkeley coffee history, even if it’s a slight retread of a 2009 piece in The Daily Californian. Both articles discussed Caffe Mediterraneum’s merits as the birthplace of the caffè latte. And, hey, Berkeley is where I had my first real cappuccino way back in those ancient 1980s.

A couple weeks back we visited this café with Tim of espressophile fame. Approaching its North Beach location, you wouldn’t think it would be much different from the others nearby — but you’d be wrong. The espresso here is a real standout in the neighborhood, coinciding with the ownership change in late 2008 to Alex and Jessie.

North Beach may be credited as a sort of ground zero for the historical introduction of espresso in America (or at least west of the Mississippi). But unfortunately the espresso standards in North Beach seemed to have evolved little beyond those pioneer days: a heavy dependence on beans roasted too darkly for any brightness or balance, little regard for roast freshness, and a slack and often haphazard approach to barista skills. It’s little surprise that, in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of better espresso standards in neighborhoods such as the Mission — culturally rich ethnic neighborhoods of growing economic means, much like the North Beach of its time.

While neighborhood staples such as Caffé Trieste and Caffè Greco have stagnated, Cafe Capriccio marks a neighborhood return to the practice of making great espresso.

This corner café has red-and-white-striped awnings (complete with icicle lights), sidewalk tables, and many mirrors inside a small space with a few dark tables. The clientele here are generally quiet and studious. Using an organic Ecco Caffè espresso blend and a new three-group Nuova Simonelli, they pull pretty shots with mottled dark brown crema with reddish flecks.

Ordering a few shots here, the consistency wasn’t perfect (the crema on some was lighter) — but it looks serious and has a good consistency, thickness, and persistence. A shot close to our hearts, it has a thick, almost syrupy body: potent, dense. Flavorwise, it is well-balanced (a true espresso blend), smooth, shows pungent strength, and finishes with a sweeter edge. A very pleasant surprise, and one of the finest espresso examples in town. North Beach is relevant again.

Read the review of Cafe Capriccio.

Must be a light news day for the SF Chronicle to pull out an evergreen story like this today: Exploring our love of the bean from the grounds up. But while the Chronical [sic] has published up to 70% of the material in previous articles, the article provides a worthy (albeit brief) examination of SF’s coffee history — a history that we often reference and yet few locals may know about.

For example, there’s the Gold Rush origins of Folgers and Hills Bros. There’s Caffé Trieste and the birth of the SF cappuccino in the 1950s. There’s Peet’s Coffee & Tea‘s Berkeley origins from 1966 and their influence on a budding Seattle retail coffee company known as Starbucks. And of course there are obligatory nods to the city’s nouvelle vague roasters — plus a couple of redeemable restaurant coffee options.

Though perhaps our favorite reference is a 1963 SF Chronicle headline sensationally highlighting the sad state of SF restaurant coffee. (But perhaps not sensational enough to make Hearst proud.) Within six years we were able to put men on the moon, and yet 46 years later most restaurant coffee in this city is still rather terrifying.

Today’s Daily Californian, an independent student newspaper for the UC Berkeley campus, published an article on Berkeley’s venerable Caffe Mediterraneum: Historic Cafe Grounds For Coffee and Conversation – The Daily Californian. Sure, the coffee isn’t so great here. But for a place that is over 50 years old and is most often credited as the birthplace of the caffè latte, they are due some props.

Caffe Mediterraneum is also located just a few blocks from the site of last year’s Western Regional Barista Competition. Coincidentally, the 2009 version concluded yesterday in Los Angeles, with each of the top three finishers hailing from Intelligentsia L.A.:

1. Nick Griffith
2. Devin Pedde
3. Ryan Willbur

Congratulations to the winners. Intelligentsia sure knows what they hell they’re doing, no question. Though one might suggest these results add to the theory that barista competitions have a “home field advantage”. (Last year’s runner-up at the WRBC in Berkeley, Intelligentsia L.A.’s Kyle Glanville, went on to win the 2008 USBC.)

With little fanfare, last week Four Barrel Coffee finally graduated out of the ranks of the Malaysian street food experience and opened up its formal café space. So this week we paid a visit to check out the new digs — and update our espresso review. (See: our previous Four Barrel Coffee Trip Report.)

Last year Jeremy Tooker (along with partners that included Stumptown‘s Duane Sorenson) split from nearby Ritual Coffee Roasters to start a new coffee business that avoided the trappings of Ritual’s Valencia St. coffee bar (besides emphasizing more of the roasting operations). While it’s still early to tell, so far it’s not clear if they solved many of Ritual’s problems so much as relocated them a few blocks up Valencia St.

Not surprisingly, given loyalties and lineage, many of the clientèle here fit the same MO as Ritual’s customers. The lack of Wi-Fi and laptop outlets might prevent some table squatting. But like the liquor store/mini-marts of my old Southwest Berkeley neighborhood, there are already early signs of a “front sidewalk loiter” that so many Ritual customers have perfected. And when we approached the counter to make a purchase, most of the staff and the customers in line were perfectly content to mill about and socialize as if at a kegger party rather than service the line or make an order. Hopefully this is something that will diminish as the novelty wears off.

On the positive side, they finally can boast some baseline customer amenities: places to sit with tables or counters, and a lone a restroom complete with hanging chandelier and a laminate floor that sports a hunting motif. This latter detail nicely compliments the four boars’ heads that adorn one wall above a display of roasted coffee for sale. Apparently, each of these trophies Jeremy hunted off of eBay — at least if we are to believe this informative video published by SF Gate: SF Gate: Multimedia (video).

The five-minute video is a rather worthwhile interview with Jeremy, who offers an early tour of the space, demonstrates how to make a great French press of coffee, and discusses a variety of topics that include restaurant coffee, SF’s coffee history before Seattle stole the limelight, and Direct Trade.

The entire space, despite its in-progress roasting operations in back as PG&E allows in the gas lines, centers around the café’s showpiece: two beautiful Mistral Triplette espresso machines, tricked out with Four Barrel branding in glowing glory. These machines themselves are worth the trip, given their rarity and the exquisite machine design handiwork of Kees van der Westen (though the Mistral is now distributed by La Marzocco). Duane Sorenson’s influence shines through.

Oh, but how was the espresso? Great, of course. Until they get their own roasting operations up, they are serving Stumptown’s Hairbender blend. The baristas here are meticulous and deliberate — rightfully taking their sweet time to do it right. They pull shots with a darker, mottled, somewhat bubbly looking crema. The body is a touch thin for the pedigree. But flavorwise, the shot is supremely bright: mostly a sharp pungency of spices and some herbal elements, but there are traces of honey, nuts, and even orange peel. That much hasn’t changed.

Read the updated review of Four Barrel Coffee.

Today’s London Times published something of a book review of a new four-volume series, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (Markman Ellis, editor): Smell the coffee – Times Online. It’s a long-winded article. But compared to the British tolerance for long-winded, academic tomes (it clocks in at a whopping 1,840 pages), the article is a walk in the park — and represents a great savings over the £350 list price (over $720).

Unfortunately, the article’s author spends too much uncritical time on the curious-but-flawed documentary, Black Gold, and its unburdened, one-dimensional representation of Fair Trade as a cure-all. After several paragraphs of this, he suddenly remembers that he’s reviewing a book and not a movie. The question he oddly seems to keep asking — of both the 1600s coffeehouse and the modern Starbucks — is whether coffeehouses are inherent goods or social evils.

More interesting are the roots of the early European coffeehouses of the 17th century as places of literary enlightenment, the exchange of ideas, and the consumption of foul, rancid coffee. But just as often, they were considered places that either sheltered drunkards in need of sobering up — or sent away the sober to the local ale-house, seeking to vanquish the choking smoke. There are tales of symbiotic relationships with the newspapers in the 1700s that soon turned contentious — curiously mirroring the role WiFi Internet access plays in cafés today.

And all the while coffee went from bad to worse: from excessively boiling “badly transported, badly kept, badly roasted and badly brewed” beans to indiscriminately cutting the beans with other roasted beans and peas, chicory, mangelwurzel, and other impurities otherwise used for livestock. In some ways, it makes the coffee quality movement of the past twenty years seem like an unlikely miracle. Think about that the next time you are served a bitter, ashy restaurant espresso filled to the rim.

Today Voice of America News broadcast an executive summary of sorts on specialty coffee consumption in America: VOA News – Good to the Last Drop: Coffee Culture Is Alive and Well in the US. Like many things VOA, it’s spoken in slow and clearly annunciated English. Think the clinical drone of NPR presented at the pace of Barney & Friends. It’s enough to make you feel like a severe head injury victim in rehab, recovering from a high-speed motorcycle accident.

The story starts in Philadelphia’s excellent La Colombe Torrefaction. It then proceeds to touch on Starbucks bashing for its cancerous expansion, public curiosity about barista championships, a little on the history of coffee production and consumption, the differences between arabica and robusta, coffee’s economic crisis, and some of the environmental concerns surrounding coffee production.

Unlike the Catholic Church — which swallowed the Fair Trade self-promotion bait hook, line, and sinker — VOA did a commendable job of at least attempting to present both pro and con arguments to the Fair Trade movement. That sort of critical thinking is worth calling out in itself, particularly coming from an agency whose sole purpose is essentially propaganda.

That famous portal for coffee connoisseurs, DailyIndia.com (?!?), keeps the hits on coming. This time it’s the latest installment on the history of coffee: History of Coffee: Part IV – Commercialisation of Coffee.

The so-called ‘Dark Ages’ of coffee lasted from the mid-19th Century to the late 20th Century. In that time, roasted coffee went from a neighborhood (dare I say artisan?) product, often roasted at home, to a highly commercialized and industrialized commodity that looked and tasted nothing like coffee — all in the name of convenience and modernization.

Beginning with John Arbuckle in 1865, packages of ground, roasted coffee were marketed and distributed regionally. By glazing the roasted beans like an Easter ham, Arbuckle developed a method for retaining some of the roasted coffee’s freshness while transporting the product over longer and longer distances. This process was later extended to national and international distribution networks.

The pursuit of profit — rather than quality — also lead to heavy use of cheaper robusta bean stocks. Ultimately, the death of coffee culminated in the introduction of coffee’s Orange Tang equivalent, instant coffee, in the 20th Century … where the end product resembled processed grit-in-a-can rather than anything you would call coffee.

The author, James Grierson, has written four other parts in this online series on the history of coffee: Coffee Knowledge.

A brief history of coffee from Canada’s Brock University press: Bean there, done that: a coffee timeline. From its Ethiopian origins in 1000 A.D. to today.