Today’s L.A. Weekly featured an interesting bio-piece on father and son L.A. espresso pioneers, Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: Q & A with Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: L.A.’s Single Espresso Origin – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink. You might recognize the Pasquini name for some of their excellent home espresso machines. But the Pasquini family is credited with first introducing espresso to the L.A. area.

Some of the more interesting details from the piece:

• Their initial business was first frequented by espresso-starved Hungarians.
• In the early days, they even got some of their espresso from SF’s Caffé Trieste.
• From the beginning, only about 3% of their customers ordered espresso. The bulk was cappuccino and caffe latte.
• Starbucks coming on the scene helped popularize their business. Well, it was good for business, but “it wasn’t good for quality.”

And while the Pasquinis are rolling with the superautomatic and Nespresso machine punches, we were particularly intrigued by their reaction to La Marzocco. To quote:

La Marzocco did a wonderful job convincing people that only certain machines can make a good coffee. … They did a wonderful job convincing the [specialty] barista that that is the state of the art.

It’s a bit of a back-handed compliment — less to their equipment-building prowess, and more to La Marzocco’s marketing ability to build anxieties and insecurities within specialty baristas.

Which explains a little of the ambivalence we feel when we witness the likes of a Sightglass fawning over the latest coffee toy fads on the market. It’s one thing to be enamored with trendy equipment. But it’s another to rely on it as a cover up for a lack of sweat and hard-work that goes into optimizing with the equipment you’ve got.

As we last left our story, SOMA‘s ever-morphing Sightglass Coffee was glacially executing on its grand designs to become a major SF roastery and a spacious coffee destination. It had been over a year since we last walked among the spent heroin needles of nearby 6th Street, so much of our new Sightglass experience had been through retail brightness bombs sold throughout the Bay Area using Sightglass’ own roasts.

This past week we finally got the chance to revisit Sightglass, and we can safely say it has largely succeeded at its very ambitious goals. We say “largely”, however, because we have more than just a little qualified ambivalence for what exactly Sightglass has become.

Sightglass’ original cubbyhole is now merely the doorway entrance to a vast warehouse space dedicated to exposed wood beams and coffee production. There are a couple of split levels upstairs for staff and vast amounts of stand-up counter space all around the floor plan. But while the square footage of this coffeeshop has expanded some 100-fold, there is seating for only about a dozen more people than before. There is window counter seating along the 7th Street sidewalk. But between that and the bicycle parking at the other end of the building there is virtually no place to sit.

The deliberate scarcity of seating is a decidedly useful move to ward off the laptop zombie set. And we wish far more places catered to stand-up espresso service the way it is a cultural institution in places like Italy. But somehow a place like Four Barrel makes their zombie-warding mojo seem natural and organic to the space, whereas at Sightglass it comes off like a lack of planning.

The vibe inside is a bit unique for a Bay Area coffee shop. In some areas, children sometimes play on the floor with parents in an unusual day-care-lite-like fashion. Meanwhile, there is a noticeable bent towards employing comely female staff and an unusually high proportion of both staff and patrons wearing cycling caps. Yet there is an unusual shortage of the obligatory piercings and body art. And as if an homage to Four Barrel and its mounted boar heads, the sparse decór inside includes the occasional mounted desert animal skull.

As if to proclaim they can mimic more than just Four Barrel, there’s a trusty turntable by the coffee service area for playing vinyl copies of the Beatles’ Revolver or the Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim EP — giving it a little of that Stumptown Portland feel.

It really tied the room together

But enough about interior decorating: what about the coffee? For one, there’s an ample wall of the stuff for retail purchase. It’s not even the “$15 a pound” stuff we mentioned earlier this week: we’re talking the $19.50 for 12 ounces category. At which price, we want bottle rockets shooting out of our ears when we sip this stuff. After sampling some of their Guatemala Finca San Diego Buena Vista Yellow Bourbon at home, let’s just say we’re not giving up our Barefoot Coffee take on Edwin Martinez’ Finca Vista Hermosa — despite some recent local press love.

The general quality of barista here seems to have raised a notch with their expansion. In store they offer Chemex and Hario V60 brewing of three different cultivars — plus the usual espresso drinks, a few baked goods, and the usual Hooker’s Sweet Treats salted caramels. And to pull those shots they employ both Slayer and La Marzocco Strada machines at opposite ends of the service area. Explaining the difference between the two espresso machines to a friend who was there with us, there’s really no other polite way to say this: owners Jerad and Justin Morrison are total name brand fad whores. So we merely described the machines as “last year’s model” versus “this year’s model” — and then proceeded to pay on their iPad checkout system, established here since the week the iPad went public.

Living up to their reputation as worshippers at the altar of the brightness bomb, they pull espresso shots with a rather one-dimensional, medium brown, even crema that struggles to coat the surface. It is very bright and flavorful in a citrus-meets-malt way, but surprisingly not overwhelmingly so. Though there is a tinny, almost metallic taste in the finish where it lacks any real sweetness or molasses-like smoothness.

Of course, a lot of people in North America enjoy this flavor profile. But it becomes particularly problematic when it comes to American’s love of milk-based espresso drinks. Their cappuccino is what we might call a “supermodel” cappuccino — pretty and perfect on the outside, but vapid at the core and lacking any real substance. Despite the beautiful appearance and accompanying latte art, their cappuccinos are tepid, milky, and lack any real punch that can hold up to the milk. We honestly cannot recommend the cappuccino here, as the primary brightness notes in the espresso are lost to become something insidiously bland and rather flavorless.

Sightglass’ place in SF’s coffee pantheon

It’s fair to say that by establishing both their roasting operations and a large service area, Sightglass has positioned themselves as one of the premiere coffee destinations in San Francisco. These days, that says something. However, we cannot help but feel there’s a missing attention to detail here that holds Sightglass back from being among the very best — this despite a web site that proclaims their “deep attention to detail.”

There’s nothing inherently flawed in name brand fad whoring if you get the execution right. But without that execution, you risk appearing as though you’ve followed a checklist for a paint-by-numbers Third Wave coffeeshop — rather than being something with a soul and substance of its own. We don’t even mind if your interior design ideas were lifted from the Stumptown and Four Barrel catalogs as long as your attention to detail comes out in your coffee. Forget the other details for a moment: a washed-out, bland cappuccino just doesn’t cut it.

An almost poetically symbolic example of this attention-to-detail problem was evident watching the team perform maintenance on their on-site Probat roaster (aka, “the sightglass”). They re-applied the mounting bolts to their Probat … without washers. Sometimes it takes just a little extra effort to do it right.

Read the updated review of Sightglass Coffee.

Today’s installment for comic relief Friday comes from a regular blog reader here (espressophile): New Coffee Concept Makes Roasting Obsolete | Roaster Project.

This comic piece from the Roaster Project is highly buzzword-compliant (“fourth wave”, etc.). Part of its premise is that if third wave coffee is “barely roasted,” the next stage is to not even roast the green beans at all — otherwise damaging the coffee’s delicate expressions of micro-lot terroir.

The piece also offers a few quotable gems, including:

• “We buy micro-lots from farmers, so that one can taste the nuances, such as milk thistle, oregano, and lamb’s ear.”
• “At the Aloof Coffee Bar, we value customer service. The most important thing we can do for a customer is to educate them.”

Its crowning image of green coffee latte art is also sure to be great inspiration for future Coffee Fests.

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.

In the transitioning Cape Town neighborhood of Woodstock, which out-Missions the Mission, this espresso bar and roaster perhaps looks like no other you’ve seen before. Located inside the newly-art-conscious Old Biscuit Mill, this small space is a pristine, stark black-&-white-themed coffee lab that exudes meticulous organization. The Old Biscuit Mill is known in town for Cape Town’s original gourmet food market (and hipster Mecca) that it hosts each Saturday — giving Espresso Lab Microroasters a little bit of the small-operation, gourmet-public-market-based origins familiar to the Bay Area’s Blue Bottle Coffee.

The periodic table of the chemical elements features heavily in the highly consistent theme of this roaster/café. It shows in the elemental-looking coffee drink menu printed on the white tile walls (those “atomic weights” in the photo are actually prices in South African Rands), through to the labeled chem-lab-looking buckets of unroasted green beans, and all the way to the company T-shirts packaged in silver ziploc bags labeled with the “element” Ts for T-shirt.

Opening a little over a year ago, they have three internal benches for seating plus a couple of outdoor patio tables. In back is a black & white Diedrich IR-7 roaster. In front they offer Hario Buono kettle/V60 drip coffee — their “Artisinal Brew” (Ab). Renato, co-owner with Helene, noted how the locals still haven’t made a leap to filter coffee just yet. However, he is assisting in the opening of a pour-over bar (with Espresso Lab Microroasters’ coffee) in Stellenbosch — part of Cape Town’s famed nearby winelands and their associated fine dining establishments. (Stellenbosch is very much akin to the Napa Valley when compared to Cape Town’s San Francisco.)

Although the pour-over uptake may be slow at this location, there’s plenty of espresso to be had from their two-group La Marzocco GB/5, where you have the choice of an espresso blend or (on the day’s visit) a single-origin Kenya. The Kenya, Gichatha-ini from the Gikanda Farmers Co-Operative Society, won the SCAA’s Best of Kenya. Cup of Excellence still doesn’t exist in Africa outside of Rwanda.

Their Esp008 espresso blend (rated here) uses 40% Serra do Boné Brazil as a base, 40% Puente Ecológico Tarrazú Costa Rica for the midrange, and 20% Guji Ethiopia for brightness and “wildness”. Their espresso blends vary mostly by different African varietals for that last 20%, and they emphasize changes in blending ratios — rather than using additional microlot farms or roasting the coffees differently for different blends or uses.

The Esp008 espresso blend shot (R14, or about $2 US) is dense without being too syrupy — with a textured dark-to-medium-brown crema and an upfront sweetness that’s not too off-putting. Still, its citric bite on top of an herbal background makes for a uniquely layered espresso flavor — one that Renato says is influenced by the lighter roasts of his Oslo, Norway coffee upbringing combined with his Portuguese roots and what Africa adds to the cup. Renato’s Norwegian influences include former WBC champ, Tim Wendelboe, and it shows in the lighter roasting styles and the feel of this space.

Their shot of single-origin Kenya (also used for their “Artisinal Brew” pour-over) was super bright with a pleasant floral and citric base — but without being a brightness bomb. They also offer something they call a cortado, which is pretty much the same as an American Gilbraltar out of a Gibraltar glass. And for milk-frothing, they produce rather exquisite latte art with fine surface bubbles. This is a fine and somewhat unique example of what South African espresso has to offer.

Read the review of Espresso Lab Microroasters in Woodstock, Cape Town, South Africa.

This downtown espresso bar and roaster was co-founded by Carl Wessel and former Origin roaster, Judd Francis. It’s a tiny, tiny spot with room for only three stools at the espresso bar, two stools along the shop window counter, and two inside chairs.

Inside there are worn, wooden floors, artsy touches like cacti and odd sculptures (not to mention the Vespa skeleton on the wall, giving the guys behind SF’s Vega something to lust after), a short wall rack of coffee accessories, and good rock music for the slacker set.

There’s also a roaster for on-site roasting behind the barista counter, if you can believe it. How they get this all to fit into one tiny space reminds one of a Japanese commuter hotel/locker.

Every drink is R10 (about $1.30) — milk or not — which is a bit of an unusual pricing strategy for anywhere. Using a two-group WEGA, they pull shots with a semi-thin, mottled medium and dark brown crema. It sits a little high in the cup, and this is reflected in the thinner body. Flavorwise, it tastes earthy with pepper and some tobacco. Served in classic brown ACF cups.

Read the review of Deluxe Coffeeworks in Cape Town, South Africa.

A blogger in New Jersey posted an interview with Carlo Odello of the Istituto Nazionale Espresso Italiano, or the Italian National Espresso Institute: Espresso Italiano, Talking Coffee the Italian Way with Carlo Odello – Serge the Concierge. Mr. Odello (a friend of this Web site) was recently working Caffè Italia at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York.

Talk of Italian espresso standards have recently ruffled a lot of feathers this side of the Atlantic. Especially for those who bang their heads against their knockboxes with the zombie-like mantra, “Third Wave is Best Wave“. But this brief Q&A with Mr. Odello touches on good and bad coffee odors and the differences between coffee blends roasted in Rome, Sicily, and Liguria.

We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have changed.

It’s perhaps both bad and good news that things haven’t changed much at all since our first visit. They still operate as a tiny kiosk of a service station in front, offering espresso, Chemex brewing, and some salt caramels. Their roasting operations are still being built out; the current completion estimate is now June 2010. Instead of facing the permit issues that delayed Four Barrel’s roasting operations, the delays at Sightglass were primarily zoning: given that there are two other notable roasters in the SOMA district, the environmental impact of another neighborhood roaster required a rather thorough evaluation.

One other major change here was a highly publicized switch of their espresso machine. What was a beautiful, rare, refurbished, two-group La Marzocco GS2 espresso machine — straight out of the 1970s, and a sister to the one recently installed at Intelligentsia‘s fabled Venice Beach location — has since been replaced with a two-group Slayer machine. (Just like the one at Matching Half Cafe.)

Fourth Wave Espresso Machines — aka The Mother of All Hyperbole

Ah, the infamous, fetish du jour: the Slayer. While the verdict is still out on the merits of the Slayer as an espresso machine, its merits as a hype machine are unquestionable. For example, two months ago one barista/blogger made the ludicrous claim in Serious Eats that, with the Slayer, “fourth wave coffee has arrived”.

First of all, remember that the term third wave was originally coined to describe a level of consumer appreciation for coffee. Thus, the author literally suggested that an espresso machine will single-handedly make consumers appreciate coffee in such a significantly novel way as to change consumer culture. By comparing waves, her statement suggested that once consumers compare a Slayer-made espresso with a run-of-the-mill Blue Bottle shot, for example, public coffee-drinking habits will change as dramatically as when people raised on cups of Sanka brewed in 1950s percolators discovered the espresso made at Rome’s Sant’Eustachio il caffè.

Wow. Talk about Mother of All Hyperbole. We’re honestly incredulous at how someone could make such an absurdist claim.

Thankfully, the New York Times tempered the post’s price-tag-based hype: the Serious Eats post lead with sensationalist $18,000 price tag headline, completely oblivious to the fact that a decent, three-group La Marzocco GB/5 will set you back more than that. But then Salon magazine echoed that piece with a post titled “Baristas gone wild”, and local culture & clique rag, 7×7, anointed the Slayer at Sightglass as “ushering in coffee’s fourth wave”.

Has the Sightglass switch to a Slayer revolutionized how we appreciate coffee?

We love a taste test challenge. But to make a fair and reasonable comparison, a number of variables must be held in check: location, barista, coffee roast, grind, ambient temperature and humidity, etc. Unfortunately, controlling all of these is a next to impossible task. However, there are a few things in our favor: the same place (Sightglass) using the same roast (a Sightglass blend made at Verve Coffee Roasters) and the same grinding equipment.

On the negative side, the baristas were different (but were hopefully trained to the same standards), the weather may have been different, the age of the roasts could be different, etc. But since we couldn’t reasonably get lab time to compare a Slayer with a La Marzocco GB/5, we’ll have to settle for a taste comparison made months apart.

The other thing in our favor is that we’ve historically found our own espresso tasting descriptors and rating system to be very consistent between visits at cafés with good standards and consistency. We’ve been surprised many times when, having a “blind” test at a place we haven’t visited in over a year, we’ve compared our notes and scores with our previous visit and discovered that they completely agree. And if the Slayer truly created an entirely new wave of consumer coffee appreciation over the old standards, our lack of precision should theoretically matter little.

Comparing the Sightglass GS2 and Slayer Shots

We found our Slayer-pulled Sightglass shot to have a dark crema. Comparing it with the La Marzocco-made shot of old, the crema is a little darker but a little less substantial. The body is a touch thin, but that was true before here also. One greater difference was the focus of the flavor profile: instead of a potent flavor dominated more in the pungent range of the flavor spectrum (more of cloves, herbs, etc.), the Slayer-made shot had a darker, more earthy flavor dominated more in the smoky/muted tobacco end of the spectrum. And while their La Marzocco shot had a pretty limited dynamic range of flavors that were still executed well, the newer shot had the same limited range with the exception of a surprisingly acidic bite to its finish.

Even so, these differences were subtle. We noticed the $0.50 increase in their shot prices more than any tasting differences (namely: more smokiness than pungency plus a brighter finish). In fact, when we tallied our espresso rating scores, they were identical with the GS2 shot from last July.

So does that mean the Slayer isn’t a great machine? No. But it does suggest that the 2010 issue Slayer, for all its hype, imparted no noticeable difference to the resulting shot in the cup — from a 1970′s-made La Marzocco. At least from our espresso consumer’s perspective, this supposed fourth wave looks identical to the so-called third. We honestly couldn’t tell them apart.

Sure, we have taken a bit of poetic license to its literal extreme with this semi-facetious comparison. But if you are going make audacious claims, we ask that you back them up.

Of course, the Slayer’s prime advantages are manual pressure control and pre-infusion capabilities that are perhaps best suited for single origin coffees rather than blends. The reason we found little difference from the Slayer at Sightglass could be due to the coffee being a blend, or because they’ve tuned it to produce shots that meet their previous flavor profiles, or because their baristas haven’t yet learned how to take advantage of the additional controls.

But perhaps the biggest telltale sign as to why Sightglass switched from a perfectly reasonable GS2 to a Slayer can be found in their most recent cash register system, which is now based on the Apple iPad released just this week. Is there any better way to indicate how much you’re enamored with the new and less with the reasons why behind a switch?

Read the updated review of Sightglass.

At CoffeeRatings.com, we believe that what the end consumer experiences is what matters most, regardless of who is behind the results. But often the story about coffee becomes more of a story about people. Rodger’s Coffee & Tea is a good example of this — where knowing a little of the back story helps provide a reference point describing some of what goes on in the cup.

Coffee Magic and the Birth of Philz Coffee

The story of Rodger’s Coffee & Tea centers around its owner and founder, Rodger Bories. Mr. Bories started a wholesale coffee business in the Bay Area going back to 1982, which later evolved to become Coffee Magic. In that time, Mr. Bories recognized how coffee freshness is a big determinant for whether brewed coffee tastes any good — or not.

While Mr. Bories remained a background figure, in 2002 he partnered with Phil Jaber of Gateway Liquor at 24th & Folsom Sts. And here is where the versions of events can start to vary, depending on whom you ask. According to Mr. Bories, he was invited in to fix some rather awful coffee operations at Gateway Liquor. The fruits of their partnership inspired a successful coffee quality turnaround at Gateway Liquor, which in turn inspired Phil Jaber to strike out on his own to launch Philz Coffee.

Mr. Jaber, being the ultimate showman that he is, took the path of becoming the P.T. Barnum of SF’s specialty coffee world. Meanwhile, Mr. Bories focused on the back-office details of producing quality roasts, ensuring freshness, and using the right equipment. However, as is now blatantly clear, that partnership ultimately ran a bit sour. Mr. Bories has since opened his first retail café at this location in January of this year, bringing with him the “One Cup At A Time” filter coffee concept he helped develop for Philz Coffee.

A mix of the old and new coffee schools

There’s a lot to believe in Mr. Bories’ telling of events. His café exhibits a much greater knowledge and care of bean origins, roasting styles, preparation methods, and techniques than you will find at a Philz Coffee. It also explains why we’ve long felt Mr. Jaber loved the celebrity but couldn’t be bothered with the mundane back-office details of the coffee business.

However, Mr. Bories, with 27 years in the business, is hardly a “Third Waver” — and that turns out to be a good thing. While his roasts show an attention to quality bean sources and freshness (despite the open bins of stored beans in the shop), he’s also not afraid of roasting into the second-crack for darker roasts. Neither is he afraid of blends (just without some of Philz Coffee’s fairytale names for them).

This results in beans that have a combination of freshness and roasting style that are difficult to come by in the Bay Area. We purchased a pound of their limited edition Brazil Poco Fundo for home espresso use ($13/lb). And while it is a single origin coffee, it produced some attributes in body and flavor roundness that you can’t easily find in the coffees of so-called Third Wave roasters. Most importantly, the quality of the espresso it produced, while not necessarily superior, compared well with the same roasters.

As for the café…

The café is located in the ground floor corner of what looks like some Mission district condo gentrification. They have limited sidewalk seating out front on benches and plastic chairs. Inside there’s a bench and some limited window counter stool seating, but the main attraction is standing up at the coffee bar for service “Italian style”.

Standing at the bar, you can identify dozens of coffee varietals in plastic bins: some blends, but many with geographic designations. You can choose any kind you like for espresso — more than you would practically want, actually. This despite the main attraction of individually-made filter drip coffee. Their hot chocolate preparation is also quite a bit of Benihana-style visual entertainment. The staff is friendly and generally sarcastic, and we like that. Coffee industry rags cover the inside counters.

For our espresso shot, we chose the limited edition Brazil Poco Fundo, in place of the usual Brazil Fazenda. They are careful to grind to order and are conscientious about their beverage preparation. Using a two-group Synesso machine (another example that would never dawn on Philz Coffee), they unfortunately pull overly full espresso shots in a cup without a saucer.

Our primary complaint here is the large pour volume, as our home results with the same beans and shorter pulls proved much better. Still, the shot has a healthy layer of a medium- and light-brown crema, with a body that is somewhat thinner given the size of the pour. It has a simple herbal flavor with some spice and smoke, but you can tell it’s fresh.

Decent beans hindered by faulty pull sizes result in a cup that’s not all that much better than average. They should be capable of something better here — closer to what we produced at home. Perhaps given their young stage, improvements are coming. Cash only.

Read the review of Rodger’s Coffee & Tea.

Just a few years ago, for a variety of reasons, we were avid and regular home coffee roasters. Today we still occasionally roast our own coffee at home, but we find far fewer reasons to do so — and we find ourselves doing it much less often. The reasons for this change are partly personal. But they mostly reflect significant shifts over the past few years behind the motivations for home coffee roasting.

A little home roasting history…

Home roasting remains something of an oddity in the world of quality coffee, akin to the high school chess club even among coffee geeks. For example, there are several online communities for home roasters — most have been around for years — and yet rarely do they interact with the many other online communities devoted to baristas, consumer coffee, and the coffee trade (and vice versa). We’ve found meatspace communities to operate much the same way.

Why? We can only guess that many home roasters tend to dwell in the odd margins of prosumers: too esoteric for most layman consumers, and yet not commercial enough for the professionals to take notice. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in many countries home coffee roasting was the norm up until World War II. In America, the convenience of coffee pre-roasted outside the home didn’t even catch on until the late 1800s.

When we started home roasting around the turn of the millennium, we did so because it uniquely solved a big problem with home espresso. With espresso being particularly sensitive to the age of the roast, we needed a small-but-steady supply of fresh-roasted coffee beans that were less than a week old.

Because we consumed most of our espresso shots outside the home at the time, our home coffee turnover ran as low as a pound every 2-3 weeks — making small-batch (micro-batch?) lots rather attractive. The few roasters with relatively fresh supplies often sold by the pound. As for the decent roasters that allowed you to purchase smaller supplies in bulk? They typically stored their roasts in open bins that visually looked good in retail locations but fully exposed their coffee to days of rapid oxidation (and hence rapid staleness).

Like many other home roasters, we took the plunge for freshness, variety, and small batch sizes. And since you can typically buy green coffee beans at about half the price of their roasted versions, other home roasters pursued it as a way to save money. Or do you?

The cost savings myth

Given these economic times where industry trade mags read like a dirge for the café and quality coffee, some of the apocalyptic retail coffee prophesies out there include suggestions of a mass movement towards home roasting (e.g., Coffee Talk‘s “State of the Industry” editorial [7.8Mb pdf, pg. 10] published this month).

Of course, we’ve recently ruffled quite a few feathers among the personal finance malpractice industry — calling the bluff of a bevy of personal finance lemmings posters who regurgitated the home espresso machine savings myth. (Save that myth for the Starbucks marketing gurus hawking home espresso equipment on their cafés’ expensive retail shelf space. Someone has clearly done the math, and our money is on Starbucks determining their customer lifetime value long before any wannabe wonk thought about the economics of home espresso machines.)

Just as with the home espresso machine savings myth, the fly in home roasting’s economic ointment is labor: home roasting takes a bit of work and energy. This time investment is readily dismissed by those who love the craft, but then there’s a reason most of us don’t feel the loving zen of changing our own motor oil. Regularly flossing your teeth may seem like a small time commitment, but millions of people would gladly cough up a few bucks every month if there was a way to make the need simply go away.

As always, your mileage may vary. We started with a detailed database of each test roast (a system prototype for CoffeeRatings.com no less), adjusted various controls for time and temperature, etc. But these days, we’re more than a bit slapdash; we’re lucky to avoid getting distracted and burning the house down.

As for freshness, variety, and small batches…

Over the past few years, the financial incentives of home roasting haven’t changed. However, the freshness and variety of roasted coffees available to consumers have changed dramatically.

We had a good conversation about this with Christian of Man Seeking Coffee fame — during our joint review of Dynamo Donuts. Before the advent of Blue Bottle Coffee, almost no one dared date stamp their roasts. So the only way consumers could be sure they were getting coffee roasted less than a week old was to roast it themselves.

Today, the practice of date-stamping coffee roasts is expected among the better roasters. A week ago we walked into the Bi-Rite grocer, and we could pick up a half-pound bag of Guatemalan or Ethiopian beans from Ritual Coffee Roasters — roasted just a few days prior. A small neighborhood café such as Cafe Bello offers a daily special of a same-day roast for a mere $8 per pound.

Healdsburg’s Flying Goat Coffee, for example, will take your order online, roast it to order, and ship it to you within a couple of days. Vancouver, Canada’s 49th Parallel Roasters will FedEx roasted-to-order coffee virtually overnight to most anywhere in North America. And some roasters, such as Ritual and Blue Bottle, even offer roasted coffee subscriptions, delivered to your door.

With roasted-to-order Cup of Excellence coffees now available with the click of a mouse, what upside is left to the art of home roasting?

When home roasting still matters

Today the motivations for home roasting are far less compelling than they were just a few years ago — at least for most consumers. Still, there are still solid reasons why home roasting still makes sense:

• Pre-roasted blends and experimentation

Some coffee lovers want to experiment with different blends. And many coffee varietals contribute better to blends at different roast levels. This despite the current industry fad to roast most everything at a medium roast level, regardless of the type and origin of the bean involved. (If we hear one more roaster utter the brain-dead proclamation, “We only roast our coffee to medium roast, because that’s best,” we’re going to scream.)

• Access to hard-to-find beans

This is one of the biggest motivators. Despite the greater variety of coffees available from quality roasters, their selection simply pales in comparison to the inventory at a Sweet Maria’s, for example. Some bean stocks, let alone roast styles, are clearly out of vogue among retail roasters. For example, today there’s a huge emphasis on single origin beans — leaving a major market gap for a variety of interesting blends to be used for espresso or other brewing methods.

One of our favorite varietals for home roasting is Maui Moka for its intense, unrivaled chocolaty flavor. This living dinosaur of a varietal may cost $23 a pound green, but it’s worth the extra cost and roasting effort on occasion, because it’s pretty hard to find — fresh-roasted or not.

• Convenient access to fresh-roasted coffee

Although fresh roasts are more widely available, you might not always want to rely on the postal service to get them. Furthermore, if your home coffee turnover rate is rather low, the expense of regularly shipping micro lots of the stuff suddenly makes the financial savings argument of home roasting much more compelling.

• Got some spare time?

If you’re out of work or school and are interested in the process, home roasting becomes more appealing. When considering the labor costs, in some situations your time might be worth the investment — especially when you compare it with the costs of having a coffee subscription delivered regularly. Even so, the margins are still too thin on inexpensive green coffee beans to justify home roasting purely for financial reasons. Hence we suggest that if you’re going to bother with home roasting at all, deal only with higher quality green beans.

• Like making your own wine or beer?

These days consumers have never had so much interest in quality food and yet felt so distant from its production. If you’re the type that likes to get their hands dirty to learn something new once in a while, home roasting is worth a shot. At least as a short-term strategy until you move on to your next hands-on project.

UPDATE: Feb. 9, 2011
Despite the fact that home coffee roasting has gone from an active Internet community on newsgroups and online forums to a trickle today of what it used to be, the mainstream media seems to have just “discovered” home roasting and continue to proclaim that it’s some growing DIY fad: The Ultimate DIY: Roasting Your Own Coffee – San Jose Mercury News.

A decade ago, many home consumers of quality coffee had no choice but to roast their own for freshly roasted coffee. Today, with so many quality options now stamped with roasting dates, the need has greatly diminished. This has lead to a long decline in the home roasting community, which is now dominated by a few new DIY curiosity seekers and a more limited handful of die-hards. Neither of which spells sustained growth for this community.