Some five years ago we wrote about the problem of espresso sameness in the SF Bay Area. At issue is the challenge for local communities to preserve a diversity of quality coffee purveyors. On that subject, today’s Washington D.C. City Paper posted an article on their city’s growing quality coffee monoculture: How Did Counter Culture Coffee Take Over D.C.? Freebies – Young & Hungry.

A regional diversity in roasting styles, bean sourcing, and even plain old philosophical approaches towards coffee (for example, industry-centric practices vs. being customer-centric) is a prerequisite for any vibrant coffee culture to exist. Too much of one philosophy or approach without a foil, and it becomes hegemony — if not also a little monotony.

Given this age of large corporate buy-outs and company financial failures — to which D.C. is no stranger — having all your eggs in one basket is also a recipe for disaster. The article also offers up some local purveyors that give hope for more of a balanced coffee economy in the area.

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

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

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

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

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

Saveur is one among many “gourmet” food, wine, and travel magazines (as much as we hate that hackneyed 80′s word) — but with a specific focus on international cuisines. “Saveur” being French for “flavor”. Now whether “Saveur Sav” would be a clock-and-beret-wearing member of France’s answer to Public Enemy is still up for debate. (Oui, garçon!) But the cover story for their latest (October ’08) issue is “The Breakfast Issue.” And while many of us will take issue that “coffee: it’s not just for breakfast anymore,” they feature a series of articles on coffee in the print magazine and as Web exclusives.

The main print article reviews nine different coffees from nine different specialty roasters, representing a rather broad spectrum of roasted coffee available for home brew: 9 Great Coffees – Saveur.com. And we sure do mean “broad”. It includes the usual suspects — the likes of Counter Culture, Stumptown, Intelligentsia, and 49th Parallel. But there’s also the unorthodox choice of traditionalists Sant’Eustachio il caffè and even the “mass production” coffees of Green Mountain and Peet’s.

On one end of the spectrum they’ve got Newman’s Own Organics, and at the other end they’ve got Intelligentsia’s Panama Hacienda La Esmeralda (a batch of which we reviewed last year as roasted by Peet’s). Though to once again invoke the ever-tiresome wine analogy, we’ve noticed a trend where Esmeralda has become something of the Silver Oak cab of the coffee world: i.e., a great product, but one burdened with a status symbol brand name that people commonly latch on to when they know little else about the beverage. (Well, at least it isn’t kopi luwak.)

In Saveur.com’s online exclusives, they review an additional 14 coffees (More of Our Favorite Roasts – Saveur.com) and offer a coffee glossary (A Glossary of Coffee Terminology – Saveur.com). There’s even a brief interview/book promotion piece from Counter Cult member and Third Wave choir girl, Michaele Weissman: A Flawless Cup – Saveur.com.

Because there are only about three or four people who write any original content anymore — and millions of others who just copy them and each other (see: us) — the Washington Post joined in on the San Fransisco Chronicle‘s act (ROAST WITH THE MOST / A new generation of Bay Area coffee roasters pushes the perfect cup to the next level) and published a similar story today about Washington D.C.’s own area roasters: Roasting Raises the Coffee Bar – washingtonpost.com.

Here the article was penned by Michaele Weissman, who has been out on a book tour promoting her new book, God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee. Which, curiously enough, closely mirrors the title of Instaurator’s The Espresso Quest recently released book (which itself was to be titled God In My Espresso Cup).

Ms. Weissman, a reporter by trade, is a good layman storyteller — something the coffee industry severely lacks. We recently let our subscription to Barista Magazine expire — mostly because the writing was so poor. (Sorry, Matt Milletto — you seem like a nice guy and all, but you really ought to stick to coffee. That droning laundry list of a coffee travelog in the Feb/Mar issue probably put us over the edge.)

But unlike Instaurator in his book, Ms. Weissman unfortunately takes on the rather gullible stance of a coffee outsider who buys hook, line, and sinker into the Third Wave myth. (Not surprising, given her Counter Culture Coffee loyalties.) But despite that, we still might still check it out at the S.F. Public Library someday.

The truth is out. What do die hard coffee drinkers in coffee-obsessed Australia really order?: Caffeine connoisseurs say lattes are the cream of the crop | Herald Sun. Yes, it’s the boorish latte. (And written by a boorish reporter: “Caffeine connoisseurs”?!? It’s been a while since we’ve seen the tiresome caffeine riff.)

Of course we’re being a bit facetious. But Australians are often cited as some of the greatest espresso connoisseurs in the world. And we at CoffeeRatings.com have heard a lot of smack talk from visiting Aussies, lamenting our national disregard for latte art and the inability to find a proper flat white (assuming anyone actually knows what one is).

The fact is — they’re right. Coffee standards are terrible in this country; they are one of the prime motivators that gave birth to CoffeeRatings.com five years ago this month. We generally serve over-extracted, bitter, watery dreck that is only made fit for human consumption after drowning it in gallons of milk and flavoring it with three kinds of syrup.

Even if that’s the rule, there are exceptions — and more exceptions thankfully appear around the nation every month. And while those exceptions are, say, easier to come by in towns like Seattle (which, as a rule of the masses, has generally terrible coffee standards as well), Australia has a coffee history and national obsession that makes these exceptions more commonplace.

But now we also know the “dirty truth”: behind every person who can drink a decent quality espresso in Australia, there are seven Aussies swigging down skinny/soy/chai lattes. Has the Australian coffee palate evolved much at all beyond our double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato? After reading this story, you’d be hard-pressed to say so.

So we asked our guest correspondent in Perth…

To get another perspective on this story and the “research” behind it, we asked Michael ‘Grendel’ Carroll what he thought about the Herald Sun‘s claims. Michael runs Cafe Grendel — a coffee review blog out of Perth, Australia. Granted, Perth is half a continent away from the Herald Sun‘s Melbourne, but at least they use the same currency.

Mr. Carroll first noted that the online poll associated with this Herald Sun story should be taken with a grain of salt. Given that the article mentions The Deck, better known as a restaurant, it calls the specialty coffee/cafe credibility of the Herald Sun into question. Mr. Carroll also noted, “It sounds to me as if (to use an Aussie slang) the owner [of The Deck] was ‘having a bit of a lend of himself,’ which is another way of suggesting he sounds a bit pretentious.”

And coffee pretentiousness is something of a problem Down Under, just as it is in very limited circles in the States. “While verbose descriptions of the various flavours and aromas have their place I think we may have taken it a little too far over here at times, and our coffee snobbery drifts to ridiculous levels,” said Mr. Carroll. “So much so that I and some fellow coffee snobs have a running ‘elderberry’ joke whenever we do a cupping.” Did Counter Culture Coffee recently open an office in Perth?

As in the U.S. as Australia, consumer knowledge and awareness of specialty coffee is spreading rapidly, raising consumer expectations for the coffee they drink. This in itself is a huge accomplishment. However, knowledge often inevitably leads to a rise in pretentiousness (see: the ever-popular wine analogy) — which can undermine more populist demands for better coffee. To counter this, Mr. Carroll wrote, “We will one day stop making rules for people, I hope, and allow them to enjoy coffee as coffee without placing too many subjective demands on the experience.” We could not agree more.

French coffee cuppers seem displeased with the San Ignacio Juana Mamami Huanca from Bolivia — or maybe they’re just being French.

Promising news for anyone who takes the gamble of ordering prepared coffee in restaurants: the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) has recently announced a partnership with Durham, NC’s Counter Culture Coffee to develop a coffee curriculum: newsobserver.com | Coffee partnership forms. (Press release from last week.)

Unlike the closer-to-home CCA (California Culinary Academy) — which has made overtures to become the “Draw Tippy the Turtle” of cooking schools by reportedly whoring itself out to every Food TV watcher/wannabe chef with a checking account — the CIA is held in the highest esteem among America’s top culinary pros. We still feel that many notable chefs suffer a kind of hubris: that demonstrating a mastery in cuisine naturally confers an equivalent expertise with anything put into your mouth (i.e., coffee — let’s keep it clean here, folks!). The fact that the CIA is giving it serious treatment is a real step forward given how far coffee quality standards at restaurants have to improve.

Now we’ve expressed our ambivalence over some of Counter Culture’s Fair-Trade-club-to-the-head marketing, even if their heart is in the right place. (And the next simpleton who says that an argument against Fair Trade is an argument for poverty should be clubbed in the head.) We have even questioned their habit of shoehorning “coffee cupping” into some perverse wine-tasting proxy; even Peet’s has the sense to offer “Comparative Tastings” instead. But by all accounts, they sure do know their beans. Unfortunately they didn’t exist when I lived in Durham briefly back in 1991. (Time to hit my Linden Terrace crew up on my ghettro for a kilo, yo.)

It may be a new year, but often it is only the calendar that changes. Take this article in today’s New York Daily News — yet another installment in a long line of ever-popular wine analogy/”gee whiz, there’s this thing called cupping” pieces: Coffee: Hey, I’m no ordinary Joe. It comes with the obligatory Counter Culture Coffee PR placements, historical revisionism about what coffee cupping is, shoehorned wine comparisons, and ensuing ridicule in comments from readers who still resent those who started asking for cheese in flavors other than “orange” and “white”.

After getting past wondering how some people could seem so threatened by someone else’s coffee habits, I mused over the ever-bewildering relationship society has been having with their food in general. Setting aside the obesity epidemic and the insane proliferation of corn-based products in the American food chain for a moment, we’ve evidently become so disconnected from how our food is produced that we’ve come to glamorize and romanticize the ugly, dirty, back-breaking underside of food production. (Mind you, I came to this as I was caking grime under my fingernails, taking apart my home espresso machine for the annual ritual of replacing its gaskets.)

How the decommoditization of food has glamorized its production and producers

The public invention of the celebrity chef, the adoration of wine growers, and even the public promotion of coffee cupping all share common roots with this phenomenon. Being a restaurant chef was, and still is, largely a blue collar profession. Wine growers are basically farmers who have developed sudden packs of fashionable, well-heeled groupies. And coffee cupping — despite John Moore’s claim that “[cupping] is like going to mosque, temple or church to celebrate the coffee” — is the ritual of coffee buyers testing lots of unroasted coffee for defects before purchase.

A true coffee cupper is only interested in the taste evaluation and doesn’t actually swallow the stuff — spitting it out into a container. And yet coffee cuppings are being promoted as if some elitist activity analogous to wine tasting (hence eliciting rage and scorn from the occasional Web commenter) … as if slurping and spewing for coffee defects were among the most indulgent pleasures known to royalty. Let’s just say that the next time I get a birthday cake, I don’t plan on celebrating with it by spitting it back onto my plate.

“This coffee cupping sure is fun, Ben!” *spit*

Dealing with agricultural products, whether coffee or wine or restaurants, has always meant a lot of sweaty, unglamorous work. Yet this disconnect between food producers and consumers has created an upscale market where people are willing to spend top dollar for the privilege of performing the most menial labor. It’s the modern equivalent of Ben Rogers, whom Tom Sawyer famously convinced to gladly whitewash his fence for him. Except in today’s version, even Tom Sawyer would have admired the oneupmanship masterstroke of also getting Ben to pay for the pleasure of doing it.

The best examples of this today come from the wine industry, where people are paying large sums of money to go on trips for the back-breaking work of wine harvesting. Marketed as a sort of lifestyles of the rich and richer, the Sonoma County Grape Camp, for example, charges $15,000 a couple (I am not making this up) for the privilege of picking grapes while hunched over in an open field — doing work that otherwise only illegal immigrants can seemingly tolerate. Similar programs exist overseas.

There is an upside to this, of course. People are more willing than they have been for decades to know where their food comes from and how it is made. But the true mark of success for this movement will be when it isn’t just the elitists who recognize the value in that. The first step is in recognizing things for what they are — and even for what they are not.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to taste and enjoy coffee’s many flavors among the different varietals it has to offer. I’ll even continue roasting my own coffee at home from time-to-time. But just as I don’t want to USDA-inspect my own meat, please — someone else do the actual cupping for me.

UPDATE: April 21, 2008
To illustrate how Counter Culture Coffee’s public cuppings graft this industry process on to bewildered retail consumers expecting something much more akin to wine tasting, today a reporter from Asheville, NC’s Citizen-Times wrote a humorous piece about his experience: Columnist at a coffee tasting | COLUMNISTS | Asheville CITIZEN-TIMES.com.

Basically, the reporter puts the “ridicule” in “ridiculous”. Just because some consumers may love bacon, that doesn’t mean they want to play meat inspector for a day and examine a pig carcass for abscesses, tuberculosis, and hog cholera — as much fun as that might be for hog farmers.

UPDATE: May 28, 2008
Counter Culture Coffee continues to seek a profit by spreading consumer ignorance. This time it’s marketing manager, Mark Overbay, trying to sex up coffee’s equivalent of meat inspection in today’s New York Times: Do I Detect a Hint of Joe? Coffee Tastings Catch on With Aficionados – NYTimes.com. There’s a reason why Peet’s Coffee & Tea promotes something called “Comparative Tastings,” Mark.

For example, here’s the definition of cupping from the Napa Valley Roasting Company Web site:

Cupping is an evaluation of green beans. The beans are under roasted and ground into a cup. Then the grounds are infused with water and first slurped and then spit out to experience all the flavors that exist in the beans. The best and worst flavors are present in this state. The key to a truly great cup of coffee is translating the promise of what exists in the green beans and then executing a roasting profile that maximize those flavors.

In the mixed feelings department, the Washington Business Journal recently reported on Counter Culture Coffee‘s newest regional training center in D.C.: Counter Culture Coffee opens training center in Adams Morgan – Washington Business Journal:. As with Counter Culture’s other training centers, it is designed to educate industry wonks and general consumers alike on coffee flavors and Fair Trade practices.

On the upside, awareness of what makes good coffee is a very good thing. I wholly support the notion of educating more people on how to make good coffee, from bean to cup. And while Fair Trade practices are hardly secrets anymore, coffee retailers and consumers should be aware of the issues that lead to the creation of Fair Trade.

That said, Counter Culture seems intent on shoehorning the ever-popular wine analogy with coffee consumers. While this is a convenient vehicle for explaining to consumers why a roasted coffee should cost $15 a pound, it’s also very misleading. Consumers are loaded with pre-conceived notions and expectations where the wine tasting model just does not fit — whether it’s the manual skill and chemistry involved in coffee preparation, the completely unromantic ritual of coffee cupping, or the idea of food pairing.

Environmentalism and social justice: today’s marketing jingle?

Counter Culture is avidly Fair Trade at its roots, so it’s no surprise that they actively promote causes they so firmly believe in. But I have personally become further and further disenfranchised with Fair Trade. As with Communism, the devil isn’t in the concept — it is in the detail of how it is executed.

And it’s not just because growers and the environment aren’t being aided to the degree Fair Trade advocates suggest they are. The goals of certification labels such as “Fair Trade” and “organic” have literally been swallowed whole by marketing efforts — not entirely unlike the “buy green” oxymoron. Just as Michael Pollan advised “never trust a food product that makes a health claim” in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve recently come to the rather radical conclusion of “never trust a product that makes an environmental or social justice claim”. Unfortunately, it’s gotten this bad — and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better.