Yesterday morning, KQED radio aired an hour-long Forum segment featuring a small round-table of SF coffee “luminaries”: SF’s Coffee Innovators: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. The panel included James Freeman, of Blue Bottle Coffee, Eileen Hassi, of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and an unusually quiet Jeremy Tooker, of Four Barrel Coffee.

Much like the title of its associated Web page, the radio program played out like your typical coffee innovator/”third wave“/bleeding-edge routine that we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. While a bit heavy on the Coffee 101 — particularly when callers asked common FAQ-type questions that have been answered on the Internet 20,000 times over already — KQED produced a good program overall.

Some of the more interesting comments included Eileen Hassi stating that “San Francisco has better coffee than any other city in the world” — with the only potential exception being Oslo, Norway. We’d like to think so, and there’s a bit of evidence to back that up.

James Freeman noted Italy’s “industrialized system of near-universal adequacy,” which is a different but accurate way of summing up our long-held beliefs that outstanding coffee in Italy is almost as hard to find as unacceptable coffee. Other covered topics included coffeehouses eliminating WiFi, Berkeley’s Caffe Mediterraneum inventing the latte, the Gibraltar, and even James Freeman designating home roasting as coffee’s “geeky lunatic fringe.”

The rumors of home coffee roasting’s meteoric rise have been greatly exaggerated…

While it’s worth noting that Mr. Freeman started as a home roaster, recent media coverage of home roasting has been a bit bizarre. To read it in the press these days, you’d think home roasting were at its apex rather than continuing its gradual decline towards its nadir. This despite numerous media stories covering it over five years ago as some hot new trend.

At the 2006 WRBC, we were perplexed by the complete lack of home roaster representation among the event’s attendees. (Namely, any home roaster worth his weight in greens would have been giddy over the reappearance of the Maui Moka bean. Nobody there even noticed.) And yet by 2009 we noted a real decline in online home roasting community activity, and we wrote about some of the underlying reasons for it.

South India coffee

Curiously enough, the first caller to the radio program (at 12’12″ in) mentions a recent trip to South India and his interest in South Indian coffee. I’m posting this from South India — Bengaluru (née Bangalore), to be precise. And I have to say, I’ve become quite fond of both South Indian coffee and the South Indian coffee culture.

Sure, they prefer it sweetened and with hot milk (that often has a skin still on it). The coffee is often cut with cheaper chicory and is brewed with a two-chambered cylindrical metal drip brewer — not unlike a Vietnamese brewer or an upside-down version of a Neapolitan flip coffee pot. But damn, if this stuff isn’t good. Even better, there’s a culture of regular coffee breaks that would be familiar to many Mediterraneans.

We’ve reported from India before, but only from the North — which isn’t known for a strong coffee culture beyond young people frequenting chains that emulate the West. Bengaluru is home to the Coffee Board of India, and this weekend I hope to head out across its state of Karnataka to visit origin at the Kodagu district. Also known as Coorg, this district grows a good amount of India’s good coffee. (Yes, they even grow really good robusta there. Just ask Tom Owens of Sweet Maria.) Details certainly to follow…

Because public coffee knowledge is in such a state of transition these days, reading mass media articles about coffee can be a little like being in a parent support group. Sometimes you’re new to a subject area, and you might find commiseration among other people going through the same new learning experiences. At other times you might already be familiar with a topic, and it’s a bit like having a two-year-old and hearing your friends gush over the experience of being the first-time parent of a newborn. (Throw in a little patronizing bit of, “Oh, how cute…”)

Now whether you’re the parent of a newborn or of a teenager with a driver’s license, we’ve often liked the no-nonsense, fad-skeptical coffee articles published by the Seattle Weekly. Today’s piece explores the importance of coffee grinders: The 2010 Grinder Smackdown: Coffee Gets Combative – Seattle Restaurants and Dining – Voracious.

Comparing a La Marzocco Swift grinder and a Mahlkönig K30 Vario, the author discovers how much the choice of grinder can influence the quality and properties of the resulting espresso shot. We’ve always emphasized how a solid grinder is often more important than the quality of your espresso machine.

The author also reflects upon the wisdom of, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”

The Boston Globe published an article today (OK, technically tomorrow) about making great espresso with cheap home equipment: High-quality espresso from low-end machines – The Boston Globe. The author experimented by buying cheaper, used home espresso machines, and he claims to have achieved decent results. The key to his results were a good grind, good beans, and good portafilter packing.

Given some of the wretched espresso we’ve subjected ourselves to from the supposed “professionals,” how bad could it really be? While we haven’t tried going ghetto with home machines, we agree with the writer’s advice: grinders are often where home espresso first goes wrong, and you need a high-end one to produce a decent espresso grind. That’s a nice change from the endless supply of home espresso machine pushers who criminally neglect the importance of a good burr grinder.

The writer also found that having beans ground for him at a local coffee shop never produced espresso as good as the canned stuff — which may surprise many (including us). That says something about the reliability of local coffee shop coffee grinding, the freshness of their coffee, or both.

Of the pre-packaged variety, he tested eleven different brands and suggested that Era Ora and Sant’Eustachio came out on top.

Last month I mentioned an article on David Lebovitz’s site regarding his recent training at Illy‘s Università del caffè in Trieste, Italy. David is a professionally trained pastry chef and writer, and recently he’s taken up a bit of an obsession with quality home espresso production. (Sound familiar?)

Today his site features an article and “Top 8″ list I wrote for his audience on taking home espresso to the next level: David Lebovitz: Delving Deeper Into Coffee.

Consumer Reports published a home buyer’s guide to espresso makers this month: ConsumerReports.org – Buyer’s guide to espresso makers 3/07. As with a lot of things in Consumer Reports, they often lack sufficient knowledge or background to offer educated opinions beyond winging it with what’s on the surface. (Well, beyond that and Consumers Union‘s usual internal arrogance of believing that all consumers are good and vendors evil. But that’s another story.)

I can look past the article talking about Starbucks as if it were just a recent fad. But trouble brews when they mention Bialetti among the espresso machine brands sold in the U.S., and yet four paragraphs later they clearly state “espresso is made by forcing hot water under pressure through tightly packed, or tamped, finely ground coffee”. (Bialetti moka pots use steam rather than water under pressure — and thus technically they do not make espresso.) The other brands in their list are makers of historically cheap, landfill-bound home appliances — with a shaver and a popcorn popper manufacturer thrown in for good measure.

It gets dicier, with the article emphasizing the the ever-popular-and-delusional cost savings benefits of these home espresso machines. And when it comes to the taste test, they treat espresso machines as if they were self-contained, standalone appliances that pump out uniform cups of espresso, regardless of the grinder and the beans used. As if we all plug our home espresso machines into a wall socket for a steady stream of freshly ground coffee that appears on our monthly PG&E bill.

As when SFist Jeremy Nisen skewered a Los Angeles Times article that attempted to comparatively review coffees last year (“Know Your Coffee Reviewers”), this oversimplified approach is disingenuous and counter-productive. How can you reasonably compare one machine that can use fresh coffee beans with a pod machine that must use the requesite packets of stale, pre-ground beans — without taking all these other factors into account?

And yet despite the world of difference between fresh coffee beans and not, Consumer Reports concluded with much love for the Nespresso. Not that it’s a bad espresso machine. But personally, I cannot make it past their required stale, pre-ground beans. Fortunately for Nespresso, many of their customers have been so conditioned by stale, pre-ground beans (the reviewers of Consumer Reports apparently included), they’ve come to expect — and believe there is — nothing more.

Today’s Edmonton Journal published a primer on the more sophisticated home espresso setup: Getting Serious About Coffee. In other words, what do you do when your $100 home Krups machine isn’t cutting it — because the espresso it produces belongs in the same landfill where your machine will deservedly rot its final days?

There’s an avalanche of articles, and dedicated Web sites, on the topic. However, I will briefly point out my own Rules of Home Espresso Engagement from my own years of home espresso-making:

• Don’t buy a home machine as a means of saving money. You’ll spend more by throwing out the cheap piece of junk you bought because of the bad coffee it produces, and you’ll end back up at square one.
• To do this right, it’s going to be expensive. Don’t even bother getting a home espresso machine if you can’t afford at least a $400 Rancilio Silva.
• Buy your espresso machine from a specialist retailer. Bigger-name retailers of kitchen appliances and gourmet food equipment mostly sell overpriced, underperforming landfill.
• An exception to the above rule is if you want something self-contained, push-button, and of the ultimate convenience. In which case, I recommend that you forget the home machine, find your favorite café on CoffeeRatings.com, and pay someone else to brew your espresso.
• Do your research online, get opinions of those you trust.
• Don’t spend more than $400 on an espresso machine without also spending almost as much on a decent burr grinder. Most everybody treats the grinder as an afterthought, and an inexpensive grinder will throttle the quality completely — making your expensive espresso machine pointless.
• Use coffee beans as fresh as you can possibly get — ideally less than one week since roasting. Your crema will notice the difference. Bags of the stuff that you find on Starbucks‘, Peet’s, or other store shelves are typically weeks old — so go to a local roaster if you can. If opening the bag doesn’t make your house stink of coffee, it’s not fresh enough. (Unless it’s roasted that day — and it never is.)
• Unless you drink espresso daily and in significant quantities, you may want to consider home roasting your own beans. People did this for centuries before Sanka, today it is a lot less complicated than it sounds (think “hot air popcorn popper”), and you can’t beat the freshness.
• Clean your equipment frequently, as with food-safe coffee oil solvents such as Puro Caff, and perform regular maintenance, such as replacing seals and gaskets about every year, to prevent your home espresso from going rancid in a hurry.

A couple days ago, CoffeeGeek.com announced their 2006 Editors’ Choice awards for espresso: CoffeeGeek – Editor’s Choice Awards 2006 – Espresso. Award categories include espresso machines in different price ranges, coffee grinders, bean blends, and espresso-making accessories.

If you still need holiday gifts for that special coffee mutant in your life, get your credit card ready. (I hope my wife is reading this…)

A friend and CoffeeRatings.com reader, Jeremy Nisen, occasionally writes for SFist — which many rightfully recognize as San Francisco’s best local blog. (Jeremy interviewed me for it earlier this year.) Yesterday he pointed me to his most recent article on the site: SFist: Um, Yeah, But What Kind of Grinder Did They Use?.

In it, Jeremy takes issue with a recent Los Angeles Times article (French roast brews, sip for sip – Los Angeles Times) where a panel of coffee tasters reviewed the French roasts of several different roasters. True to an SFist’s core, Jeremy does his best “L.A. sucks” rebuttal when he finds them guilty of talking smack about Graffeo beans. But more to the point, he raises all sorts of legit questions about the validity of their side-by-side comparison taste test to begin with.

Certainly, the L.A. Times was just innocently cranking out a nice, forgettable fluff piece that perhaps influenced a few readers to try out different roasters — and undoubtedly the staff are now all off to thinking about who has the best mojito recipe. But in a taste-making media world now dominated by celebrity chefs who never cook, knowing the quality of the advice you’re getting is at least as important as knowing the rancher who raised your Kobe beef.

The Airing of Grievances

Issue #1: Food editors, like most restaurant chefs, couldn’t tell a good cup of coffee if it scalded their thighs in a McDonald’s drive-thru. They’ve made it their business to know everything about food, but often that has translated into a misguided belief that this somehow confers upon them de facto coffee taster certification. Which partly explains why restaurants notoriously serve some of the worst espresso in any city I visit. And as Jeremy put it, “After all, how often do you see a restaurant review talk about the end-of-the-meal cuppa joe?”

Issue #2: Thirteen cups of coffee at one sitting is bound to make anybody think, “we were struck by how similar so many of them were.” I guarantee you that if you smack your forehead hard enough on your kitchen table a dozen times, that thirteenth smack will feel less painful than the first. When I reviewed espresso for CoffeeRatings.com, four was my limit at any one time (caffeine-induced hallucinations aside). Even at coffee cuppings, my tastebuds go numb before reaching double digits.

Issue #3: How fresh is the coffee? This is a huge determinant to how good any coffee will turn out. If you bought resold Blue Bottle Beans hidden behind the two-year-old Pop Tarts at the corner convenience store, they may taste a lot worse than Costco’s ashy Mt. St. Helens Pyroclastic Flow blend that you happen to catch a mere three-weeks-old that day.

The point of all this is that methodology counts immensely when making any legitimate comparison. While I do not claim to be a professional coffee tastemaster by any means, it is for this reason that I have posted a Tasting Methodology link prominently on the site from day one. If you really want to know methodology, the guide Espresso Italiano Tasting is a good resource for “rules of engagement”.

Canadian Business magazine recently reposted a 2001 article on the deep and seemingly bottomless pit of home espresso perfectionism (something I can identify with all too well): A cuppa perfection | After Hours | Gotta Have It | Canadian Business Online. The article is even more accurate today than it was when first published.

It all innocently starts, of course, with a quality home espresso machine. Which is, quite naturally, wholly incomplete without also a high quality grinder and fresh beans. Next there’s roasting your own beans for the ultimate freshness in small batches. And then there’s often revisiting the espresso machine all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s this relentless pursuit of higher standards that has made me question the value of super-automatic machines in the big scheme of things. All the best baristas who have ever served me have invariably tossed out several shots during their preparations — because some of their pulls just did not meet their standards. Call me a Luddite, but I’m not so sure that level of quality control and perfectionism is something that will ever be automated.

An article in yesterday’s ThePilot of the North Carolina Sandhills tells the story of how a Victoria Arduino espresso machine made its way from Torino, Italy to Incredible Edibles of Pinehurst, NC — placing the coffee shop on the noteworthy American espresso map: Dolce Vita Right Here at Home – The Pilot Newspaper – Local News.

Just an espresso machine, you say? The Victoria Arduino originated in Torino a century ago. It’s an exquisite machine of classic manufacturing and beauty, held in high regard among many espresso aficionados, and immortalized in advertising prints from the 1920s.

There are some 100 numbered Victoria Arduino machines currently in use, and this is the story of #55. Machine #1 is rumored to be in use at the Vatican for pulling Holy Papal espresso shots. (There is something of what may have once been a Victoria Arduino currently at SF’s Tosca Cafe — but it’s only an unnumbered, garage sale shell of the machine’s past glory.)

Of course, I love a special espresso machine as much as the next guy. But if only great grinders got half the love espresso machines receive — especially given that they contribute arguably half of the machine element required for making great espresso.