Media profiles of Illycaffè‘s Andrea Illy are commonplace. But this one from today’s The Guardian (UK) is better than most: Andrea Illy: family businessman who’s raising the bar for premium coffee | Business | The Guardian.

For one, Mr. Illy talks about the importance of pricing and brand positioning. Regardless of what you think of Illy coffee, offering discount promotions and specials is incongruous with establishing it as a luxury item. You don’t lure customers with a come-on for a cheap fix; you lure them because they want to treat themselves. Discounts cheapen that image and position you for the coffee misery market.

He also notes how Illycaffè ensures that resellers of its coffee have the right equipment and are making it properly, retraining staff if necessary. While this is critical for the perceived quality of any roaster whose coffee beans are served in third-party establishments, our data suggests that Illycaffè has fallen far short of living up to these ideals — at least in the U.S.

Back in 2009 we made a comparison of our espresso scores among cafés with common machines, common roasters, or common chain brands, and we used the standard deviation of these scores as a measure of inconsistency. Illy coffee rated much more inconsistently than different Starbucks chain stores — which are notorious themselves for their very poor consistency.

“[Fairtrade] is about paying a higher price for the same goods” — Andrea Illy

Consistent with an interview four years ago, Mr. Illy finishes the article with a couple of good contrarian, somewhat incendiary quotes about Fair Trade. For one: “[Fairtrade] is about paying a higher price for the same goods. That is against the laws of supply and demand.” Another: “consumers pay more for Fairtrade because they want to feel good. It’s about solidarity not quality. Why not give to the Red Cross?”

All of which echoes many of our thoughts about the rather trendy role of “Corporate Social Responsibility” in business today, where consumers seem to prefer to outsource their charitable giving to third-party businesses rather than donate directly themselves. As we always ask: don’t tell us you’re going to donate 10% of the sales proceeds to charity. Give us that 10% off, and let us take responsibility and decide who and how much to donate with the extra savings. You’re my coffee roaster, not my Foundation.

Several months after we declared that coffee’s golden age is over, famed Illy barista-in-chief, Giorgio Milos, posted this in The Atlantic today: America’s Golden Age of Coffee: Remarkably Like Italy’s Past – Giorgio Milos – Life – The Atlantic.

You might recall Mr. Milos ruffling a few New World coffee feathers last year in The Atlantic, when he roughly suggested that “the Italian way” is the only way to appreciate espresso. Among other things he called out the brightness bomb, where many Western baristas have fallen in love with espresso shots that taste like a mouthful of Sour Patch Kids.

In his latest piece, Mr. Milos has made something of a curious about-face. Has all his time around Western espresso started to change his palate? More specifically, he rightfully called out the enthusiasm and passion for coffee quality in the American barista community — something that has been stagnant in Italy for decades. He also drew a number of parallels between “coffee innovation” in America today and in Italy a century ago.

(We’ll try to restrain our gag reflex whenever we hear a term like “coffee innovation”. This is another area where — to quote Mr. Milos — the “oft-cited parallels between specialty coffee and wine break down” in that no one has talked about “wine innovation” with a straight face for many generations.)

Mr. Milos also raised a red flag for the American barista’s “tendency to keep consumers out of the R&D process” — something we similarly called out earlier this year. And he also spoke our language when he wrote, “Italy, where it’s easy to find a very good cup of coffee and tough to find something undrinkable — and about equally tough to find something outstanding.”

UPDATE: Aug. 4, 2011
Is that hell freezing over, or is that just summer in San Francisco? Either way, the cited article is even getting nods in the wine world: A lesson in winemaking – straight from the espresso bar . . . – By the glass – Wine News, Views & Reviews – Boston.com. Take that, all ye winemaking slaves to the big-fruit/big-oak palate.

Near SF’s Flatiron Building (yeah, we got one too), this one-time Starbucks kiosk arguably put the then-next-door All Star Cafe & Bakery at 550 Market St. out of business in its first year of existence. Yet despite morning lines of commuters waiting for their lattes, and an overworked crew of three in tight quarters with an overworked Verismo machine, Starbucks abruptly closed up shop here.

In came Giorgio Milos, Illy‘s head barista and a former Italian champ, to help reopen this space as an Illy-branded café a couple months back. It’s a real improvement for the location, as the old All Star Cafe even beat out the Starbucks that once resided here. But even so — it painfully seems that you still can only do so much with Illy coffee in America.

They offer espresso, panini, and pastries — plus cans of Illy (with Francis Francis machines) on display in the modern, tight space. There’s a lone iron bench on the sidewalk in front, but that’s it for seating. Using a seriously polished, chrome, new, two-group La Carimali machine, they pull shots with a textured medium brown crema that look generally good. But the crema here lacks a real thickness and volume — as you can classically expect from exported Illy coffee.

It has a generally bolder flavor than most American Illy shots: bolder spice and a sharper bite to it without much of the typical woodiness. Served in Illy-logo IPA cups. The milk frothing here shows some care. But as the photo illustrates, the results can be a little suspect.

Read the review of Prima Cosa Caffe.

Coffee talk in the mainstream press these days looks a bit like the telenovela: short-lived serials from specific writers with an individual point of view. One of said serials comes from Giorgio Milos of illycaffè in The Atlantic, and his installment today is on milk frothing: All You Need to Know About Steaming Milk – Food – The Atlantic.

Mr. Milos injects a bit of World Cup mania in his article — which is appropriate, given that soccer (football) is unquestionably the official sport of the coffee world. (As an aside, we’ll be spending a little time ourselves in South Africa next month. Stay tuned for upcoming reviews of espresso bars and reports on the coffee culture specifically around Cape Town.)

Now there’s nothing in Mr. Milos’ short article that you couldn’t find in a standard barista book. But given that “milk” is the flavored coffee of choice in America, it’s a critical set of details for the local coffee culture. In our own home barista experience, we’ve found consistency much harder to achieve with milk frothing than with espresso shots.

Mr. Milos closes his article with an ode to latte art and a video demonstration at Mammarella’s in Napa. While we have yet to visit Mammarella’s, yesterday we were at Francis Ford Coppola’s sister café, Cafe Zoetrope. Let’s just say we were about as disappointed with their espresso as fans of Les Blues were with their 2-0 loss to Mexico.

In recent months, The Atlantic — much like the New York Times — has shown a heightened interest in coffee. Most of it has come from articles penned by Starbucks co-founder, Jerry Baldwin. But today’s article comes from Giorgio Milos, Master Barista for illycaffè: A Winning Formula for Traditional Espresso – Food – The Atlantic.

Yes, Italy: the birthplace of good espresso, and the perennial underachiever at barista championships. But even so, Mr. Milos has a few critiques to offer Americans on the deficiencies of our espresso — namely:

• too much coffee per shot — resulting in overly concentrated shots with a narrow aroma profile,
• coffee that is still gassing out after recent roasting — often resulting in sour flavors (akin to the brightness bomb we often mention),
• cups that aren’t pre-heated, and
• improper grind.

Italians take their espresso preparation very seriously. On the whole, our palate prefers some of the best North American examples to the best that Italy has to offer. However, Italy is far more consistent, the typical standards are much higher there than here, and the process of making a decent espresso is far more codified than the free-for-all we experience in America.

It’s not uncommon, however, to find sour expressions on the faces of Italian espresso experts when they try even the best examples this continent has to offer. The Italian espresso palate may be precise, but some in the Americas might say it can be a bit too precise.

Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article on Illycaffè‘s quiet expansion in the U.S. coffeehouse market: Illy Uses Backdoor to Take On Starbucks in U.S. – WSJ.com.

Anytime someone tries to sell coffee in this country, the knee-jerk media presumption is that they’re going to “Take On Starbucks“™. Illy has always publicly stated that they would never expand at the expense of their quality controls — an area where Starbucks spectacularly self-imploded. That gross oversimplification aside, Illy is expanding its reach by signing exclusive, three-year service-and-supply contracts with select independent cafés across the country.

Our recently-posted review of Caffè Cento is one such example. (With echoes of the Illy sponsorship behind the Gambero Rosso’s annual Bar d’Italia guide.) In contrast to the overtly Illy-branded Espressamente café chain, three years ago Illy kicked off the “Artisti del Gusto” program for cafés in Italy. It has since come to the U.S. within the past year.

The idea behind the program is that Illy provides the espresso machines, coffee cups, artwork, and training. Once the café earns Illy certification, it must agree to exclusively serve Illy coffee for at least three years — which is typically offered at a premium price over other roasted coffee sources.

The article mentions Caffè Greco in North Beach, which supposedly increased sales by 10% and profits by 3% since signing up to the Illy program last year. However, Caffè Greco has been serving Illy coffee since since we started tracking them on this Web site in 2003.

Yet what Illy is doing is really little different than the quality controls required by the likes of Blue Bottle Coffee Company and other area purveyors. For example, besides offering training standards, Blue Bottle requires that locations carrying their coffee rotate their coffee supplies at a minimum of once every two weeks.

A few weeks ago we received the latest (and tenth) edition of the annual Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso for 2010. It is the closest thing in print we’ve seen to our Web site reviews, and we’ve generally found it indispensable when traveling Italy in search of good espresso. (We last reviewed the 2007 edition.)

Illy is, as they have long been, a heavy sponsor of the guide. If this seems like an conflict of interest, it certainly is: not all award-winning cafés in Italy necessarily serve Illy coffee, and non-Illy winners frequently display their Illy-branded credentials.

Italian culture seems to accept these conflicts of interest more readily than America (more in a fatalistic way than anything else). But when you have Krups as the lead sponsor to the U.S. Barista Championship, it’s not like we have a lot of high ground to stand on either.

And, at least in Europe, Illy coffee is often an excellent option — unlike the blander, stale distribution that dominates their U.S. market.

Bar of the Year 2010

On September 24, a panel of experts met at the Città del Gusto di Roma (quite literally the “city of taste” in Rome) to present this new edition of the guide and to announce the winner for Bar of the Year among the guide’s 18 highest-rated finalists: Zilioli of Brecia, Lombardia. Former winners of the Bar of the Year award include Converso Bra, winning it in both 2004 and 2005.

Among all of Italy’s 20 regions, Piemonte still dominates the awards, boasting 7 of the 27 highest rated coffee bars in the country — including Baratti & Milano, Caffè Platti, Caffè Mulassano, Neuv Caval’d Brôns, Strumia, and the aforementioned Converso Bra.

The print stock and cover of this year’s guide is a bit flimsier than our 2007 edition (it’s now closer to a Zagat paperback guide), but it otherwise seems largely the same. As in past years when we’re not in Italian bookstores, we purchased it from ibs.it for €10 plus €10,20 shipping — which, for being FedEx’ed from overseas in under a week, is one of the better deals out there.

Not to be confused with Cento, which is decidedly at the opposite end of the amenity scale, this is a classically pretty café at the rear entrance of the elegant Fairmont Hotel. It caters primarily to hotel tourists — many of whom come from around the globe and get a little homesick for something other than a McStarbucks.

The location overlooks the cable cars intersecting at California & Powell Sts., and there is limited outdoor sidewalk seating at café tables against the building. The café itself seems closely modeled after many of the thematic and modern Illy-branded cafés of Italy: modern red light fixtures over café tables, a polished décor, Italian music, and wait staff with accents.

The tourists seem to go for the “authenticity” here — even if the espresso doesn’t come close to matching what you can get from an Illy café in Italy. They serve the usual Italian-themed light lunch fare, and there’s a merchandising wall of Illy and Ghirardelli products so tourists can return bearing gifts. One nice touch is an old school, decorative brass Gaggia espresso machine on display at the hotel entrance, just inside the hotel hallway leading from the café.

Using a sparkling and shiny, Illy-branded two-group La Cimbali machine, they pull shots of espresso from the giant sealed Illy cans. It’s the typical North American Illy flavor: soft, meek and based on mild pepper and spice. However, it does lack some of the woodiness you often find in Illy. It has a thin layer of lighter brown crema and is served in Illy designer IPA cups with no saucer. All the things you expect from a North American Illy shot, including all the things you expect it to be lacking.

Read the review of Caffè Cento.

One of the things that the big coffee chains do well is consistency. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom, lifted straight from the fast food chain playbook. A McDonald’s french fry is pretty much the same everywhere, and the coffee served at a big chain is little different. Or so we’ve all been told.

For example, a Long Island Press article cited in our last post quoted local roast master, Greg Heinz: “Starbucks does a lot of things very well. It maintains consistency nationwide.” The article’s author then later goes on to say, “Just like any chain, Starbucks cannot exist without uniformity.”

Or can it? We’ve always felt that the coffee quality can be quite erratic between one Starbucks and another. Lately we’ve been digging into the CoffeeRatings.com data we’ve collected over the years to validate some of our assumptions about coffee and quality. What we found supported our hunch that some of the biggest coffee chains are actually pretty lousy at consistency and uniformity.

Using our ratings data to measure quality consistency among cafés

Below is a table we’ve compiled by keying off some of the fields in our database from thousands of reviewed espresso shots. Each row represents the aggregate espresso shot reviews for a given chain, a given coffee roaster, a given espresso machine manufacturer, or a given cup manufacturer — reflecting a few choices we made for illustration.

Each row (or sample set) shows the number of cafés, high espresso score, low score, average score, median score, and standard deviation for all the associated ratings. For our consistency evaluation here, the key is the standard deviation — which is a simplistic measure of the spread in espresso scores for a given grouping.

For example, the first row represents all reviewed Starbucks. The data suggest that most reviewed Starbucks — about 68 percent, assuming a normal distribution — have an espresso rating score that’s within 1.05 rating points of the average for all Starbucks reviewed (here that’s 5.13).

Now compare this 1.05 with the other example rows in the table. For example, all reviewed Peet’s Coffee & Tea outlets have a standard deviation of 0.74. This suggests a much narrower variation in their espresso scores — and hence better consistency and predictability.

Coffee quality consistency among independent cafés can be stronger than within the big chains themselves

All reviewed cafés using Blue Bottle Coffee beans may have very different owners but score an even lower 0.70 standard deviation. These cafés may only share a bean supplier and some of standards for freshness and access to common consulting and training, but their espresso scores are significantly more consistent among each other than the cafés under a single Starbucks ownership — or even Peet’s.

Surely, a single quality dimension does not represent the breadth of possible flavor profiles, body weights, and crema textures that might also factor into a consistency analysis. But this data refutes the conventional wisdom that Starbucks, for example, provides a consistently dependable and uniform level of beverage quality. Even with their complete supply and delivery chain standardization, Starbucks fails to produce espresso quality that’s as consistent as a number of independent cafés that have only a coffee bean supplier in common.

Our data also suggests that the Starbucks brand is no better a determinant of quality consistency than whether the café uses a La Marzocco espresso machine or Delco cups. This is a critical point to understand, so let’s put this another way:

The Starbucks brand predicts consistency of espresso quality no better than if all the random cafés we surveyed that use Delco cups decided to re-brand themselves as “The Delco-branded Cups Coffeehouse chain.”

Given the investments Starbucks has made in coffee bean and roasting consistency, standardized push-button espresso machines, and standardized training, we don’t see how you can interpret this data as anything short of a complete failure for the company to deliver on the brand expectations of quality consistency.

If Starbucks’ consistency isn’t in their prepared coffee, then it is likely a psychological perception: the consumer’s brand association, the consistency of the Starbucks beverage menu, Starbucks’ own ridiculous names for drinks and their sizes, and the familiar environment of its coffee shops.

Seeking out chains in the hopes of managing risk

We recently came across a blog post by Chris Pirillo, a tech-geek/blogger/ex-TV-show-host who practically wet his underpants because he found a Peet’s Coffee & Tea chain store in his Sheraton Waikiki hotel. This when located in the very same building is an outlet of the Honolulu Coffee Company — which sources beans from Hawaii’s own Greenwell Farms, operates one of the few Mistral Triplette espresso machines in the world, and last scored as high as the best Peet’s we’ve ever been to anywhere. (Famed Baltimore coffee podcaster, Jay Caragay, disputes the quality there as dubious — but we stick by our last, albeit five-year-old, rating.)

Meanwhile, a friend in the Netherlands told us about a Starbucks that opened in Utrecht a week ago. When he passed by over the weekend, he said, “The line was unholy.” In a country where coffee shops legally sell marijuana by the menu, lines are out the door for one that peddles the double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.

What makes people seek out mass-produced mediocrity over independent, higher quality options just as conveniently nearby? What made an old boss of mine seek out a Pizza Hut for dinner when we were in the heart of London together on business travel with time to kill? These questions are woven into why we started CoffeeRatings.com six years ago.

In the case of coffee, you can largely dismiss the argument that chains provide a convenient shorthand to take out the risk in quality versus an unknown. As our data suggests here, big coffee chains can be less consistent among themselves than independent cafés with a common coffee supplier are to each other.

This is the part of the article where we’re supposed to have a snappy, revelatory answer to these questions. But we’ve got nothin’ — other than the consumer comfort with big coffee chains likely says more about their environment and sales practices than it does about the quality of the actual products they sell.

For a few years now, we had an idea for a post that sat in our unpublished queue: how can you tell a good espresso shop from a bad one? (At least before sampling it.) Given the thousands of good, bad, and mediocre espresso shots we’ve reviewed over the years, we have definitely noticed some patterns worth sharing.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve recognized the value of shorthand rules. Back in the 1980s, I once (famously, in my circles) observed that the ghetto status of your neighborhood can be surmised by the fast food chicken chain nearby. (In short, Church’s Chicken = “wear Kevlar”.) Earlier this month, there were a couple of coffee-related posts from coffee professionals that inspired us to dust off this idea:

• Flavorwire » Blog Archive » The Kool-Aid’s in the Coffee: An Interview with David Latourell of Intelligentsia Coffee Roaster
• Detecting a Great Coffee Shop with the CoffeeMeister – Slashfood

But while coffee professionals know their establishments and their industry favorites best, few have subjected themselves to the horrors of many a bad espresso bar from a consumer perspective. Not that we at CoffeeRatings.com have a taste-bud death wish. But we’ve developed a sort of sixth sense about what to expect just by walking into a coffeehouse and having a look around. This post is an attempt to articulate both the positive and negative cues we get when entering a new establishment.

Some suggested rules are more obvious — like the wine enthusiast’s equivalent of “avoid wine that comes in a box.” Other rules are more subtle or outright unusual. For example, as a news story today had it, if the aroma from the coffee machine forces your plane to make an emergency landing, you might consider tea.

Encouraging signs of decent coffee ahead

In no particular order…

• They roast their own. Score extra points if they date-stamp their roasted beans for retail sale.
• They bother with latte art. Latte art is more gimmick than a sign of quality per se (sorry, Aussies). But it’s almost unheard of to find a place that bothers with latte art and yet makes a lousy cappuccino.
• A La Marzocco machine. Oh, sure, there are plenty of other great espresso machines out there. And there are places that can make great espresso from the most modest equipment choices. But shelling out the bucks for a La Marzocco is typically reserved for those who believe it will actually make a difference for them.
• They offer more than one kind of bean for espresso. This is a rare find. But when they do, they expect you to notice that the espresso there isn’t just some generic, nameless commodity shot out of a soda gun. Many other establishments think more like Homer Simpson’s tour of the Duff Beer factory, where a single spigot fills Duff, Duff Light, and Duff Dry.
• They serve a glass of water on the side. Despite the American obsession with the Big Gulp®, espresso should not quench your thirst. Better espresso can often be found at places that don’t expect it to.
• They take time to make it. You could have a really new, or really slow, barista. Or they could be a little bit of a perfectionist about what they’re doing. We never encourage our baristi to rush the job.
• Cleanliness is next to decent espresso. If the staff keeps their work areas clean, there are better chances that they clean their equipment of rancid coffee oil build-up — and that they keep their equipment properly tuned and maintained.

Signs of when to run — don’t walk — away

Now for the cues when you know things are about to get ugly. Call it coffee’s homage to Waiter Rant’s “Signs An Establishment Isn’t Going to Deliver the Service You Expect”.

• The roar and/or whine of poorly steamed milk. This is one of those cases where their handling of milk can translate to their handling of coffee. And milk that is steamed in the pitcher to the scalding sounds of a 747 takeoff or the squeal of a dentist’s drill is a major red flag.
• A superautomatic espresso machine. Superautomatic machines almost never produce an espresso better than “palatable”. Hello, Starbucks.
• The barista is wearing a company-issue hat or cap. One sure-fire way to non-verbally tell a customer, “How may I massacre your order?” is to require them to dress like fast food employees.
• They use a two-group La Spaziale 3000 espresso machine. Ouch. Do we really have that much against La Spaziale? They honestly make some good equipment, and a few cafés are quite capable with them. But in the Bay Area, the two-group La Spaziale 3000 is the machine of choice (namely: they’re inexpensive) among cafés looking to skimp and save a few bucks.
• America’s Best Coffee. Or Peerless coffee, should they admit it. The most common combination of the cheap-and-careless café is the two-group La Spaziale 3000 with America’s Best Coffee beans. A close second is Peerless coffee — which we’ve also found to be the coffee most likely for employees to say it’s Illy in an attempt to make up something that sounds better. Of course, almost as bad (it varies) is the café where the employees have no idea whose beans they serve. But the pattern here seems to be this: the more self-aggrandizing the coffee brand name, the worse the coffee.
• Portafilter handles are left cooling on the drip tray. This is often the kiss of death: a café that knows nothing about the importance of stable temperature control, and they could care less.
• Served with a lemon rind on the side. You’d be surprised how many restaurants still do this. Why? We don’t know, because it’s like a neon sign that says, “Prepare to spew.”
• Paper cups are the only option. There are times where even we want a coffee “to go”. But those conditions are so sub-par. For a café to serve their espresso only in paper cups, you may as well be greeted by a fiberglass clown head with a speakerphone in his throat at the drive-thru entrance. If someone’s idea of quality and class is the stemware at a four-year-old’s birthday party, we emphasize the “go” part of “to go”.
• Flavored coffees on the menu. Or the word “gourmet”. In some parts of the country, and rare corners of the Bay Area, the 1980s are still alive and well and some people are still selling chocolate macadamia nut flavored coffee. If a café sells coffee that sounds more like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, you’d be better off looking for ice cream. Same goes if they use the word “gourmet” in their branding — a word that has since become affiliated only with the mass-produced packaged foods that line the aisles of Wal-Mart, marked for quick sale to their morbidly obese loyal customers.

We really need to stop here before we are overcome with snarkiness poisoning.