For as long as I’ve lived in San Francisco — over two decades now — I’ve lived with laments over the sorry state of local newspapers. Living in a large Victorian shared among Berkeley graduate students many years ago, I grew accustomed to a daily house copy of one of the Timeses (i.e., either the New York or L.A. varietals) for serious news reading. The SF Chronicle, on the other hand, was always relegated to local movie times and for lining bird cages.

Fast forward to today, and my how those once-greats have fallen. The New York Times may have performed a bit of peacock strutting last year, proclaiming, “No, New York City coffee is good. We really, really mean it this time!” But the NY Times can be forgiven compared to the sloth-like L.A. Times, who came out with this special feature just today, in freaking 2011: More refined coffee culture in L.A. is percolating – latimes.com. This more than a year after L.A.-area baristas — after cleaning up on so many awards at the regional and national barista championships — decided to quit the competition program to give someone else a try for a change.

This is akin to a 1961 L.A. Times article proclaiming that quality baseball has arrived in town — merely two seasons after the L.A. Dodgers had already won the World Series. Even so, the L.A. Times does add some useful listings of regional coffeeshops worth checking out: Specialty coffeeshops in the L.A. area – latimes.com. Plus the obligatory coffee map.

Just please don’t call ‘em “craft”.

Pardon the sensationalist headline. (Like nobody has ever done that before.) But here’s something from yesterday’s L.A. Weekly on Demitasse, one of the more anticipated new coffeeshops in the L.A. area, that questions/provokes some of the conventional coffee wisdom of the month: Demitasse Will Not Have Pourover Coffee + Other Twists on the Third Wave Coffee Shop – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink.

So what’s different here? Anticipated “Third Wave” (ugh) coffeeshop openings have been fodder for the local presses for several years now, so it only makes sense that each might attempt to differentiate themselves from the hoard with a slightly different angle now and then. But what we have with Demitasse is yet another coffeeshop identifying itself (at least in the article) more by what it doesn’t do than by what it does do. And what it doesn’t do is pour-over coffee.

Or does it? Per the article, clearly they’re fans of the Clever full-immersion coffee dripper — which some circles might say isn’t pour-over coffee by only a slight technicality. But the reason the owner, Bobak Roshan, gives for not offering pour-over coffee is telling: “Roshan adamantly is against the method as far too dependent on the skills and utmost attention of the barista, too often to the detriment of the coffee drinker looking to have the cleanest, tastiest cup possible.”

There you have it. The method requires too much concentrated attention, for too long, of an easily distracted barista in a retail environment. There is some truth to this, even suggesting a bit of retail reality folly in the nascent Brewers Cup. Of the few coffeeshops that have offered vac pot coffee over the years, most would only do so after the morning caffeine rush-hour. And yet vac pot brewing requires much less constant attention than pour-over brewing. And then there’s the reality that the biggest expense in retail coffee is labor.

Which isn’t to say that pour-over brewing is going away anytime soon. Despite the many efforts to convince us otherwise, retail pour-over brewing has been around for decades. However, this might suggest that many coffeeshops are starting to learn the dismissed conventional wisdom behind the once-novel-now-passé Clover brewer: that individually hand-crafted, manual brewing processes make a great cup of coffee, but they fail to scale in a retail environment supporting any kind of volume at a competitive price.

Now if only we understood the semi-conventional wisdom behind using Equator Estate Coffees — despite only a single notable retail example of it in the face of dozens of underachievers.

The coffee culture export trade is in high swing, whether it is Stumptown Roasters opening in Amsterdam or Blue Bottle Coffee following Intelligentsia‘s footsteps and invading L.A.: Drip Bar, a Mobile Blue Bottle Café | NBC Los Angeles. Yes, that last article cites the tiresome caffeine-riff cliché abused by many an unimaginative coffee writer — calling Bay Area Blue Bottle fans “caffeine-starved locals” — but the article notes a second attempt to bring Blue Bottle to the tanned, spackled, and collagen-injected masses down south.

Drip Bar, a mobile/portable café concept scheduled for introduction in L.A. this May, plans to pour Blue Bottle Coffee using Hario V60 drippers. Should we be surprised that in a town where you have to drive everywhere, your coffee should now come on wheels?

As we wrote last October, the spiraling Hario V60 dripper became all the rage at Intelligentsia as a Clover brewer substitute. Many other coffee shops have since followed suit in declaring the Hario V60 dripper as the greatest thing since the double boiler — including SF’s Ritual Coffee Roasters, who was among the first in the Bay Area to offer a Hario V60 drip bar.

We have our own Hario V60 and Buono drip kettle for home use. We even got a friend to translate all the Japanese instructions for us. Good coffee, to be sure. But the professional coffee world seems to chase short-attention-span fads on a level that rivals many Japanese consumers — with a heavy copy-cat hype that ebbs and flows with the coffee growing seasons.

When we first encountered a Hario V60 drip bar, last December at Intelligentsia’s Monadnock location in Chicago, we asked the barista if he liked it that much better than a Chemex brewer or a typical Melitta bar. While continuing his pour with a Buono kettle, he slowly responded with a resounding, “Well…?” So while the V60 is a fun new coffee toy, and it produces great coffee, let’s just say we’re not ready to throw our old Chemex brewer out the window just yet.

Yesterday’s Chicago Tribune reported on a curious coffee bar concept planned for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea‘s latest location, currently under construction in Los Angeles’ Venice Beach. The concept includes featuring five different stations where five separate baristas personally attend to each customer, individually catering to their unique coffee whims: Intelligentsia plans a groundbreaking coffee bar in Venice Beach | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene.

Although this proposed system will supposedly accommodate the customer that’s merely interested in a quick cup of coffee, Intelligentsia CEO Doug Zell claims, “We want the role of the barista here to be like a sommelier or a great server at a restaurant.” Hence the main emphasis of this process will be to individually educate customers about coffee varieties and brewing options, to direct customers to the kind of coffee experience they are seeking, and potentially suggesting possible pairings for the coffee along with home equipment options.

Now coffee’s wine analogy is already a beaten dead horse — particularly as many coffee bars continue their march towards becoming surrogate wine bars. But Zell’s proposed concept seems to take the barista role well beyond sommelier and into the new territory of a Nordstrom personal shopper. Will sophisticated coffee consumers welcome this as a lower barrier to delve deeper into coffee, or will they see this as more of a bloated and heavy-handed sales pitch?

Is “the Ignorant Customer” a viable restaurant concept?

Sometimes we feel that the premium coffee industry is a bit over-earnest in their consumer marketing efforts. While we applaud some of Zell’s eyebrow-raising moves, such as eliminating the venti-sized drink, this latest idea smacks of trying to mold consumer behavior — rather than relaxing a little and letting consumers organically help define it a little more.

Part of the fun is figuring out things for yourself. And nobody likes the experience of dining at a restaurant with a sommelier always hovering over them. So while some hand-holding is good, too much and you risk Starbucks‘ insistence on customers speaking in their specialized drink-size language.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t want to be a coffee tourist at Intelligentsia Venice Beach. And Zell and company should be commended for their out-of-the-box thinking and original approach. But this time, we wonder how long before the novelty wears off.

Intelligentsia’s concept seems founded on expectations that most coffee consumers are uneducated, that they will wax poetic about $5-a-cup Cup of Excellence beans from El Salvador if only an expert explained it to them, and that they will come to appreciate cuppings as the ultimate enjoyment of coffee.

That may be true for some of their customers — and certainly more true for Intelligentsia than for most coffee chains. But as with the current fad of experimenting with only single-origin coffees, consumer interest and the business model generated through this educational process is neither long-term nor sustainable. Consumers cannot remain ignorant forever. And in this era of simplifying our lives, enjoying coffee shouldn’t always have to be an educational chore.

UPDATE: April 28, 2009
The L.A. Times published an article on this coming café: It’s just you and your barista at Intelligentsia Venice – Los Angeles Times.

The return of baseball also marks the return of a popular form of that “North vs. South” rivalry — with San Franciscans channeling their hate for L.A. through the sport, and L.A. being, well, mostly oblivious. Last weekend, we witnessed that rivalry expressed through espresso — with San Francisco’s Chris Baca edging out the formidable competition from the Southland. But the likes of Silverlake’s Intelligentsia and barista champs like San Dimas’ Heather Perry are the exception to the rule: like New York City, Los Angeles has historically been a coffee wasteland.

Which is what attracted us to a recent “find that right coffeehouse for you” article on the coffeehouses in downtown Los Angeles: News Item in Downtown Los Angeles – Coffee Anyone?. Sure, it’s an old school coffeehouse piece — of a style harkening back to the day when coffeehouse reviews only told you about what you wanted to see and how you wanted to be seen while drinking the stuff, and nobody dared talk about the quality of what came in the cup. But in L.A. things are slower to catch on.

More “export” than “import”

Los Angeles has successfully exported its culture and lifestyle around the world. However, L.A.’s execution at importing culture and trying to make it their own has frequently been a Hollywood bust (L.A. Kings hockey, anyone?). Although convertibles, bathing suits, and breast implants have all had limited success here, “coffee culture” fits L.A. about as well as palm-tree-lined skating rinks at the mall. Or trying get anywhere on foot.

For example, take Coffee Klatch, home of two-time and reigning U.S. Barista Champ, Heather Perry. For a coffeehouse as good as you could once find in the region, Coffee Klatch is somehat famous for offering overflowing cappuccinos that you’d typically find served in suburban shopping malls (to “cater to local tastes” and stay in business). The café itself is a relatively dingy location in a town, San Dimas, most famously known as the “center of the universe” in the 1989 film, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Stepping into its donut-shop-like environment, we had to resist the urge to strike a pose and yell, “Wyld Stallyns!” while playing air guitar.

Future Southland barista competitors discuss their presentation techniques for the judges:

Talking the talk

But back to the article, the author mentions a few local, independent cafés. They include Figueroa Corridor-based Café Corsa, where owner Rick Weiche comically parrots back every modern quality coffee cliché in the book (“third wave“, “$11,000″ Clovers, the ever-popular wine analogy). Following Café Corsa, the article covers Fourth Street’s Lost Souls, who features coffee-blended drinks with names that sound more like 1970s Blaxploitation films (“Soul Cooler”, “Chocolate Monkey”, etc.).

Also mentioned is Groundwork, with two area locations, where owner Richard Karno hates the “third wave” moniker, but only for its perceived elitism (rather than our major beef: the principle of its very non-existence). And given that this is L.A., no mention of coffee culture would be complete without an obligatory nod to Starbucks and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.

UPDATE: April 6, 2008
Today Reuters published another one of those articles on how New York City coffee is slowly improving, even if it’s going kicking and screaming: Call that kawfee? New York embraces better brew | U.S. | Reuters.

However, the credibility-blowing part of the article is in one of its opening paragraphs: “The coffee palates of New Yorkers are closing in on those of their sophisticated West Coast counterparts in Los Angeles and Seattle.” Ummm, Los Angeles? Where U.S. barista champions are forced to pass off gigantic, frothy milkshakes as cappuccinos just to keep the doors open? If L.A.’s coffee culture is considered “sophisticated,” Britney Spears bent over a toilet must seem like Oscar Night®.

Our only rational explanations come down to Reuters’ New York bias. For one, L.A. is the only other American city that New Yorkers look upon with a sibling rivalry. For another, geography education in this country is so poor that many on the East Coast vaguely think that all of California is a suburb of L.A. — unaware that the distance between L.A. and San Francisco is the same between Vermont and Ohio. Having lived on the East Coast for a few years before moving here, I experienced firsthand the infamous, “Hey, we’re going to be in L.A. Tuesday, and we can drive up to meet you for lunch.”

UPDATE: July 1, 2008
L.A.’s local ABC affiliate published a story today on what they consider to be the seven best coffeehouses in town: abc7.com: Top 7 coffee houses in L.A. to get your caffeine fix 7/01/08. Included in the list are Lamill Coffee Boutique, Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Urth Caffe, Joni’s Coffee Roasting Cafe, Zona Rosa Cafe, Caffe Luxxe, Novel Cafe, Kéan Coffee, Stell’s Coffee and Tea, and Latte 101. (Don’t ask how ABC-7 in L.A. counts to seven.)