Next month Berkeley hosts its first ever coffee and tea festival, and the SF Chronicle used the opportunity to mention Berkeley’s coffee and espresso roots: Berkeley perks up for Coffee and Tea Festival. The piece adds a bit of worthy Berkeley coffee history, even if it’s a slight retread of a 2009 piece in The Daily Californian. Both articles discussed Caffe Mediterraneum’s merits as the birthplace of the caffè latte. And, hey, Berkeley is where I had my first real cappuccino way back in those ancient 1980s.

Some stories are too easy to predict. Like in our Trip Report to Pirate Cat Radio Cafe & Studio back in March. Back then we had heard the rumors that chef-turned-author-turned-TV-glutton, Anthony Bourdain, stopped in at the Pirate Cat to try their bacon maple latte. So naturally we suspected that Pirate Cat might make the national airwaves in due time.

That time was tonight, with this evening’s episode of No Reservations set in San Francisco.

As for Mr. Bourdain? Sure, the guy has a pretty tiresome schtick about being some bad-boy of dangerous food. Meanwhile, milquetoast BBC hosts such as Stefan Gates are foraging for food among the Karen people in landmine-rigged jungles with the Burmese Army in pursuit. (The milquetoast Mr. Gates even has the distinction of appearing on an album cover of Mr. Bourdain’s beloved Led Zeppelin.)

Mr. Bourdain’s Web site even says that the Ferry Building Farmers’ Market is in “Fisherman’s Wharf.” (Huh?) But he does make a fairly good case that for every food-hating vegan and overly-precious yuppie in this town, there are plenty of beer-guzzling burger joints and animal-eating animal lovers (such as Chris Costentino, of Incanto fame … and now pretty much a professional food TV whore).

Regardless, it was good seeing DJ Monkey and the Pirate Cat Cafe getting a little love between TV commercials for bing.com and Frosted Mini-Wheats.

An Op-Ed piece in Monday’s Washington Post noted the curious phenomenon of local culture that is exported, reinterpreted abroad, and then imported back again. The article’s topic was the wildly received recent openings of Starbucks cafés in cities such as Warsaw and Prague — with the backdrop of their centuries-old coffeehouse culture traditions: Anne Applebaum – A Starbucks State of Mind – washingtonpost.com.

We’ve witnessed this phenomenon before with the all-American burger joint/diner. A little over a decade ago, these establishments rose in popularity as a cultural export within a number of Southeast Asian cities, such as Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Several years later, imported versions of these Asian-flavored burger joints showed up in Southern California. (You could always tell when curry powder, pickled cucumbers, and vinegar made their way into the menu.) So why would Starbucks be greeted like coffeehouse “liberators” in Eastern Europe — while many Westerners now view the brand as an overpriced, jumped-the-shark, frivolous luxury that diluted its quality in pursuit of industrialized mass production?

The article’s author notes that the stylish Eastern European cafés of the 19th century served as island respites from dreary conditions at home and an opportunity to aspire to the comforts of the upper classes. Today, after the European café of old was exported to Seattle and transformed into a culture of vapid Sting CDs and gargantuan milkshakes sloshed into to-go paper cups, Starbucks arrival in cities such as Warsaw and Prague once again represents the opportunity to aspire to the world’s upwardly mobile classes in the shadow of Communism’s collapse.

1995: Seattle First Invades Prague

The author also makes mention of Eastern Europe’s preceding decade of Starbucks knock-offs, which reminded me of when I visited Prague in 1995. Back then, Prague was in the throes of its post-Communism reconstruction and remodeling phase. A layer of dust covered the city, and it seemed like PVC pipe was sold on every corner. (I remember remarking at the time how I could have made a killing opening a Home Depot chain there.)

I quickly became a regular at a coffee shop in the historic Staré Město district called Pražská Káva — or, quite simply, “Prague Coffee” — located at U-Zlatého-hada (or “at the golden snake” in Prague’s historic addressing system, and today on a street named Karlova, just across the Charles Bridge). They boasted “Seattle style lattes.” While Starbucks was still largely an unknown there in 1995, the Western appeal for “Seattle style” coffee beverages was clear to anyone who collected money from American tourists. Having been in Seattle just a few months prior, I was actually quite surprised how well Pražská Káva’s lattes measured up to their Seattle counterparts — and how you could get a good espresso in town for only about 20-25 Kč (about $1 U.S. at today’s exchange rates).

Oddly, that was probably the first café I ever gravitated towards just for the quality of their espresso. Although I found the espresso quality around Prague to be generally quite decent at the time, I also suffered my worst coffee experience ever in Prague — a styrofoam cup of traditional Czech “coffee” purchased at the Vyšehrad castle, which I can only describe as grainy sawdust suspended in hot water.

Sadly, Pražská Káva was replaced years ago by a hotel and restaurant. We suspect that today’s infiltration of Starbucks there will do more to lower the imported “Seattle style” standards that Pražská Káva once held.

We had originally posted this as an addendum to our recent review of the new, more permanent installment of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in the Ferry Building Marketplace. However, the strange phenomenon of the Gibraltar deserves its very own post. Originating here in San Francisco, the Gibraltar has since spread to Los Angeles (Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea), New York (Café Grumpy), and now London (Climpson & Sons). The purpose of this post is to demystify, debunk, and, well, defrock the Gibraltar before the misconceptions behind this invasive species are allowed to propagate any further.

So what is the Gibraltar? Technically speaking, it’s the registered name for a line of glassware tumblers from Ohio-based Libbey Inc..

So what does any of this have to do with coffee? Prior to opening Blue Bottle Coffee Co.‘s first SF café in Hayes Valley in January 2005, owner James Freeman experimented and tuned variables for his café by making cappuccinos in 4.5-oz versions of these cheap restaurant supply glasses. He offered these practice runs to his staff and to employees of the Dark Garden corset shop down the street.

Word of mouth spread, and these test beverages needed a name. Steve Ford, then a barista and roasting colleague of James at Blue Bottle (and now head roaster at Ritual Coffee Roasters), apparently found inspiration from the packaging for these glasses. Thus the Gibraltar was born out of a combination of happenstance and an inside joke. Except now the joke has gone global.

Sarsaparilla — in a dirty glass

We chalk up the rise of the Gibraltar as one of coffee’s more pointless creations — an artifact of America’s milk-engorged bastardization of the standard cappuccino.

Why? Because the 4.5-oz Gibraltar glass is redundant with the regulation 4.75-oz ceramic cappuccino cup. (James obviously knew this when he started his experiments.) Both are sufficient for containing the 150-ml Italian regulation cappuccino. Except that the ceramic cup is explicitly designed with thermal and aesthetic properties for consuming a cappuccino.

The problem is that few people in America have experienced a true, regulation cappuccino. As illustrated in the photos below — comparing a medium cappuccino from Peet’s Coffee & Tea with a 4.75-oz regulation Intelligentsia-branded cappuccino cup — Americans drown their cappuccino in so much milk that the typical cappuccino technically qualifies as a caffè latte (latte being Italian for “milk”).

When preciousness is valued more than quality

So when a local food & fashion magazine such as 7×7 says that the Gibraltar is a “MUST ORDER” at Blue Bottle Cafe, and that it ranks #28 on the “100 Things to Try Before You Die”, this is basically shorthand for, “We’ve never had a properly made regulation cappuccino in our lives, so we’re willing to worship it in a cheap restaurant supply glass.”

It’s things like this that make it easy to be cynical about consumer behavior, particularly among self-described foodies. We would dismiss this misplaced (and misinformed) obsession with the Gibraltar as just a lone opinion in 7×7 magazine, but we personally know too many knowledgeable people working professionally in the quality food business who also contribute to the Gibraltar’s cult-like status.

Where’s the harm in that, you say? We’ve long lamented that genius chefs are often coffee fools, but many of these food writers and bloggers serve the role of influencers and arbiters of taste. Trouble arises when they spend more energy trying to be precious than focusing on quality.

The trap of this preciousness is the illusion of exclusivity. This makes the Gibraltar a cousin of what we’ve previously called the Malaysian street food experience: cafés that serve espresso out of the alleyways of heroin deals, stripping themselves of all customer amenities, to fabricate an image of exclusivity. The Gibraltar grew out of behind-the-scenes experimentation carried out in a Hayes Valley alleyway, and to this day the Gibraltar has never been featured on a Blue Bottle coffee menu — even though Blue Bottle’s espresso machines sport stacks of Gibraltar glasses in anticipation of the inevitable orders. (Mr. Freeman doesn’t receive enough credit for his clever marketing savvy, even if the cult of the Gibraltar was far from his intentions.)

So instead of encouraging people to enjoy a proper espresso drink served in a proper cup, this desire for the illusion of exclusivity ends up proliferating ignorance (about the existence of the regulation cappuccino) and trumping a better sensory experience (drinking out of cappuccino cups instead of cheap restaurant supply glasses). The next thing you know, the Gibraltar — and not the regulation cappuccino — is being held up as a standard in London cafés.

In an article from London posted last month on this subject, Steve Ford put it this way:

I’ve never really talked about the Gibraltar for publication, partly because I think it was very much of a time and place – that being the Bay Area circa 2005. The fact that I’m talking about it now is mostly because I’ve given up on the original idea. There WAS something special about it back then. Now, it’s just another drink on the menu to me, and like so many cappuccinos, generally prepared poorly or just wrong. Every year people ask about it, so I can track how far the idea has gone, but the fact that it’s all the way in the UK and I have no idea how it got there is disappointing. And not to be too melodramatic, but I feel like the soul of the drink has been lost. It used to be something unique, and now it’s just another piece of fucking latte art.

There you have it: the Gibraltar as the Fool’s Cappuccino. James Freeman, always looking at the bright side, still offers Gibraltars in his cafés “off the menu” because he sees demand for it as a way of weaning people off paper cups and overly milky caffè lattes. But for some of us, the Gibraltar represents a faddish Band-Aid for how badly America screwed up the cappuccino.

UPDATE: Oct. 1, 2010
And in case you thought it was just us: 2009 World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies is Done With Lattes & Flat Whites.

Today’s Daily Californian, an independent student newspaper for the UC Berkeley campus, published an article on Berkeley’s venerable Caffe Mediterraneum: Historic Cafe Grounds For Coffee and Conversation – The Daily Californian. Sure, the coffee isn’t so great here. But for a place that is over 50 years old and is most often credited as the birthplace of the caffè latte, they are due some props.

Caffe Mediterraneum is also located just a few blocks from the site of last year’s Western Regional Barista Competition. Coincidentally, the 2009 version concluded yesterday in Los Angeles, with each of the top three finishers hailing from Intelligentsia L.A.:

1. Nick Griffith
2. Devin Pedde
3. Ryan Willbur

Congratulations to the winners. Intelligentsia sure knows what they hell they’re doing, no question. Though one might suggest these results add to the theory that barista competitions have a “home field advantage”. (Last year’s runner-up at the WRBC in Berkeley, Intelligentsia L.A.’s Kyle Glanville, went on to win the 2008 USBC.)

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.

The News & Advance of Lynchburg, VA recently published a brief review of the area’s independent coffeehouses. Like many smaller towns in America that have come to similar conclusions about themselves, “In the past two years, Lynchburg has become a mini-mecca for coffee.”

But unlike many articles of its kind, the author doesn’t dote over the ambiance of these various coffeehouses — nor the baked goods and sandwiches they serve. Instead, she focuses more on the coffee — albeit using a rather unscientific approach with the caffè latte as the yardstick (please reserve your sexual stereotypes!): NewsAdvance.com | Whole lotta latte.

Back in the 1980s, Wendy’s fast food restaurants sponsored a highly successful advertising campaign featuring a diminutive elderly Jewish woman (Clara Peller, she quickly became a cultural icon from these spots). When presented with the hamburgers of Wendy’s competitors, she famously asked, “Where’s the beef?!”

These days, it seems like we need a similar campaign for the coffee content in most cappuccinos and lattes. Because whenever I buy milked-based espresso drinks in this country, my reaction is almost always, “Where’s the coffee?”

To understand why this is the case, you first need to understand that milk is the new coffee flavoring. Back in the 1990s — when the coffee business was lamenting a decades-old decline in coffee consumption combined with a dearth of new, young coffee drinkers to replace the aging ones — the industry introduced coffees with spray-on chemical flavorings. This desperation move hoped to entice young, flavor-variety-seeking consumers to put down their Diet Cokes and, for the first time in their lives, consider coffee as an alternative. Hence the era of “hazelnut French vanilla creme” coffee was born to appeal to the millions who simply did not like coffee. (“It’s, like, not even coffee.”)

The flavored coffee fad lasted only a few years. But following closely in its wake was the popular rise of Starbucks and the proliferation of milk-based espresso drinks. By “cutting” the coffee, these drinks also offered something to consumers that the flavored coffees did not: appeal to the insatiable American appetite for 44-oz Super Big Gulp®-sized beverages. (Americans may love their caffeine — but not that much caffeine. At least at once.) Ironically, the story of specialty coffee’s booming success in America is really the story of the dairy industry’s revival. Our coffee houses have literally become milk bars.

The rise of coffee-flavored milk

Milk has become flavored coffee’s new flavor of choice. But given the volumes of each involved, it’s actually the other way around: we are a nation of coffee-flavored milk drinkers. And it shows in what passes for a typical cappuccino or latte. There is so much milk, our typical cappuccino would be considered a caffè latte in Italy; I often find myself ordering caffè macchiatos to get something close to a legitimate cappuccino. (And a legitimate macchiato is almost unheard of without playing backseat driver to the barista.) Newly introduced mutants like Gibraltars are typically interpreted just as variations on how much milk you want to wallow in.

Compare the photos below. The first is a photo of a medium cappuccino recently purchased at a downtown Peet’s Coffee, served, by design, in a Peet’s 16 oz. mug. Now contrast with the second photo of a regulation Intelligentsia 4.75 oz. cappuccino cup, which meets the Italian standards for a single cappuccino. (Note the foreground penny and quarter for comparisons.) Poured inside the Intelligentsia cup is a double shot of espresso (about 2 oz.) — twice the amount of espresso designed for the cup and the amount contained within the Peet’s mug — and yet there’s still plenty of room for milk. Even if you double the regulation cappuccino size to about 10 oz., what’s with the Olympic-sized pool that Peet’s is serving as a medium cappuccino?

Unless I’m planning on a “to go” cup for scalding reckless bike messengers who cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, I don’t understand why my medium cappuccino has to be such a gargantuan soup of steamed milk.

UPDATE: Feb 23, 2008
Even as far away as London, coffee experts are lamenting the comical, standard sizes of American coffee drinks: Foodie at large: The dark art of coffee making – Times Online. To quote how the situation that depresses London area roaster, Jeremy Torz:

“Quality shot up in the Nineties, but the American market has commercialised it,” he says. “It would be difficult to sell a small 6oz cappuccino, the traditional Italian size, for much more money, so to make a viable business out of it, they started to make the drinks bigger. And how do you do that without overdosing everyone on caffeine? You add more and more milk.”

So we entered the Alice in Wonderland age where the smallest latte you can buy in Starbucks is the “tall”. “What should be a silky textured, sensual drink has become a 32oz big gulp suited to the movie theatres of middle America,” says Torz scornfully.