Taking up the space that was formerly Daniel Creamery and its cheese production, the Summit has tall ceilings in a wide open space converted for café and art space use. The main seating area is littered with rectangular tables and chairs with plenty of wall outlets and laptop zombies — making you feel like you just entered a community college computer lab.

Around the edges are walls of artwork (aka the Peek Gallery) that currently feature various hand-painted signs from New Bohemia mocking the abuse of “real”, “genuine”, and “authentic” labels — and making us think of SF’s Eat Real Festival. Artwork celebrating the abuse of labels here seems more than a bit ironic, given that The Summit bathes itself in the labels “local”, “seasonal”, and “craft.”

Ahhh, craft. Previously the domain of garbage men restyled as “sanitation engineers,” wordsmithing is a growth market in today’s coffee industry. We have kiosks now being called coffee pop ups. And this year the term “artisan coffee” has been abandoned in favor of “craft coffee.” Which is not to be confused with Kraft coffee, otherwise known as Maxwell House. Are you sure you’re following all this yet?

The Summit offers a basic (seasonal) café menu and desserts in addition to a coffee menu that features Blue Bottle, using their 17-ft Ceiling blend for espresso. The Summit also features barista Seán Wilson, who trained under Eton Tsuno at the defunct (and much missed) Café Organica — arguably SF’s first real multi-roaster café back in 2005. There’s also a front counter with stool seating and a four-group La Marzocco behind it.

The barista takes his sweet time but produces a worthy shot. It could have a more substantial body, but it has a frothy, darker brown, even crema of some thickness. It manages also to avoid being too acidic until the bottom of the cup, otherwise exhibiting a balanced, herbal-leaning flavor with some sweetness throughout. Served in colorful retro cups made in Turkey for Ikea.

They’re not performing miracles with Blue Bottle coffee here. However, they are aiming for, and succeeding at, a flavor profile that raises The Summit above most other BB resellers.

Read the review of the Summit SF.

A little over two years ago, we lamented the state of populist retail home espresso by reviewing what we thought was one of the better options at the time, the Nespresso C180 Le Cube: The Home Espresso Machine Blues: Rating today’s state of consumer espresso machines. Besides having a name that sounded regrettably familiar to Renault’s Le Car of the late 1970s, we found the Le Cube to be typical of superautomated, pod-based home espresso machines at the time: the overpackaged, overpriced convenience of consistently stale coffee.

Since then we’ve had a whopper of a global recession — and all the mathematically-precise/psychologically-ignorant cost-savings come-ons for home brewing that have followed. With the Fall 2009 release of Nespresso’s new product line, the CitiZ, we wanted to test if the populist retail home espresso situation had changed through all of that.

It’s not an espresso machine, it’s a lifestyle

We first wrote about the new CitiZ line a few months ago in a critique of Nestlé’s recent environmental chest-beating: Nespresso and the definition of greenwashing. If Nestlé’s primary product line goals were to deliberately maximize materials extraction, manufacturing production, and waste by-products with each coffee serving, it’s hard to imagine the Nespresso coming out much differently than it appears today.

As with the Le Cube, we approached one of these new Nespresso beasts in its native habitat: a mainstream kitchenware retailer. Upon entering the Sur La Table, we were accosted with the massive marketing expense of what looked like a cardboard Playland promoting the new CitiZ line. Nestlé is clearly wheeling up dump trucks full of money for their consumer retail marketing campaign. This flash of cash seems like Nespresso’s attempt to convince consumers of its “upscale” ambitions.

Heading to the back of the store, we opted to test with a Nespresso CitiZ & Milk — which sports a built-in milk frother that we had no intention of using. In case you’re not familiar, Nespresso takes a Jelly-Belly-style approach to the coffee varieties in its capsules. Some of these coffee capsules brandish Nespresso’s new, lofty “Grand Cru” designation. However, for consistency, we opted to stick with the scary “flavor” concept known as a Ristretto capsule.

We inserted the capsule and pushed the “espresso” button (represented with an icon of the smaller of two cups). The extraction started out promising enough: a laminar flow of medium-to-dark brown crema from the get-go. We were honestly impressed at first — maybe things have gotten better?

But then the pour kept coming. And coming. And as it did, the richer brown crema turned into a more turbulent flow of what looked like a milky, splotchy hot chocolate with uneven bubbles. Not exactly appetizing. In just several seconds, the shot rapidly turned into the meager espresso we experienced with our 2007 review of the Le Cube.

The Taste Test

Tasting the shot, it had a much frothier and greater amount of crema than we experienced with the Le Cube. But the crema quality was a bit suspect in taste as well as appearance: thin, one-dimensional, and lacking any flavor richness nor depth. The shot was also too large, resulting in a thinner body and making us wonder what diluted mess the Nespresso would have produced if we pushed the “lungo” button.

The espresso itself had a tepid flavor still on par with an average Starbucks and not much better than a McDonald’s. Like most espresso shots made from stale, pre-ground beans packed for weeks in sealed capsules, it has a narrow flavor profile consisting primarily of some mild spices and pepper. And universally, it tastes like it is “missing something” when compared with the real thing. The company and its advocates like to point out the supposed “high-tech” vacuum-sealed freshness of these capsules, but vacuum-sealing ground coffee is a standard practice the likes of Sanka and Maxwell House have been performing since the 1980s.

Our verdict: more crema, but otherwise very little has changed from the last generation of Nespresso machines we tested. At a 5.80 coffee rating, it’s pretty much even with our C180 Le Cube review (a 5.90). We suppose something can be said for consistency. In the meantime, populist retail home espresso still seems stuck in the McDonald’s Dark Ages. (And here the McDonald’s comparison is actually a bit flattering, given that they at least grind to order.)

Read the review of the Nespresso CitiZ & Milk.

For the better part of a year, a running gag from the casual coffee lovers who know me is to ask, “So have you tried McDonald’s espresso yet? How does it rate?” Mostly they ask as a curious, sick joke — knowing that I subject myself to the worst kinds of coffee punishment. But now that I have donated my taste buds to science once again, it may be surprising to many of them that I’ve definitely had a lot worse.

Which isn’t saying a whole lot. But this is McDonald’s we’re talking about — one of the world’s most vilified entities in the fights against worldwide obesity, factory farming, and environmental atrocities. Up until recently, we’ve long remarked how visiting the McDonald’s Web site was like viewing an inner city billboard advertising cigarettes: nowhere was there a mention of anything so much as a hamburger, but there were plenty of glossy lifestyle photos of ethnic-friendly families and friends — enraptured in open-mouthed, white-toothed laughter — frolicking about at hillside picnics and poolside parties. By branding themselves like cigarettes, how was that not like a McDonald’s admission of guilt?

We suppose the good news today is that the company with the audacity to create the “Shamrock Shake” now proudly announces the new “Third Pounder” on their Web site. (Because we apparently don’t feel we’re getting fat fast enough on a diet of Quarter Pounders? The Three Pounder can only be around the corner.) But the McCafé concept is heavily promoted on the site as well.

The 16-year-old McCafé concept

And McDonald’s has invested heavily in the U.S. rollout of the McCafé concept. Although much of McDonald’s PR campaign in the States tries to brand the McCafé as “new!”, it is anything but. The McCafé was first spawned in 1993 in Australia, infiltrated some countries in Europe, and it was first introduced to the U.S. in 2001. Since its U.S. introduction, McDonald’s has opened and quickly shuttered various McCafés across the country — such as the one that opened in Mountain View in December 2003 and shut down just 14 months later.

The first generation of U.S. McCafés were dedicated, separate chain stores. McDonald’s latest move has been to integrate the McCafé as a workstation within existing McDonald’s — first starting with suburban McDonald’s chains with more real estate and less coffee competition. The McCafé has arrived in San Francisco, however, and we chose a downtown location for our first experiment.

The tepid and stock flavors of McCafé

The branding for McCafé was laid on thick and heavy. And not uncommon to McDonald’s in expensive commercial real estate districts, this is a tight spot with mirrored walls trying to make the place seem less like a closet. In front is an ever-present refugee-from-a-methadone-clinic as your doorman. (For tips, of course.) In part, the attraction for voluntary doormen is due to the heavy tourist traffic that flows through here — a lot of it from Asia for some odd reason. And at one corner of their serving station is the McCafé setup.

The McCafé signs even provide an espresso-drink-ordering procedure as follows:

1. Size
2. Drink
3. Milk
4. Syrup

Naturally, for us it was only steps #1 & #2, and they use dueling superautomatic Franke machines to pull shots with a large pour size and a blonde, even crema. The existence of any crema thickness was actually a little surprising, given the machines and staff skills, even if its color is way off. Served in a large, insulated McCafé-branded paper cup, it has a tepid flavor of cedar and some pepper. While it isn’t ashy, like some Starbucks and their blackened coffees, it is one-dimensional but not entirely unpleasant. Their ads may call out “the bold and rich flavors of McCafé,” but we find that statement to be accurate only if you’ve been mostly nursed on Maxwell House.

Their coffee is supplied by three main roasters — Distant Lands, Gaviña, and S&D Coffee. And just as McDonald’s buys food staples from multiple suppliers in huge lots to blend out the flavor profile to a single, consistent stew spread across entire nations, their coffee is little different. Although their supply chain for coffee appears to be a lot more thoughtful than the one for, say, beef, another difference is that McDonald’s makes bigger, nameless vats of “mutt” coffee from multiple suppliers who each produce vast nameless lots of “mutt” coffee.

When McDonald’s can make espresso this mediocre, who needs Starbucks? Or Nespresso?

But as we mentioned up top, the espresso here may not be good, but it isn’t outright awful. And therein lies the marketing foolishness of Starbucks: years of dumbing down their product to fill an ever-expanding armada of cafés has made it rather push-button and brain-dead. So much so, that any fast food chain with an ounce of ambition, such as McDonald’s, can make a relatively legitimate quality play for their customers. Slap on a recession and a cheaper price tag, and Starbucks is suddenly dog-paddling to stay afloat in the deep, rapid waters of fast food competition.

McDonald’s espresso quality also depreciates the value of many superautomatic home espresso machines, such as the Nespresso. Why should consumers spend hundreds of dollars on a home machine, plus a subscription of premium-priced coffee capsules, to essentially achieve McDonald’s quality at a similar price point? That just doesn’t cut it.

In a way, this all makes us commend McDonald’s espresso for helping to draw back the curtain on the “Great Oz” of Starbucks — or superautomated home machines such as the Nespresso system. When you are charging a premium for your product, or if you are promoting it as some premium espresso experience, you had better set your standards above McDonald’s (for crying out loud) to be taken seriously.

While we would never go to a McDonald’s McCafé for the espresso unless we were extremely desperate, we like the McCafé if for nothing other than shining some humbling truth behind the many hot-air claims of “luxury” mass-produced espresso out on the market today.

Read the review of McDonald’s at 609 Market St. in San Francisco.

Foodie rag gone online, Saveur.com, recently published a series of coffee-themed articles in conjunction with the SCAA. One of the articles lamented American restaurants’ continued one-dimensional treatment of coffee: Nothing ‘Regular’ About It – Saveur.com.

“‘Regular’ coffee?! The appetizer alone rated five adjectives,” writes reporter Jim Munson. We’ve expressed this very same lament here a couple years ago. It’s preposterous to think of “wine” or “cheese” as singular, indiscriminate, sufficiently self-described substances on restaurant menus.

Given that American coffee palates have now had two whole decades to evolve beyond Maxwell House, and given that it has been almost 10 years since we first walked into a restaurant in Santa Barbara (unfortunately now closed) and were offered five different coffee varietals in French presses, what is the hold up?

And it’s not just coffee snobbery either. You can’t even walk into a supermarket today and buy basic “orange juice” without having to navigate 47 different options. Even something as straightforward as V8 juice now comes in a ridiculously confusing array of Low Sodium, Spicy Hot, High Fiber, Essential Antioxidants, and Calcium Enriched … not to mention V8 Splash, V8 Splash Smoothies, V8 V-Fusion and V-Fusion Light. (Please kill me now.)

The article goes on:

With the vast array of origins, blends and roasts now available, settling for a “regular” coffee is a little like asking for a generic bottle of “red” wine. Or, for your main course, maybe you’d like a nice plate of “meat”?

Too many restaurant coffee varieties down in Oz?

Meanwhile, earlier this week in Australia’s The Sydney Morning Herald, we noticed an opinion piece that lamented Australian restaurants’ paltry tea options in the face of many coffee choices: Coffee has spoiled the tea party – Heckler – Opinion – smh.com.au.

Yet most cafes and restaurants have menus with endless variations of coffee. You know the usual trendy drinks such as lattes, mugacino, cappuccino, espresso macchiato and cafe con leche. But where’s the tea? If you are lucky there will be one or two types listed at the bottom of the blackboard – usually English breakfast or Earl Grey.

The writer even goes on to offer “10 simple rules for eateries,” where #1 is: “Offer the same number of teas as you offer coffees. A minimum of 10 is acceptable.”

At first glance, I wondered if this reflected a level of coffee savviness in Australia that’s lacking in the U.S. However, I would hardly consider the writer’s list of “the usual trendy drinks” as anything more than variations in preparation methods, or simple variations of steamed milk, than coffee varietals per se.

This likely reflects a bit of coffee ignorance by the writer that may not be all that different from what we experience in the U.S. (Especially given that Australia’s coffee culture is almost exclusively focused on espresso.) Meanwhile, we’ve had more than our fill of ten-teas/one-kind-of-coffee restaurants here in S.F.

It’s not rocket science…

But whether Australia or the U.S., it’s not rocket science for a restaurant to offer interesting coffee varieties that adequately finish a memorable meal. Four months later, and I still think back to one of my favorite coffee experiences of a simple French press of Harens Old Tree Estate at Merriman’s on Hawaii’s Big Island. No $11,000 Clover required. No special staff training. Just a fresh supply of good coffee.

Merriman’s is a great restaurant, and yet I don’t remember the food nearly as much as the coffee. And at a $10 price tag, that French press was far more memorable than bottles of wine I’ve had at restaurants for five times the price.

According to today’s Globe and Mail (Toronto), Kraft’s Maxwell House coffee will soon be airing new Canadian television ads that may do less to promote their coffee than to assuage consumer guilt: globeandmail.com: Selling good feelings, one cup at a time. In short, the idea is for Maxwell House — who, when it comes to Third World exploitation, represents one of the (Big) four horsemen of the Fair Trade apocalypse — will promote how they’re spending only $19,000 to produce a TV ad that typically costs $245,000, passing the savings on to good causes in your name.

As we’ve mentioned before, for some reason coffee is a bizarre lightning rod for consumers with economic, social justice, and environmental causes. (Meanwhile, $29 DVD players made by cheap labor at river-polluting Chinese factories and clothing produced in Haitian and Honduran sweatshops fly off the racks at Wal-Mart with remarkable impunity.) At issue is the consumer marketing and public relations stunt of the new millennium known as corporate social responsibility, or CSR — sister to the “buy green” oxymoron.

In case you’ve been living under a pet rock, “buy green” has given us the perversely mixed messages of green shopping malls and ceramic coffee cups meant to look like environmentally unfriendly (and flavor-unfriendly) paper cups (what happened to “reduce” and “reuse”?). It’s also given us the bogus concept of carbon offsets, a falsely feel-good currency that modernizes the ad pitch “the more you buy, the more you save” by perpetuating the illusion that you can save the planet by consuming more stuff.

The failures of corporate social responsibility

While “buy green” capitalizes on environmental guilt as an unspoken part of a sales pitch, CSR — as so eloquently stated in a recent issue of The Economist — has three main objections: “that it encroaches on what should be the proper business of government; that CSR is a sideshow; and that it involves playing with other people’s money.”

In a legal system that recognizes the rights of corporations as no different from those of a living, breathing person, it’s easy to be cynical about the inherent social value of business — especially in this city. Producing useful and desirable goods and services for society at an attainable cost, employing people with paying jobs to do so, and raising living standards in the process is readily dismissed as a social good. (CSR devalues this more than it does anything else.) So we favor the overly simplistic view that all business is evil business.

At the risk of sounding like the stereotypical liberal arts college freshman/dufus who first discovers Ayn Rand and Objectivism, the problem arises when the when the business of business becomes something other than business — i.e., charitable giving. When that happens, who’s minding the store?

The failures of consumer social responsibility

Instead of telling us you’re going to donate $5 to save alcoholic chimps if we purchase your product, how about following lawful business practices to produce it, getting rid of the overhead of collecting and distributing this extra $5 a pop, charging $6 less for the product by focusing on efficiencies, and reasonably expecting me to get off of my lazy ass and put a check in the mail — funded by the savings and made out to the charity of my choice? (And if those business practices are unacceptable, don’t give the government a free pass but demand a universal law for everyone to follow — instead of supporting a system of under-the-table kickbacks from corporations.)

We can talk the talk about corporate social responsibility, but consumers hold the economic purse strings of this country. Where are consumer social responsibilities in this if, in a world defined by globalization, we effectively outsource our personal responsibility for charitable giving to corporations — some random, third party middleman — because we’re either too lazy or too cheap to do it ourselves?

When Starbucks and the Big Four coffee producers started jumping on the Fair Trade bandwagon — the very companies that were the original impetus for Fair Trade organizers — it arguably did more to discredit Fair Trade than to pump up the images of these corporations. So when the Big Four likes of Maxwell House start proudly wearing CSR badges on their chests, what will be its bigger impact on image: improvements to the Maxwell House brand, or devaluation of CSR itself?

Today’s New York Times Magazine published an article on the declining design aesthetic of the espresso machine: The Pod People – New York Times. As the author puts it, “Cape Canaveralesque control centers that have replaced those great machines.” And she blames the meteoric popularity of Starbucks, which inspired a great wave of ensuing greed by machine manufacturers and roasters targeting the home market.

In particular, she points out the design demise from the espresso pod and pod machine market — citing its inherent packaging wastefulness, the ugliness of the new wave of pod-friendly machines, and the irritation of over-designed machines that only work with a select kind of overpriced coffee pod. (The last phenomenon being so bad that there is a market for “ghetto pods” — echoing the days of do-it-yourself inkjet printer cartridge refills.)

Coffee pod freshness

If poor design were their only drawback. The author takes a pass on criticizing espresso pod quality, stating, “Admittedly, Nespresso and E.S.E. do taste rather good. (The premeasured grounds are fresh, thanks to the hermetically sealed capsules.)”

It’s clear the author is a designer and not necessarily a coffee geek, but this is an old soapbox topic for us. Virtually all the coffee you purchase today comes in some sort of hermetically and/or vacuum-sealed container — including Folger’s and Maxwell House. (Even setting aside that pre-ground coffee is far more unstable than whole bean.) If that were necessary and sufficient to keep coffee supplies fresh, there would be little advantage to home roasting or purchasing roast-dated coffee from the likes of Blue Bottle, etc.

But the truth is that freshness matters a lot, and it matters immensely when it comes to espresso. No matter how well you mummify pre-ground, roasted coffee for shipment around the world and storage in warehouses, it is always more stale than local, recently roasted supplies. In espresso, it always produces a thinner, lighter, less healthy looking crema. I’ve never encountered a single exception to this rule. Just look at the photos and ratings from our Nespresso tests. So unless she’s comparing these pod machines to the home Krups models of the 1990s, coffee freshness remains a negative for these new machines/systems.

New York espresso redux

Also in today’s New York Times Travel section is an update on a familiar topic: where to get a decent espresso among Gotham City’s terrible standards: Weeknd in New York – Coffee Bars – Travel – New York Times. In addition to some of the usual suspects, they also mention Zibetto Espresso Bar — a relative newcomer of note.

On Friday, The Republican (Springfield, MA) reported on a recent, local case of daughter-mother domestic abuse: Counseling ordered in ‘poisoned coffee’ case – Breaking News – MassLive.com. On the surface, the story is your typical police blotter fodder. But peel back a layer, and it raises all sorts of questions about what really goes into a can of Big Four coffee — and questions about the people who drink it regularly.

The short of it is that a 19-year-old daughter maliciously added Love My Carpet_® carpet & room deodorizer to her mother’s can of Maxwell House coffee. A regular Maxwell House drinker, the mother “had been experiencing stomach upset for about a month prior to her daughter being arrested.” She thus apparently continued to drink her daily cup of Maxwell House, oblivious to any taste, smell, or other sensory differences introduced by a big dose of Love My Carpet_® non-dairy creamer.

The sad story of domestic abuse is scary enough. But scarier still is the notion that a regular coffee drinker cannot tell the difference between Maxwell House and a carpet & room deodorizer. But I’m still not sure if this story says more about the quality of Maxwell House coffee or the taste buds of loyal Maxwell House drinkers, or both.

Under these circumstances, does Maxwell House’s recent announcement of their switch to 100% arabica beans really make a difference? Especially if we can secretly replace Maxwell House with Love My Carpet_® — just as Folgers Crystals did to “fancy restaurant coffee” decades ago. I’m just waiting for the Love My Carpet_® latte recipes…

Speaking of Folgers and fancy restaurant coffee, here’s a TV commercial clip from 1989, espousing the virtues of Folgers Crystals in place of coffee from “San Francisco’s Coffee Cantata gourmet coffee house”:

I believe this reference is to the one and the same Cantata Coffee on Upper Haight Street — which has quietly labored as an independent purveyor of fresh roasted beans for decades. The video shoot is obviously from nowhere near the Cantata, as it’s hard to merge the images in this video with Haight St. teen skate punks begging for change and a swearing street person marinating on the sidewalk in his own urine.

Corporate spokespeople frequently speak volumes more in what’s left unsaid than in what they say. Take yesterday’s Reuters news release from The Big 4‘s Kraft Foods. Kraft’s flagship coffee, Maxwell House, has desensitized American coffee taste buds for decades. Kraft has just recently decided to use 100% arabica beans in Maxwell House’s cans of unholy horror: INTERVIEW-Maxwell House coffee to go 100 pct arabica | Reuters.

In a statement made yesterday by Kraft senior vice-president and general manager of coffee in North America, John LeBoutillier, Kraft is changing the Maxwell House blend “to give mainstream America a richer, less bitter cup of coffee.”

The unsaid message from Mr. LeBoutillier? “For decades we have knowingly given mainstream America a weaker, more bitter cup of coffee. In more recent years, while the likes of Starbucks has created a market for much better coffee than the crude commodity we’ve been forever slinging on supermarket shelves, we countered by offering mainstream America even worse coffee: using cheap Vietnamese robusta beans, chemically treating it to taste more like our usual coffee, and passing the savings on to our shareholders. And by diverting our massive coffee purchases from our usual growers to cheap suppliers of low-grade beans, we helped instigate the global coffee crisis, inspiring desperate measures such as the Fair Trade movement.”

To also cite the Reuters article, “The move is neither an effort to challenge premium coffees nor in response to the hike in robusta futures prices to a recent nine-year peak, LeBoutillier said.” As if we didn’t predict exactly this ten months ago.