We love a good dose of sarcasm now and then. We’ve also been known to slag on McCafés while praising the coffee standards in Australia. So we had to highlight this sarcastic gem from Australia’s The Punch today: G’day from the McCafe…. Have a nice day! | Article | The Punch.

Apparently Oprah Winfrey is taking her 25-year-old TV show on a pre-retirement tour through Australia. In anticipation of her Aussie tour, Oprah slanders much of Australia for American audiences with a sponsored TV segment laden with outdated and exaggerated stereotypes.

One of her more egregious offenses? Making the McDonald’s-sponsored claim that Aussies just love McCafés. Millions of Aussies can only reply, “What’s a McCafé?”

Well, at least it’s not a crappy Oprah rehash of kopi luwak. (Pun honestly not intended.)

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.

It’s tough to be a newspaper man these days. Having run out of tiresome video game and comic book themes, they’re now making Hollywood movies out of bloggers. It seems that anyone with a Twitter account can also get a book deal — ironically celebrating the very media format it supposedly deems irrelevant. So we avoid the knee-jerk reactions when a newspaper staple like SF Chronicle restaurant critic, Michael Bauer, publishes a brief write-up on the local coffee scene: Michael Bauer: Between Meals : Let’s have another cup of coffee.

Trust us: a guy like Mr. Bauer has his haters. The guy even has recent exposés of his identity — Superman-style — despite the fact that his face has been on “WANTED” posters in SF restaurant kitchens for years, offering a bounty for any restaurant employee who identifies his arrival.

What we appreciate about Mr. Bauer is that he makes no pretense about being a coffee expert. That you’ve developed a professional palate for food doesn’t convey credentials as a coffee expert, purely by association, just because both activities involve your mouth. This is a far cry from the megalomania of some Bay Area celebrity chefs who think their coffee reigns supreme — when, in fact, it loses taste tests comparing them with an airport Starbucks. A bellwether of intelligence is a self-awareness of limitations.

In the article, Mr. Bauer notes that, “Blue Bottle has become a name with loads of cachet, and coffee made in a French press is practically becoming as ubiquitous as tap water.” We couldn’t help but notice this very phenomenon this evening, as we watched Noe Valley‘s Contigo produce French presses of the stuff like a factory assembly line for coffee-craving customers. Before even asking who supplied their beans, we (correctly) suspected it was branded Blue Bottle just by the heavy rotation at their coffee grinder. (Oddly enough, we found the resulting press pot to be a bit underwhelming — in flavor, freshness, etc. — for the pedigree.)

And to prove his own ignorance of the topic, the last half of Mr. Bauer’s article on “artisan coffee” (his term, not ours) concerns McDonald’s and Starbucks — which have about as much to do with artisan coffee as a Big Mac has to do with Kobe beef. The difference here being that we can forgive the guy — he clearly knows not of what he speaks. But at least he’s not pretending to be something he’s not.

What a strange newsweek it’s been in the coffee world. The best way to characterize it?: What’s old is suddenly new again.

Tuesday we had Starbucks’ latest cry for attention/help/suicide prevention with their mysterious “04.08.08″-on-a-lame-paper-cup campaign. Essentially, the publicity stunt announced the launch of their “new” Pike Place Roast and a “new” return to the old brown-and-white mermaid branding. Yet Starbucks’ Pike Place Roast is something that at least Seattle-area residents have been familiar with for years already, and their “new” branding campaign just underscores the delusions CEO Howard Schultz is having about turning back the clock — making him coffee’s Norma Desmond. (A much better Starbucks post this week also came from the past: the opening of the first Starbucks.)

Then in London on Wednesday, the ever-tiresome kopi luwak story again reared it’s ugly, old head, and hundreds of newspaper editors and bloggers fawned and giggled over it like they just discovered flatulence. What kind of a rock do you have to be living under to miss the first 37,000 times the story of this “new” coffee novelty gag was exhumed over the past ten years on the Internet? Odds are that it hasn’t yet dawned on these people that the 41st and the 43rd American presidents are actually different George Bushes who invaded Iraq. But we can almost forgive these waves of sophomoric, scatological snickers when compared with David Cooper at Peter Jones, who decided to brew Jamaican Blue Mountain as an espresso — which is a bit like driving a Lamborghini in an off-road 4×4 rally.

Not to be outdone, today McDonald’s announced “free latte Fridays” in Western Washington state. After nearly seven years of unqualified U.S. failures, McDonald’s is still trying to convince us that their McCafé concept is “new” and going to rock the world of “unsnobby” espresso lovers across the country.

Putting the “new” back in “news,” or: “Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1991″

So what to post this week that wasn’t some gimmick or publicity stunt retread? How about something truly new to discuss: the coffee scene in Kiev, Ukraine: UNIAN – ”Coffee mania” floods Kyiv.

The article, from the Ukrainian UNIAN news agency, notes the burgeoning coffee scene in the capital city — where coffee shops in the city center are now as little as 30 meters apart. But reading through their list and description of area coffee shops, we had flashbacks to the coffee house reviews in San Francisco from the late 1980s/early 1990s. Back then, it was enough just to mention that a café offered coffee — the rest was some rant about ambiance, where you could read Kant, and what food was on the menu.

But we suppose even that is cultural progress in a nation’s appreciation for good coffee; things could be a lot worse. Take Vietnam, for example. Today Vietnam’s leading coffee producer and exporter, Vinacafe Bien Hoa, announced that they have made the world’s largest cup of coffee: Vietnam makes world’s largest cup of coffee _English_Xinhua. Said “cup” apparently holds some 3,613 liters of coffee — or the equivalent of one horribly overextracted doppio shot of Vietnamese robusta espresso.

No word yet on whether Howard Schultz, not to be outdone, has purchased this massive cup of coffee for Starbucks’ next publicity stunt.

UPDATE: Nov. 25, 2008
In the unclear-on-the-concept category, next month Bien Hoa Vinacoffee will once again pull the “largest cup of coffee in the world” publicity stunt: World’s largest coffee cup comes back for a refill – Vietnam Business Finance. But bizarrely, the cited article quotes the following:

In showing the world its largest cup of coffee, Vinacoffee wants to send a message about the quality and position of Vietnamese coffee, said Nguyen Thanh Tung, the marketing manager of Bien Hoa Vinacoffee.

So Bien Hoa Vinacoffee’s logic here is that they convey a message of “quality” through an obscenely large swimming pool full of coffee. Perhaps the only way to top that is to make it “to-go” in a paper cup.

One of the worst-kept secrets of the past few years is that McDonald’s has been trying to get into the espresso business. Today, news services such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that McDonald’s plans to launch coffee bars with the new employee position of “barista”: McDonald’s coffee bars to take on Starbucks: report | Reuters.

Undoubtedly, McDonald’s will hire or convert thousands minimum wage employees who couldn’t tell a robusta from a McSkillet, give them about two hours of training, and place them behind boxy, push-button, superautomated espresso machines producing paper cups full of a rather watered-down, ashy brew that barely resembles espresso. In turn, some of them will then master the art of “dishwater” milk frothing and graduate to making cappuccinos and lattes. In other words, McDonald’s is going to follow in Starbucks‘ footsteps.

Well, more power to the clown. Even if we still think McDonald’s is misguided in trying to refashion Ronald into a Happy-Meal-peddling pusher of lowest common denominator espresso. Starbucks, who in the past has verbally invited the McDonald’s challenge, will now truly discover how far their espresso quality — and ability to differentiate their product — has fallen after years of massive tradeoffs made to support their insanely ambitious expansion plans. Maybe not enough to shake off Starbucks’ most loyal customers, but enough to keep them bleeding. (Though if McDonald’s adds Wi-Fi at their Playlands, who knows?)

The downside is that we’re not looking forward to having to sample a few of McDonald’s offerings — the sacrifice required for the sake of research and completeness of our database of comparative espresso reviews. Well, that and paper-hatted employees with bad acne telling us in their pubescent cracking voices, “Would you like four pumps of vanilla and caramel syrup with that?”

UPDATE: 4:15pm PST
Now that Jim Donald got the axe as Starbucks CEO, with chairman Howard Schultz to replace him, this just got more interesting: Starbucks Founder Returns as Chief – New York Times. Starbucks shareholders are pinning their hopes that Schultz is the coffee industry’s equivalent to Steve Jobs.

Now just because their national holiday ad campaign has ended, don’t think that Starbucks has given up their Pass The Cheer spirit. They will Pay It Forward on Mr. Donald’s golden parachute for some time to come.

In the “who just can’t let a failed idea die” contest between McDonald’s McCafé and the Sony Mini-Disc, McDonald’s seems to be upping the ante along the Central Coast of California: Espresso now comes express at McDonald’s – LompocRecord.com.

The strangest part is that the article cites Marcos Salazar, an area supervisor for McDonald’s, as saying, “The Central Coast is known to have successful rollouts of new products.” Nevermind that the McCafé has already been tried and failed miserably each of several times across the U.S over the past several years. If there are people who don’t know this yet, McDonald’s just has yet to reach them.

UPDATE: Aug. 31, 2007
So what if the rest of the world doesn’t like it. Those Japanese will try anything they think is new: McCafe aims for slice of coffee shop pie | The Japan Times Online.

Yesterday’s Washington Post ran an article that pretty much embodied everything I despise about coffee: Coffee craze has everyone a bit nuts – Family Times – The Washington Times, America’s Newspaper. It’s the focus on all the sizzle and none of the steak. Apparently, few of us want to hear about what it takes to get the best single espresso possible in a ready and convenient location. Instead we’re inundated with stories about all the ridiculous frippery that comes disguised as “gourmet” (oh, do I ever hate that over-abused word) coffee.

The article pushes all my basic “annoy-the-hell-out-of-me” buttons, including:

• The idea that good coffee must equate with a 17-adjective concoction of frothed milk, hazelnut syrup, whipped cream, chopped nuts, and a cherry on top that is oh, about, 2% espresso,
• Branded cafés opened by those purveyors of great coffee production, Kiss and Jackie Chan,
• Yuppies bored with the wine tasting routine who have now turned to coffee cupping as their latest taste bud fad (I still reserve that cupping is mostly a nasty, brutish task that’s best suited for finding bean defects than for the enjoyment of coffee),
• McDonald’s McCafé has been a repeat failure as dependable as the Sony Mini-Disc in most countries, save maybe Ireland, and yet it just won’t go away,
• Starbucks has gotten bored with coffee and now is a media company wannabe, making book, CD, and movie deals,
• Kopi Luwak press for those who must pay the ultimate for the über exclusiveness of everything, including coffee beans crapped out of an Indonesian civet (I say we forget the weasels and go straight for “celebrity blends” — starting this month with beans passed through the bowels of Tom Cruise).

The problem isn’t that a good cup of basic boring old coffee is such a rare breed these days. The problem is that society is easily distracted by anything beyond the simple merits of good coffee.

We probably owe some of that to all the people who really don’t like coffee to begin with and yet now have vehicles for coming along for the ride. We probably owe the rest to modern product marketing techniques.

I’ve mentioned my experience with orange juice. And you can’t even buy a toothbrush today without stumbling on the monthly patent war of marketing escalation: laser-guided plaque-interceptor technology is the only possible outcome where Moore’s Law of disposable razors predicts we’ll be using 14 blades by the year 2100.

McDonald’s fell in love with the foreign smell of money brewing when their switch to premium coffee helped boost their sagging top line. Although McDonald’s is still stinging from their McCafé failures in recent years, apparently they are ready to strike out again — testing out espresso production and other specialty coffee drinks at six test markets nationwide. One of the markets, as featured in a local TV news story, is Rochester, NY: McDonald’s tests specialty coffee waters – WROC TV NEWS 8 NOW ROCHESTER NEW YORK – Local Story.

With the likes of Starbucks dumbing down their espresso-making (and effectively dumbing down the quality of their product) to cope with relentless expansion, there is little reason to expect that McDonald’s espresso couldn’t rival Starbucks in quality. (We’re just inviting the hate mail, aren’t we here?) But as we all know, product quality alone does not constitute a successful business strategy. The question for McDonald’s is whether they can stop hemorrhaging fast food retail customers to the likes of Starbucks with comparable espresso drinks.

UPDATE: March 1, 2007
As with Sony and the Mini-Disc, some executives at large corporations refuse to let their pet ideas die the horrible death they deserve — no matter how many times they reanimate the corpse. Yes, McDonald’s is at it again, but this time trying to integrate their McCafé failure into their mainline franchise business: McDonald’s selling lattes and cappuccinos: WSJ | Reuters. This time for sure!

McDonald’s Corporation’s financial vital signs have kept worried investors up at night in recent years. Lacking same-store growth momentum, McDonald’s managed to find growth overseas … until international markets started to quickly saturate. McDonald’s has been making death rattle noises on the retail fast food market ever since.

McDonald’s slowly recognized that they were losing a great share of the convenience food business to expanding behemoths such as Starbucks. So after several failed attempts to capture interest in this evolving consumer market, including the ill-fated McCafé, McDonald’s decided to introduce better coffee to their stores last month.

This time, the early results seem quite positive, including this latest headline: McDonald’s CEO says recent coffee sales have ‘skyrocketed’ – MarketWatch. Same-store breakfast sales were up 8 percent in March. Of course, McDonald’s is now backpedalling somewhat, implying that nothing was ever wrong with their coffee to begin with. They just didn’t “focus attention” on it.

One can only guess what McDonald’s might be like if they “focused their attention” on their food.