As we last left our story, SOMA‘s ever-morphing Sightglass Coffee was glacially executing on its grand designs to become a major SF roastery and a spacious coffee destination. It had been over a year since we last walked among the spent heroin needles of nearby 6th Street, so much of our new Sightglass experience had been through retail brightness bombs sold throughout the Bay Area using Sightglass’ own roasts.

This past week we finally got the chance to revisit Sightglass, and we can safely say it has largely succeeded at its very ambitious goals. We say “largely”, however, because we have more than just a little qualified ambivalence for what exactly Sightglass has become.

Sightglass’ original cubbyhole is now merely the doorway entrance to a vast warehouse space dedicated to exposed wood beams and coffee production. There are a couple of split levels upstairs for staff and vast amounts of stand-up counter space all around the floor plan. But while the square footage of this coffeeshop has expanded some 100-fold, there is seating for only about a dozen more people than before. There is window counter seating along the 7th Street sidewalk. But between that and the bicycle parking at the other end of the building there is virtually no place to sit.

The deliberate scarcity of seating is a decidedly useful move to ward off the laptop zombie set. And we wish far more places catered to stand-up espresso service the way it is a cultural institution in places like Italy. But somehow a place like Four Barrel makes their zombie-warding mojo seem natural and organic to the space, whereas at Sightglass it comes off like a lack of planning.

The vibe inside is a bit unique for a Bay Area coffee shop. In some areas, children sometimes play on the floor with parents in an unusual day-care-lite-like fashion. Meanwhile, there is a noticeable bent towards employing comely female staff and an unusually high proportion of both staff and patrons wearing cycling caps. Yet there is an unusual shortage of the obligatory piercings and body art. And as if an homage to Four Barrel and its mounted boar heads, the sparse decór inside includes the occasional mounted desert animal skull.

As if to proclaim they can mimic more than just Four Barrel, there’s a trusty turntable by the coffee service area for playing vinyl copies of the Beatles’ Revolver or the Pixies’ Come On Pilgrim EP — giving it a little of that Stumptown Portland feel.

It really tied the room together

But enough about interior decorating: what about the coffee? For one, there’s an ample wall of the stuff for retail purchase. It’s not even the “$15 a pound” stuff we mentioned earlier this week: we’re talking the $19.50 for 12 ounces category. At which price, we want bottle rockets shooting out of our ears when we sip this stuff. After sampling some of their Guatemala Finca San Diego Buena Vista Yellow Bourbon at home, let’s just say we’re not giving up our Barefoot Coffee take on Edwin Martinez’ Finca Vista Hermosa — despite some recent local press love.

The general quality of barista here seems to have raised a notch with their expansion. In store they offer Chemex and Hario V60 brewing of three different cultivars — plus the usual espresso drinks, a few baked goods, and the usual Hooker’s Sweet Treats salted caramels. And to pull those shots they employ both Slayer and La Marzocco Strada machines at opposite ends of the service area. Explaining the difference between the two espresso machines to a friend who was there with us, there’s really no other polite way to say this: owners Jerad and Justin Morrison are total name brand fad whores. So we merely described the machines as “last year’s model” versus “this year’s model” — and then proceeded to pay on their iPad checkout system, established here since the week the iPad went public.

Living up to their reputation as worshippers at the altar of the brightness bomb, they pull espresso shots with a rather one-dimensional, medium brown, even crema that struggles to coat the surface. It is very bright and flavorful in a citrus-meets-malt way, but surprisingly not overwhelmingly so. Though there is a tinny, almost metallic taste in the finish where it lacks any real sweetness or molasses-like smoothness.

Of course, a lot of people in North America enjoy this flavor profile. But it becomes particularly problematic when it comes to American’s love of milk-based espresso drinks. Their cappuccino is what we might call a “supermodel” cappuccino — pretty and perfect on the outside, but vapid at the core and lacking any real substance. Despite the beautiful appearance and accompanying latte art, their cappuccinos are tepid, milky, and lack any real punch that can hold up to the milk. We honestly cannot recommend the cappuccino here, as the primary brightness notes in the espresso are lost to become something insidiously bland and rather flavorless.

Sightglass’ place in SF’s coffee pantheon

It’s fair to say that by establishing both their roasting operations and a large service area, Sightglass has positioned themselves as one of the premiere coffee destinations in San Francisco. These days, that says something. However, we cannot help but feel there’s a missing attention to detail here that holds Sightglass back from being among the very best — this despite a web site that proclaims their “deep attention to detail.”

There’s nothing inherently flawed in name brand fad whoring if you get the execution right. But without that execution, you risk appearing as though you’ve followed a checklist for a paint-by-numbers Third Wave coffeeshop — rather than being something with a soul and substance of its own. We don’t even mind if your interior design ideas were lifted from the Stumptown and Four Barrel catalogs as long as your attention to detail comes out in your coffee. Forget the other details for a moment: a washed-out, bland cappuccino just doesn’t cut it.

An almost poetically symbolic example of this attention-to-detail problem was evident watching the team perform maintenance on their on-site Probat roaster (aka, “the sightglass”). They re-applied the mounting bolts to their Probat … without washers. Sometimes it takes just a little extra effort to do it right.

Read the updated review of Sightglass Coffee.

This past weekend, Barefoot Coffee Roasters celebrated their seventh anniversary. While the San Francisco Coffee Wars have clearly overlooked the South Bay, we’ve frequently traced some of our favorite coffee experiences back to this small microroaster and their tiny chain of cafés. Besides their flagship café in Santa Clara, they have recently expanded to a couple of small kiosks in San Jose. One of which we visited this past weekend.

Having lived in Palo Alto for four years during the early 1990s, I used to joke “in Palo Alto, diversity means owning a Macintosh.” While there’s more to the Peninsula and South Bay than strip malls and residential sprawl, those are two of the reasons we don’t go back. One of the reasons we do go back is if said strip mall or residential sprawl hosts a Barefoot location. Barefoot’s Roll-Up Bar falls in the latter category.

Co-located with the Barefoot Coffee Works (the new home of Barefoot’s roasting operations), the Roll-Up Bar is literally located at the garage door at the end of a massive driveway. If that sounds rather residential, it’s because it is. Located in pretty much a house that is only lacking a basketball hoop in the wide driveway, this is a casual spot not far from the Shark Tank where locals can enjoy great coffee in what feels like someone’s gated front yard.

If you’re driving here like most people, just be prepared to look for a morning house party serving coffee. The neighbor next door currently sports a rather elaborate Halloween yard decoration, then commemorating the impending doom for the Philadelphia Phillies. (Even if San Jose has their own Giants.)

There are a few benches in front for seating, but otherwise it’s a limited set of stools at a small wooden counter bar set up for Hario V60 pour-overs plus an ornate, copper-plated, three-group Victoria Arduino lever machine. In back there are a couple of Probat roasters, a lot of storage shelves, a cupping room, and plenty of unroasted coffee.

For their 7th anniversary celebration, Barefoot did the crazy thing and gave out free coffee all day long at all of their locations. But rather than offer only their everyday, less expensive coffees, to their credit they poured a lot of their special supplies. Besides serving their Bolivia Cup of Excellence #29 Flor Rosa (with three days age) at the pour-over bar in notNeutral Bangladeshi cups, they were also serving this coffee (normally at $24/12-oz) as their single origin espresso.

The resulting cup was fragrant, with a medium brown, even layer of crema in their classic dark brown ACF cups. It’s single origin overboard — with a sharp, acidic sweetness tasting of berries, honey, and a light molasses. This is straight-out brightness bomb espresso that would make most Italians recoil in disgust. But if you’re into that sort of thing, and we sometimes are, it’s rather exceptional. However, we need to update this review at some point with a more “typical” shot from this location.

Read the review of Barefoot Coffee Roasters’ Roll-Up Bar in San Jose.

Opening in Oct. 2009, James Freeman finally established a spacious company headquarters home for his ever-growing Bay Area coffee empire here in Jack London Square. They host a surprisingly small café for retail coffee service. There’s several tall stools and tables for outdoor seating along Webster St., and indoors there is barely a four-person window counter to sit at.

Much of the space is dedicated to specialized operations such as warehousing equipment and supplies, larger batch roasting (with two large Probat roasters), daily cuppings (every day at 2pm), making baked goods for all of their outlets, barista training, and desks for buyers and all the other administrative details.

This location is part coffee lab, given the test roasts and equipment trials they perform here, but also part museum — the latter reflecting Mr. Freeman’s enthusiasm for older equipment and electronics. His blending of the two seems to put the recent media obsession with gadgetizing coffee and emphasizing coffee “firsts” in a rather conflicted state.

Coffee so fresh, it’s from the future!

On the one hand, you have Mr. Freeman experimenting with the Marco Über boiler — a device the New York Times yesterday called “The Rolls-Royce of Kettles” in breaking-news fashion (“the first in New York City!”). Media outlets like the Times have recently picked up the puzzling, and frequently annoying, habit of taking the centuries-old art of making coffee and suddenly pitching it as if we were in the midst of a Cold War-era coffee-making arms race against the Russians. “Throw out that obsolete La Marzocco Linea — now it’s all about the new $22,000 Cannibal Corpse machine!”

This bizarre hyperactive emphasis is something you just don’t see for making tea or waffles or ice cream. Coffee not only seems to bring out the cause-driven kooks more than any other consumable. It also seems to bring out the misplaced desires of bleeding-edge technology news junkies — an odd lot who have been suffering withdrawal symptoms ever since the demise of manned space flight. (This before you add a fickleness and ADHD that’s normally associated with the fashion industry.)

Now juxtapose this fetish with Mr. Freeman’s obvious infatuation with things like the 1940s Altec Lansing “Voice of the Theatre” speakers at this location, an old Russian projector scope for internal office presentations, vintage stereo equipment in the barista training room, and a dual-lever La San Marco machine at the Mint Plaza Blue Bottle Cafe — nostalgically, Blue Bottle’s first espresso machine and it’s still in service for single origin coffees. Good luck geeking out on the bleeding-edge technology news in all that.

Old classics, and classically good coffee

The facility emphasizes transparency: large glass panes with visibility inside Blue Bottle’s various operations. Combined with their roasting and training facilities, this makes Blue Bottle’s headquarters perhaps the closest Bay Area equivalent we have to Cape Town’s Origin Coffee Roasting complex — just with all the Cal/OSHA regulations thrown in so that transparency here means “look, but don’t touch”.

The retail coffee bar may be small at this location, but it’s capable of great things with its “oh so last year, honey” three-group La Marzocco Linea machine. The resulting shot is extra potent and short without being overly syrupy. It has a textured, richer medium brown crema and a smooth, rounded, fresh-tasting, flavorful pungency of thyme, some pepper, and traces of smoke, honey, and cedar. An outstanding shot. Served in classic brown Nuova Point cups.

Read the review of the Blue Bottle Coffee Company in Oakland‘s Jack London Square.

Also known as Truth. (note the period at the end), this café and roastery opened in March 2010 — founded by “charismatic leader and coffee evangelist” David Donde. Those aren’t our words, but Mr. Donde wouldn’t disagree.

Mr. Donde, a somewhat controversial local figure, is no small fish in the South African coffee pond. In 2006, he co-founded both the ground-breaking Origin Coffee Roasters and the Specialty Coffee Association of Southern Africa. He may fancy himself as a coffee cult leader, but perhaps that isn’t entirely an exaggeration. Sure, he’s a regional talk show host and an automobile columnist for the national edition of GQ — giving mirrors a rather excessive workout wherever he goes. Maybe that doesn’t make him the David Koresh of coffee, but perhaps he’s close. Fortunately, Mr. Donde’s coffee efforts largely live up to the self-constructed spectacle and hype.

His café sports some outdoor plaza seating with TRUTH.-branded parasols, and indoors the space looks as much a museum to slavery (being home to the Prestwich Memorial) as it does a roastery with bags of beans, a Probat, and a wall of merchandising that includes the necessary Clever drippers, Expobar machines, etc.

Some locals criticize the atmosphere of this place, but we criticize it less for its misgivings in social dynamics and more for its over-earnest veneer of artisan coffee legitimacy. Let’s face it: the place reeks of “Third Wave” clichés. You get the sense that someone visited a few U.S. coffee bars crowned as “Third Wave” destinations by the mainstream media and developed a checklist of brand names, devices, services, and philosophical positions. As a result, Truth. feels a little like it’s going through all the motions of a heralded Third Wave coffee bar, but yet it seems less genuine for its place. To its defense, it’s not a cliché if few others on the continent are doing it. But the resulting espresso here is particularly defensible, given the end product.

Although we knew well of this café before arriving in Cape Town, we happened upon it while walking with 149,000 of our closest friends along Cape Town’s World Cup Fan Walk for the Uruguay-Netherlands semi-final. The Fan Walk was arguably more exciting and lively than the match itself.

As the World Cup progressed over the weeks, what started as a secured three-mile-long pedestrian zone for fans to walk to Green Point Stadium organically evolved into a massively popular street carnival filled with revelers, music, dancing, vuvuzelas, and food for people with or without tickets. Given Truth.’s location right on the Fan Walk, they kept their doors open past midnight to serve World Cup revelers seeking espresso and even Boerewors rolls (the South African version of the hot dog).

Using a three-group Nuova Simonelli Aurelia and grinders from Mazzer and Anfim, they serve double shots by default for R14. The barista also rejects sink shots (also a good thing). While they offer shots in Continental fine bone china, they served us in a 30ml shotglass with a shotglass of mineral water on the side. It has a frothy, darker brown crema with a lighter center at the pour. Its body is still on the lighter side, as is typical of South Africa, but it has a robust toasted flavor, mostly an herbal pungency with a sharp brightness and some earthy body. There’s even some sweetness towards the bottom. One of the most North American-style shots in town.

Read the review of Truth. at Green Point in Cape Town, South Africa.

This St. Helena outlet of a two-location Napa coffeehouse and roaster routinely receives “best coffeehouse” awards in the area. Given how they handle roasted beans, consumer coffee education, and filter coffee, this isn’t much of a surprise — particularly given their general lack of legitimate competition in the region. But from what we can tell, these accolades are for everything but their espresso.

Like their sister location in Napa, this spot is a large, barn-like wooden structure. It has skylights, a few patio tables in front, and plenty of seating inside. There’s also a working Probat roaster at the back, a community book trade, and a central counter devoted to retail coffee bean sales and a four-cup Melitta bar.

Also like their Napa location, they use an unusual two-group Diadema machine for espresso. With it, they pull shots with a medium brown, textured crema that barely coats the surface. It comes in a larger pour size. The resulting shot has a bit of bulk when you taste it, emphasizing body over brightness. Flavorwise, it has an earthy, slightly smoky flavor that also, unfortunately, tastes too much of ash.

The Napa Valley is certainly about wine. It might even be about coffee a little if you look hard enough. But it’s definitely not about espresso — at least yet.

Read the review of the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company in St. Helena.

Recently we’ve been spending a bit more time on the Peninsula, so we’ve been on the hunt for notable espresso shots just due south of San Francisco. We’ve followed up on a few places that locals admire and put them to the test. The results have been… well… you’ll see.

Some consider this among the best coffee spots in sleepy San Carlos. Maybe that’s not as backhanded a compliment as being elected prom queen at a leper colony, but it still doesn’t really say much. Outside there’s a large sidewalk table and several small café tables indoors. The space is dominated by the elongated serving area, with bins of their own roasted coffee and an old, dingy Probat roaster at the far end of the shop. Given the sandwiches, ice cream, and classical music radio here, this is a full café — even if they are known more as a roastery.

Owner Young Cheong proudly displays a few things on the walls: his training credentials (from Burlingame), their policy to use no roasts older than 21 days, and their commitment to filtered water. Their roasts are rather dark — even the Kenyan beans have a major gloss — and the owner roasts only about once or twice per week.

Serving espresso from their two-group WEGA, he serves shots that are full and high, with an even, semi-thick light/medium brown crema in their classic brown ACF classic cups. The tobacco flavor leans towards some ashiness, however — as could be expected given the darkness of their roasts.

Careful when asking “for here”: they still might serve you in a paper cup…then crassly dump it in a ceramic one when you point out their mistake. Not exactly recommended, even if you’re lost in San Carlos.

Read the review of the Plantation Coffee Roastery.

Weren’t we just saying that there are only about three or four people with original story ideas? Sure enough, this time it’s the New York Times that recycled the same local roasters story idea that has already been once around the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post in recent months: Specialty Coffee Roasters Brew in New York – NYTimes.com.

New York’s quality coffee scene, while improving, remains a major coffee underachiever. So interestingly enough, the article heavily weights its coverage towards the many New York imports angling to get the job done, including many of the West Coast’s usual suspects: Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia employees, Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffè, and James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee.

Only at its conclusion does the article make mention of any NY locals: Café Grumpy, Abraço Espresso, and Ninth Street Espresso. With much of the New York quality coffee scene still playing catch-up to the rest of the country, the writer suggests (we think correctly) that the lack of representation by NY roasters reflects the capital investments and relationships with growers that take time to develop.

In any case, the Chicago Tribune has probably been put on notice that their turn is next to rehash this article.

Today the SF Chronicle posted an impressively long article on the state of quality coffee roasting in the Bay Area: ROAST WITH THE MOST / A new generation of Bay Area coffee roasters pushes the perfect cup to the next level. It’s a remarkable piece, given its breadth. It lightly touches on everything from the roasting process, roasting trends, more meticulous coffee sourcing, and restaurants taking notice in better quality coffee. It also includes interviews with a good number of quality coffee luminaries in the area — and not just the usual, overexposed suspects.

On the topic of overexposure, it’s also good to see focus on advancements in the quality of the coffee — and not just an emphasis on machinery (and their escalating price tags), which has been something of a media trend of late. Equipment advances such as the Clover brewer would be amount to little more than a curiously expensive robotics grad student project if not for the improvements in coffee sourcing, roasting, and freshness.

Today’s geography lesson: Rome is not a U.S. city

As much as Coffeeratings.com was born five years ago out of frustration with the lack of quality standards and their awareness in the Bay Area specialty coffee scene, we actually take a bit of exception with some of the suggestions in the article — for example, “While the Bay Area is considered the birthplace of premium coffee, many say the quality of its coffee has lagged behind that of other U.S. cities in the past 10 or 15 years.”

In the past few years the Bay Area has arguably established itself as a national coffee leader, second only to perhaps Portland and Seattle. (And even at that, Seattle and Portland — like SF — are equally rife with median-quality coffeehouses that make poor espresso.) But go back a decade ago, and the coffee quality in the great majority of other U.S. cities was hurting far worse than SF.

Only hipster dufuses who use the word “‘spro” need apply

The article also unfortunately feeds this terrible misconception going around that better coffee can only come from a “new generation” of coffee professionals — an attitude that if you haven’t been making coffee for less than three years, you are irrelevant to good quality coffee today. Call it specialty coffee’s take on Jerry Rubin‘s “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” (It’s also one of many reasons why we ridicule the term “Third Wave.” Although the phrase’s originators coined it more to describe coffee consumption rather than coffee purveyors, today it is most commonly used to describe the latter.)

But the media will always focus on the new. And what’s old often becomes new again. (See: siphon coffee.) We read stories that suggest single origin coffees will bring about the (greatly exaggerated) death of the blend, or that lighter roasts will universally trump all those “horrible, traditional darker roasts.” But we see each of these as consumer fads that are merely highlighting the less explored dimensions of the overall coffee enjoyment experience. When the novelty of the new wears off, single origin or blend, light or dark roast, there will always be something to be enjoyed in the full variety of experiences coffee has to offer.

As a former resident of Palo Alto for several years, a trip down Santa Clara’s Stevens Creek Boulevard conjures up images of discount mattress stores, Denny’s, and strip malls as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, that’s commercial real estate in the Silicon Valley — regardless of the hidden gems tucked away in Northern California’s answer to The O.C.

One of those gems is Barefoot Coffee Roasters — three-time winner for best coffee in the local free weekly, Metro (and one of those rare occasions where a popularity contest gets it right). Despite all my peripheral encounters with Barefoot and its well-deserved accolades, I finally paid my first visit this week.

Barefoot starts with Andy Newbom (owner and CEO, or “Chief Espresso Officer”), and I couldn’t think of a better person for the role. I first met him as emcee at the last Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC). There are many great inside stories of how he’s offered his time, energy, and even his spare bedroom to support the training and development of budding, high-quality cafés throughout the West. But most of all, he exudes an infectious enthusiasm for good espresso. Andy visibly loves good espresso the way Homer Simpson loves donuts.

Outside this small café there are several sidewalk tables and chairs for scoping out the nearby freeway traffic. Inside, there’s a handful of artful tables and sofas — and a long corridor leading past their famous Probat roaster to their less-famous bathroom with its brooding, Central American-themed mural walls.

Barefoot is religious about the need for, and its support of, professional barista training, and it shows. They have mounted numerous framed training certifications on the back wall behind their three-group La Marzocco GB/5 station. The barista will demonstrate a detailed level of quality control — rejecting shots that didn’t come out to their professional standards.

For espresso, I first sampled their Bare Espresso — a double shot made with a standard blend ($2). They served it with a medium brown crema without distinctive markings or froth, and it was a little lighter in color and thickness than I expected (or experienced at the WRBC’s The 4th Machine). The cup had a sweet, herbal earthiness with a lot of bright, acidic notes, but the body was surprisingly lighter.

I moved on to their Single Estate Espresso ($3.50) — a variant to their usual blend, typically made with a rotation of estate coffees (as modelled in very few other cafés, such as Palo Alto’s Caffé del Doge). As a single origin espresso, as in the case with single malt scotch, it often has a very distinctive, unique, and intense flavor profile. The day’s offering was a Panama Finca Hartmann, which they recommended with spouts (as opposed to a naked portafilter).

One of the things I really like about Barefoot is that they don’t succumb to the latest popularized specialty coffee trends. For example, some baristas have recently glommed on to the (not-so-new) Cup of Excellence phenomenon — as if Cup of Excellence-competing coffees have a monopoly on unique, distinctive, high-quality flavor profiles. But Barefoot knows there is plenty more out there to choose from, like Finca Hartmann. (We’ve arguably witnessed a similar phenomenon in the past year with socio/eco-conscious types discovering Fair Trade coffees en masse and attributing it with a monopoly on ethical and sustainable growing practices — putting a blind eye to Fair Trade’s many shortcomings and problems.)

The Finca Hartmann espresso hit paydirt. Not that the Bare Espresso was a slouch, but here the cup came with dark red and brown flecks in its thinner crema (expectedly thinner, given its single-bean profile). It had a more robust aroma, a round and robust body, and an intense sweetness with a sharp but pleasant bite at the back of the throat to complement its herbal pungency. Outstanding.

Read the review of Barefoot Coffee Roasters (Single Estate Espresso).