Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal features an article on the Lisbon espresso, the bica: The Best Cafes in Lisbon – WSJ.com. It touches on Lisboeta coffee culture — e.g., drinking many shots each day at the local pasteleria (a sort of pastry shop/bar); a dependence on slower roasts, good quality coffee from Brazil, but also a proportion of robusta from former African colonies; and 40ml espresso shots instead of the Italian standard of 20ml (something we never saw as a positive, btw).

The article’s title is something of a misnomer, as it overlooks some of the best and most notable cafés in town. In part, this is due to the article’s focus on Delta Cafés coffee. Cafés such as Pastéis de Belém and A Brasileira are mentioned. But then again, our definition of quintessential Portuguese/Lisbon experiences includes headbanging to Da Weasel in Praça do Comércio whereas it probably doesn’t rank with the Journal.

Just when we write about the stifling conformity among roasters and coffee professionals of this modern era, today’s New York Times blog reports on the use of robusta beans in espresso blends: Robusta Economy – Times Topics Blog – NYTimes.com.

Although there’s nothing in the post we haven’t heard before, it’s the tone of the post that we find a little sad and almost incredulous. To read the author, Oliver Schwaner-Albright, you’d think measured use of robusta beans in espresso blends were akin to the medicinal practice of bloodletting — and that those who continued to use a little robusta in their espresso blends were akin to underground disciples of Falun Gong in modern China.

We may not seek out robusta beans any more than necessary. (Ain’t that the truth.) But the apparent belief that there is a singular, conformist voice about what definitively does and does not make good coffee today smacks of a “taste totalitarianism” — not to mention a historical and factual revisionism.

To the uninitiated, CoffeeRatings.com might look more like a horse racing tip sheet than a coffee Web site. But there are very good reasons why we’ve gone through the effort to quantify things. Just look at the chaos that can ensue when you don’t follow a system nor a simple baseline set of evaluation criteria: The 21 Best Cups of Coffee in America – Digital City.

You may have forgotten about AOL ever since your computer could no longer accept their once-ubiquitous floppy disks, but they still exist. Digital City is the reheated leftovers of AOL’s stunted local directory efforts. Their article claims they “looked all over the country” for their coffee picks, but we really have to question how hard. After five years and over 600 reviews methodically scouring SF alone, we still admittedly have plenty of gaps in our review coverage.

You don’t know Jack

The article goes on to say, “Twenty-one is an arbitrary number, but the picks are not.” Or are they? Topping their list is Jack’s Stir Brew from the coffee backwaters of New York City.

Jack’s is no stranger to coffee accolades. They rated as the 2005 “Best Cup of Coffee” in NYC, according to New York Magazine. Of course, this is the same New York Magazine that admitted less than a year ago that they never before considered how to rank coffee bars. And as recently as 2002, New York Magazine claimed that the rather pedestrian espresso-peddler and 1990′s holdover, Espresso Madison (formerly at 33 East 68th Street), made the best espresso in NYC. Hence we liken them to the Grammy Awards: sometimes they get it right, but only about a decade after their picks became irrelevant.

However, our biggest suspicion surrounding Jack’s ranking on this AOL best-of list concerns Jack’s location: a 10-minute, three-city-block walk from AOL’s new Manhattan headquarters. In other words: AOL corporate HQ’s satellite meeting place and bathrooms. Let’s just say that when AOL merged with Time-Warner, it probably didn’t help their odds of winning a Pulitzer for investigative reporting.

Also on the list is New Orleans’ famous Cafe du Monde. OK, who doesn’t like strong coffee, beignets, people watching, and catching a glimpse of the #82 City Bus Named Desire? But why is one of the 21 best cups of coffee in America cut with chicory to historically keep the costs down? How much cheap Vietnamese robusta do we need to get on this list?

Shout out to the home team

As if to one-up New York Magazine and prove that AOL, too, can be decades behind the times, San Francisco makes this list at #9 with that 1950′s institution, Caffé Trieste. Now we like Caffé Trieste — that isn’t in question. But why is a place that doesn’t even rank in San Francisco’s 21 best (it’s currently tied for #54 on CoffeeRatings.com) make the cut for the nation’s 21 best?

Stranger still was the only other SF entry in the list: at #14 is Haight-Ashbury’s Coffee to the People (currently tied for #278 on CoffeeRatings.com). AOL’s City Guide has oddly always been partial to this café, so one might presume they must have offices around the corner.

Sure, it’s organic and fair trade and all — but should that be the sole criteria upon which a “best cup of coffee in America” be judged? At Coffee to the People, you can buy politics. You can even drink politics. But when it comes to taste, let us assure you: politics tastes like flat, careless drip coffee with a scant crema trying to disguise itself as espresso. And that’s a cause we cannot support.

Digital City, what were you saying about “arbitrary” again?

Whether it’s coffee or Slow Food Nation (or both), today there’s a strong public undercurrent of knee-jerk, reactionary dismissiveness of anybody who dares suggest that the generic brand-X-in-a-can isn’t good enough for them.

The mistaken public belief is that most of the things we eat and drink today are somehow normal, inevitable, and “natural” outcomes — and not necessarily the result of a series of cut corners to even outright scary practices made to industrialize food production and minimize costs (while also maximizing profits).

Now minimizing costs is a good thing. But when it’s the only thing, when lowest price is the rule and all consumables are considered interchangeable commodities, typically all the production tradeoffs made to minimize those costs are swept under the carpet and consumers are kept blissfully unaware.

Elitist snobs! Food freaks!

If you operated a business where you produced a good or product that consumers thought the only difference was price, how would you run that business? You’d make the cheapest stuff available — using as low-grade supplies as you could, and performing whatever compromising processes and practices you could to keep expenses down. You’d follow Henry Ford’s rules of industrialization, add scale, find innumerable ways to cut corners. This is how you’d make your profits. The only other challenge would be ensuring that whatever came out the other end of your machinery still qualified as the product in the eyes of indiscriminate consumers.

These practices in the mid- to late-20th century ensured that we were sold unripe oranges shipped on trucks and painted orange for consumer appeal. It ensured that supermarket tomatoes were hard and flavorless. It ensured that the chicken we eat came from factory farms where the animals were raised in impossibly tight quarters, succumbed to various diseases and illnesses because of the conditions, and then had to be pumped with drugs and antibiotics to combat these illnesses and keep them alive under those conditions. All the things that would horrify our grandmothers in contrast to what they used to call “food”. But even what do they know, given the transparency and accountability of the sausage factory these days?

The analogue for coffee today is embodied by the Big Four. Coffee beans were treated as the equivalent of nuts on screws — so producers were incented to find the cheapest, lowest grade stuff available. This is how we got in the Fair Trade mess in the first place. The major international coffee producers sought robusta supplies from Vietnam and other emerging markets — bean supplies that were cruder, and yet far cheaper, than their existing suppliers. They added chemical treatments to make it taste more like their “old” coffee, and violá! No transparency. No accountability. Just give me a big can of generic “coffee”.

Food snobs unite!

Today people are coming to a greater awareness that their tomatoes don’t taste the same under these conventional rules of industrialization as they do from the backyard. And so there’s a growing consumer interest and demand for accountability and transparency in what they are actually getting for their money. A tomato isn’t necessarily like every other tomato, and the same is true for coffee in how it is grown, handled, and prepared.

It’s always been true: you often get what you pay for. But how many of us truly know what we’re getting, or what we’re contributing to, when we demand whole chicken at Safeway for 69¢ per pound?

A lot of people still want lowest common denominator products. All fine and good — that’s a matter of choice, and economics. But should someone remember what a ripe tomato really used to taste like and asks for that experience again, does that make them an elitist food snob? If so, we will proudly wear the badge of elitist food snob with honor. Food snobs everywhere are saving our food supply from becoming one giant Play-doh Fun Factory fed by tubes of high fructose corn syrup.

Interestingly enough, yesterday The Consumerist highlighted a Pittsburgh-area video from WTAE-TV. It featured someone’s grandmother, and she demonstrated some of the clandestine production practices a Big Four coffee producer followed to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their “tastes like crap” coffee. As if we’re surprised…

UPDATE: Sept. 20, 2008
Is it any wonder that the most publicized “anti-food-snob” forces out there right now are represented by McDonald’s?: Shop Talk » Blog Archive » McDonald’s brews up anti-coffee snob ad blitz | Blogs | Reuters.com. All we can say is: Viva la snobbery!

Today Condé Nast posted an general consumer article on what to look for in good coffee: Coffee Drinking Guide – Portfolio.com. However, it reads more as a quick guide to following what’s “trendy” today — rather than as a guide to seeking good quality coffee experiences. (Not to mention that the article’s title, “Eat Sheet: Coffee,” takes on a whole other meaning with a Middle Eastern coffee grower’s accent.)

For example, the pro-”light roast” movement is really just the flavor du jour. And after so many years of over-roasted and darkly roasted coffee, who can blame anyone? But as much as we tire of the ubiquitous wine analogy for coffee, the recent focus on light roasts isn’t far off from all the people who are now drinking rosé wines again.

Once people get it out of their system, they’ll be interested in darker roasts again. Just as when they get off single origin and single estate coffees, they’ll come to appreciate well-crafted coffee blends again — and the merits of high quality robusta beans again. And just as we explore enough with Clover machines and vacuum pots, something like espresso becomes interesting again. Each has their merits, and there never has been one way to appreciate good coffee.

For example, it’s true that lighter roasts exhibit better characteristics of certain beans. But for other bean varietals — such as those from Indonesian estates in Java and Sulawesi — a lighter roast is no better than darkly roasting a delicate island coffee: instead of the great body and lower acidity inherent to these beans, they come out tasting thin, bland, and even a little grassy at times.

Coffee is often best roasted to maximize the best, most unique qualities in the bean — and no bean is the same, really. And there is no one way to appreciate it all.

One definition of “overly ambitious” is attempting to write an article about the relationship between coffee and a pluralistic nation of over 1.1 billion people. Compounding this is the nature of India itself — where not only can you find evidence of just about everything, but for everything you find to be true you will also find the exact opposite to also be true.

India is a mesmerizing country that can be quite a lot to take in at any given time or place. Life there seems so much more raw…and vibrant. Besides being a diverse country of contradictions, one seems to experience a 360-degree view of life there — in contrast with our much narrower perspectives of the world here. For example, destitute poverty lives side-by-side with optimistic, upwardly mobile hope for the future. But at either end of this wide spectrum, India is filled with people of great friendliness, joie de vivre, and spiritual centeredness. It boasts some of the best people-watching in the world, and we rapidly developed a great fondness for the country and the people who live there.

Yet despite two weeks in a country that arguably changed us (is there such a thing as an Indiaphile?), we were much less successful at unraveling the mysteries of India’s historic, evolving coffee culture. There are a few reasons for this:

• Daily 115-degree temperatures weren’t exactly conducive for drinking many shots of the stuff. Whoever coined the term “Indian summer” for those few warm weeks a year in SF obviously had no idea.
• Urban mobility is a challenge. With coffeehouses being relatively few and far between in a city as large as New Delhi (by most counts, one of the ten most populous cities in the world), getting to them on foot isn’t very practical. (Blistering heat aside.) Then add India’s rather maniacal driving culture. Its extensive network of hired drivers helps a lot, but it often requires you to know where you want to go — instead of wandering aimlessly in search of coffee.
• While there are a number of establishments with espresso machines in the region, few are dedicated to the craft. Those places that are focused primarily on coffee are overwhelmingly big chains. Despite a number of 24-hour coffee shops in hotels, their emphasis is on food service.
• India lacks a quality-aware coffee culture that directs consumers to specific coffeehouses. Although India actually has a long and rich tradition of coffee growing and consumption, only until recently has it switched focus from quantity to quality. And India has no real history with espresso, which is more of a very recent phenomenon among the mobile middle classes.

Despite these obstacles, we always welcome flimsy excuses to publish more travel photos.

It’s a bit ironic that Westerner travelers feel the culture shock of India’s raw authenticity — far removed from the corporate sameness that afflicts every downtown in America — and yet dedicated retail coffeehouses in India are dominated by big chains. The independent, mom & pop places called “coffee houses” are typically old school diners, cafés, and restaurants. (Another strange irony: with the escalation of world food prices, there are questions of how middle America can continue to afford organic foods for their families — whereas in destitute India, that’s all they’ve ever eaten.)

Of course, India is a nation famous for its tea drinkers. Chai being the Hindi word for tea — and not that latte-styled spiced tea stuff Americans call “chai” either, which is closer to chai masala gone Starbucks. (Indian trains and train stations are filled with the “chai, chai!” calls of tea-vending children and adults.) As in other developing countries famous for their tea drinkers, such as China, many of the newly affluent are gradually eschewing their daily tea for the perceived cosmopolitan mystique of espresso drinks. And in most modern offices staffed by younger Indians, coffee seems to be the beverage of choice.

However, coffee (kaufi in Hindi) is hardly new to the subcontinent. It’s generally believed that coffee was first brought to India in the 17th century through its historic Islamic ties to Yemen and the Middle East. Today India claims to be the fifth largest coffee producer in the world. Coffee is grown almost exclusively in South India, and most of it has been consumed in the domestic market — with an occasional bulk trade with the former USSR. But since the 1990s, India has developed some excellent coffees. They are also home to some excellent “oddities”, such as Monsooned Malabar and some of the highest quality robusta beans in the world. (Unfortunately we didn’t have the opportunity to visit coffee farms at origin.) Italy is currently the largest importer of Indian coffees.

South India is also famous for what they call “filter coffee” — or what the rest of us call “South Indian” or “Madras” coffee. It’s a ritualistic combination of darkly roasted beans blended with chicory, a lot of warmed milk, and sugar. It all comes together through coffee mixologists who use metal cups and tumblers to form the frothy, sweet, milky drink. While available in Northern India, it was too sweet and milky for our tastes — though some Madrasi purists told us that the concoctions up north came up short to the real thing.

We conclude with a pathetically token sampling of a few Delhi area espresso ratings:

Name	Address	City	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
Barista Crème	33, 1st Floor, Khan Market	New Delhi	6.60	6.80	6.700
Costa Coffee	L8. Outer Circle, Connaught Place	New Delhi	6.40	6.50	6.450
Café Coffee Day	14 Indira Gandhi International Airport	New Delhi	7.10	4.20	5.650

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.

Today Voice of America News broadcast an executive summary of sorts on specialty coffee consumption in America: VOA News – Good to the Last Drop: Coffee Culture Is Alive and Well in the US. Like many things VOA, it’s spoken in slow and clearly annunciated English. Think the clinical drone of NPR presented at the pace of Barney & Friends. It’s enough to make you feel like a severe head injury victim in rehab, recovering from a high-speed motorcycle accident.

The story starts in Philadelphia’s excellent La Colombe Torrefaction. It then proceeds to touch on Starbucks bashing for its cancerous expansion, public curiosity about barista championships, a little on the history of coffee production and consumption, the differences between arabica and robusta, coffee’s economic crisis, and some of the environmental concerns surrounding coffee production.

Unlike the Catholic Church — which swallowed the Fair Trade self-promotion bait hook, line, and sinker — VOA did a commendable job of at least attempting to present both pro and con arguments to the Fair Trade movement. That sort of critical thinking is worth calling out in itself, particularly coming from an agency whose sole purpose is essentially propaganda.

Last week, C. Clairborne Ray of the New York Times answered this question as part of the paper’s Q&A feature: bookofjoe: What makes coffee bitter?. (I’m citing it on another blogger’s post instead of the original NY Times source — in case you are religiously opposed to NYT logins.)

As the article states, coffee is a “complex chemical soup”. So complex, in fact, that the answer they offer is a complex alphabet soup.

The digestible short of it is that a little bitterness isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the overall balance of coffee, as it cuts down on its acidity. However, you can cut back on the perceived bitterness of the cup by avoiding distilled water, by brewing at higher temperatures, and laying off the robusta. The Coffee Research Institute also recommends medium roasts, drip-brewed systems, and using a coarser grind.

UPDATE: Aug. 21, 2007
It’s amazing what old stories get rehashed over and over again. Chemist Thomas Hofman presented findings today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, seemingly unaware of the fact that others have bothered to ask the very same question before, leading to prior research reported several times over already: Chemists Find What Makes Coffee Bitter | LiveScience (also: Physorg.com). How long before the next scientist reports on gravity research made by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa?

According to an article in today’s USA Today, hotels are still slowly catching up on the rest of society when it comes to serving better quality coffee: Upscale coffee selections brewing at more hotels – USATODAY.com. As the article opens, “Good coffee is the next big thing at hotels.” Business travelers, accustomed to better coffee at home, are demanding more than their stale pots of robusta — which have been as synonymous with “hotel breakfast” as the melon salad. Meanwhile, hotels are catching on that demand for better coffee can add to their bottom line.

Hotels are accomplishing this through better bean supplies and improved in-room coffee makers (even if they are coffee pod machines, it’s still a step up). However, the hotels are still not planning on making espresso just yet. The article mentions Hilton Hotels’ recent switch to Lavazza coffee and Cuisinart brewers. Perhaps even more shocking, Holiday Inn just announced that they have apparently discovered the arabica bean.

Also according to the article, in September the Le Méridien hotel here in San Francisco will kick off what it calls its “Creative Hour” in the evening. The idea behind this non-alcoholic happy hour is to draw guests to the lobby to drink coffee supplied by Illycaffè and to participate in coffee-related activities, including “cooking lessons for recipes that use coffee and for making special coffee drinks.”