The name is “Ma’velous”. We’re not sure if this is a New Yorker thing — like when Monday Night Football legend, Al Michaels, tries to pronounce the ‘h’ in the word “huge.” But the owner, Phillip Ma, is a self-fashioned coffee geek with apparently enough money for high-end coffeemaking toys but no real prior training in a formal retail coffee environment.

Is this a liability? Definitely in the beginning, but it’s hard to say in the long run, as Blue Bottle‘s James Freeman got his start as a coffee hobbyist. Even the legendary Alice Waters started her influential empire of local, organic California cuisine with no formal culinary schooling nor restaurant management training.

Located in a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood — just one block from SF’s amputee panhandler Mecca along the base of South Van Ness Avenue — this spot is part night club, part wine bar, part coffee lounge. Among the many unusual things about this place is that it is a night-time coffee lounge.

Yours truly may recall fond memories of late-night, up-and-coming jazz acts at the long-since-defunct (and increasingly legendary) Ajax Lounge in San Jose, where I would down a couple of sub-par double espresso shots after midnight and still sleep soundly by 2am. But for most people, the caffeine jolt of the ideal coffee experience is decidedly a morning thing.

Coffee six ways?

Coffee six ways? That’s what they offer between an espresso machine, Hario V60 pour-overs, Chemex, French Press, a Japanese siphon bar, and a Kyoto slow-drip coffee maker. “This will allow aficionados to taste the full complexity of each coffee, its natural sweet, fruity, acidic or buttery finish without cream or sugar. No bitterness here,” claims their Web site.

As for the coffees themselves, they offer everything from Intelligentsia‘s Black Cat, Intelligentsia’s Bay Area acquisition of Ecco Caffè (their Kenya, Ethiopia, Honduras, Guatemala El Tambor, and El Salvador roasts, to name a few), and coffee from Tim Wendelboe. Which makes the opening of this café rather exciting for us: even if they have only three different grinders, this is the first notable espresso bar in San Francisco to offer coffees from multiple roasters since the untimely death of Café Organica in 2006.

As for the espresso machine, they spared no expense… calling it the “Musashi 4“, it’s a one-of-a-kind four-group La Marzocco customized by Olympia, WA’s Espresso Parts. (We love their tampers, btw.)

Yes, they spared no expense here — down to the Dyson hand dryers for the staff behind the counter. The interior is dark with artistic murals, a few red leather booths, painted black wood walls, a high ceiling, red acrylic chairs, and a short bar seating area at the front entrance. They have a wine list and a cheese list in addition to their “caffeine list,” and the table service even pours water out of a Chemex.

Opening night jitters

After a few dry runs on private media openings in the past couple of weeks, last night (Thursday) was their informal public opening night. So service was bound to be sketchy, and it most certainly was: six people squirming behind the tiny counter, customers trying to squirm past the narrow pathway by the front of the counter, limp-wristed espresso tamps, slow-moving lines, and a pre-infusion-controlled espresso machine that required a bit of time to calibrate and was only yet dialed-in for a handful of their available coffees.

Local street artist, Eddie Colla, whose mural decorates the wall and the staff T-shirts, was present for the opening event, adding to the mob scene. But even for all the confusion and early kinks, there’s a lot here worth checking out.

For the most part, the Intelligentsia Black Cat is their default espresso (rated in the linked review at bottom). But as with these pressure-controlled espresso machines, don’t think that there’s only one flavor profile per coffee. Our first shot of the Black Cat was set at a 199-degree brewing temperature with four pounds bar of pre-infusion pressure. The resulting shot was an even, lighter, medium-brown-colored crema with a nose that was slightly tarry.

The flavor was primarily sweet tobacco, with some edges across the flavor profile to remind you that this was a blend and not a single origin shot. Still, it is a far cry from the Black Cat shots we’re used to at Chicago’s Intelligentsia — with it’s textured, darker crema that practically leaves a blackened ring around the cup and a pungency-heavy flavor to match.

But as if to prove a point, Phillip offered me a follow-up shot of Black Cat made at a different profile: a 200.5-degree brewing temperature with six pounds bar of pre-infusion pressure. This shot was a bit closer to the Black Cat “at origin” we’re used to: a much headier crema, more caramel flavors, and a more traditional, more rounded flavor and a slightly darker crema.

Their machine was also tuned for the Ecco Caffè Guatemala El Tambor single origin shot, which came with a mellow aroma, a lighter crema, and served sweet and bright with just a touch of sourness — very much in the tropical fruit vein. We originally thought they managed to manipulate a shot of Black Cat to taste like a Central American single origin shot until we discovered it actually was a Central American single origin shot. (Whew.) Served in classic brown ACF cups.

One of the more notable SF coffee bar openings in years

It’s hard, and unfair, to judge a place entirely on its opening day to the public. There’s a bit of tuning that’s still needed in the espresso shots, and there’s currently a high emphasis on tuning for brighter shots with coffees that sometimes perform better with greater fidelity at less acidic flavor profiles.

Sure, the place is overly enamored with coffee’s gadgetry du jour. But just the ability to sample some Black Cat — forget even at different extractions, or even the yet-to-be-readied Wendelboe coffee or the five other brewing methods available — makes this worth a return visit if for no other reason. Then add that it’s the rare coffee bar offering beans from multiple sources, the novelty of a coffee nightclub, and a decent opportunity to compare pressure profiling on the same coffees — even if it isn’t necessarily making better shots.

Read the review of Ma’velous.

Lately we’ve been thinking about quality coffee’s current obsession with all-things-technology. While there’s arguably more science than art to making good coffee, the current climate seems to have pushed any art aside. It reminds us of civilization at the turn of the 20th century, when society held a common belief that technology was going to solve all our problems. Right before the mechanized killing of World War I, the Industrial Revolution giving way to the Great Depression, and the invention of the atomic bomb.

So today we witness a lot of obsession over incessant measurement — sometimes merely in the pursuit of more measurement, and even to the level of confusing the act of measurement for actual science. This technological obsession also manifests itself by a holy-grail-like belief in the new espresso machine that will revolutionize coffee. All of which creates a lot of interest in coffee but has rarely created better coffee — or at least better coffee experiences.

As a result, quality coffee feels a bit soulless and sterile these days. This sterility has even gone mainstream in a mass-produced way, at least at the general consumer end, most notably in the form of espresso pods, single-serving coffee devices, and superautomatic espresso machines. Hence this reactionary article in last week’s New York Times: In Defense of Old-Fashioned Espresso – NYTimes.com.

Can good coffee be saved from itself?

How might we overcome this clinical obsession and save the soul of good coffee? A few months ago, Ben over at Chemically Imbalanced proposed a very thought-provoking (and discussion-provoking) idea of Le Coffeeing — a sort of coffee variant on France’s recent and reactionary Le Fooding culinary movement. Le Fooding may be a weak analog for what coffee needs, but the inspiration behind Le Coffeeing carries a lot of merit.

We’ve recently been thinking about the potentially constructive parallels between the wine and coffee industries (at least where they make sense), and today’s coffee vanguard has a lot more in common with Napa winemakers than they do with the stodgy-but-vaunted restaurant establishment of France. This is why we caught a glimpse of potential quality coffee salvation in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article on Napa Valley Wine’s Retro Dudes | Jay McInerney on Wine – WSJ.com.

The Retro Dudes of Napa are more than familiar with Napa’s cathedrals to perfectly manipulated premium wines — for example, high-performance Cabernets that smack you in the face like a plumber’s wrench made of fruit and oak. What makes the The Retro Dudes interesting is their “passion for quirky, individualistic, artisanal wines” — pursuing neglected wine varietals, blending their wines in Old World ways, keeping the skins on their grapes for natural fermentation rather than the modern technology of controlled yeast additions, and generally “rejecting some of the technological winemaking of the modern era in search of wine authenticity (and presumably, drinkability)”.

Today coffee lovers are bombarded with hype about the pressure profiling technology of new $18,000 espresso machines, $20,000 Japanese siphon bars, $11,000 superautomatic Clover brewers (i.e., until Starbucks purchase of the company made them uncool), disproportionate fawning over $100-per-pound Cup of Excellence microlot winners that devalues all runners-up, and $400+ gadgets providing digital readouts of your total dissolved solids and extraction yields that risk making statistical gymnastics the ends rather than the means to better coffee. The pursuit of the mythical perfect coffee may be giving us more to learn and experience, but it’s also sapping the soul and even the enjoyment out of the beverage.

Here’s to hoping that a generation of Coffee Retro Dudes can come to the rescue before its too late.

Today the New York Times Magazine blog posted a mini bio-piece on James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame: The Nifty 50 | James Freeman, Coffee Maker – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com. The story behind their “Nifty 50″ (did they hire a former 1960′s editor from Tiger Beat for that?) is to highlight “America’s up-and-coming talent.”

Since Mr. Freeman is not likely making an appearance on American Idol anytime soon — and since there’s still no word on the pilot for Clarineting With the Stars — the Bay Area coffee world fortunately can still celebrate him as one of our own talents. Of course, New York City has supposedly been calling for a while now, and the article claims James still holds some Gotham interest.

Sitting in James’ Blue Bottle Cafe this afternoon with visiting Hawaii coffee author and consultant, Shawn Steiman, we discussed Hawaii’s laggard status at quality retail coffee despite its notable coffee growing credentials. The conversation then turned to New York City’s laggard quality coffee status and how much its quality coffee culture had to be imported from places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — including a number of coffee professionals who hail from these towns.

We previously knew of New York City’s challenges in establishing local roasters — given its commercial real estate environment and zoning laws. But what we didn’t know, and learned from Shawn today, was something he once heard from Gimme! in Ithaca, NY: that Manhattan has no roasters because the island has insufficient gas pressure to support them.

Today’s Times piece also exhumed the old $20,000 figure on Mr. Freeman’s Japanese siphon bar. Whenever journalists turn to price tags for coffee headlines, it reminds us of the old Oscar Wilde quote about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. $11,000 Clovers, $18,000 Slayer machines included. (Do they expect commercial coffee-brewing equipment to cost about as much as their $200 Krups home espresso machine?)

UPDATE: Jan. 23, 2010
As if we needed another example of New York City’s laggard coffee culture, the New York Times yesterday published an article on the New York arrival of pour-over coffee: Ristretto | Pour-Over Coffee Drips Into New York – T Magazine Blog – NYTimes.com.

Yes, pour-over coffee: essentially the same process prosthelytized by Philz’ Coffee for the better part of the past decade — and available in Bay Area outposts as remote as Monterey’s Plumes Coffee House since the previous decade. They obviously need a James Freeman in New York City fast, because at this rate Japanese siphon bars should arrive there around the year 2018.


UPDATE: Feb. 22, 2010
Sure enough, according to today’s New York Times, it looks like Blue Bottle Coffee will open in New York City with a Japanese slow-dripper bar: Blue Bottle Coffee to Open in Williamsburg – Diner’s Journal Blog – NYTimes.com. The siphon bar may still not arrive until 2018, however.

UPDATE: Sep. 23, 2011
This time it is Fortune magazine’s turn for the profile: Blue Bottle: The best coffee you may ever drink – Fortune Features.

Recently I was approached by a writer exploring ideas for an article to be published by Wired in the UK. (This wouldn’t be the first time.) The subject line of his e-mail? “The Future of Coffee.” His goal was to put together a piece about the “vanguard of the coffee industry,” featuring “new and disruptive technology or methodology to do something entirely new.”

This is hardly an uncommon theme these days. Problem is that there is little “there” there (to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on her hometown of Oakland). For a Wired audience nurtured on futurism bombast, there is more bleeding-edge innovation going on with sous-vide cooking than the much more ancient art of coffee per se. However, coffee is far more universal and something many can relate to on a daily basis, so it naturally garners more readership.

For some people, this hideous contraption suggests “The Future of Coffee“:

What we have now is a critical mass of consumers who have “rediscovered” good coffee in recent years — even if good coffee has been around for a long time. Just that it used to be that much harder to find. In the six years since we started this Web site, the best shots we’ve ever had have not improved. But places that serve very good shots have become much more common.

But when people experience what seems like a sudden eye-opening discovery or awakening — such as the realization that there’s more to coffee than mass-produced fodder — there’s a tendency to mentally project some hockey-stick-like growth in coffee innovation for what has essentially been pretty much the same process since the 1800s. Once opened up to new possibilities, that this process of discovery and awakening doesn’t continue on some trajectory just seems too boring and mundane to accept.

Parallels between coffee and the Web?

In fact, I’ve come to liken what’s going on with coffee consumers to my experiences with the genesis of the World Wide Web — even if the Web has actually innovated while coffee has much less so.

Back in 1991, I was working among particle physicists with gravity-defying hairstyles who spoke in triple integrals at SLAC, home to the first Web site in the U.S. So I got to witness it all from the beginning — from the advent of image support in Web browsers to finally distinguish the Web from Gopher…to the 1996 psychotic rush to anoint push technology as the Web’s next revolution (Twitter 0.1?)…to the 1997 predictions by marketing wonks that we would all be shopping online at 3-D storefronts employing VRML that Christmas (shades of 3-D TV?). We even have Third Wave coffee, which I find jokingly analogous to the trite and nonsensical Web 2.0.

Coffee or the Web, the sense of experiencing an innovative rush begets more demand of, and expectations for, the same. Just read the sloganeering on the Slayer espresso machine Web site:

What lies on the other side of Caffe Artigiano, David Schomer, PID, FB80, Fair Trade, Cup of Excellence, and all the dreams of an organic, authentic, Coffee Universe now circulating and seemingly just beyond our grasp?

If Slayer was a Wired-friendly dot-com circa 1999, it would have been ridiculed for buzzword/hyperbole overload before finishing that sentence. And yes, Cup of Excellence competitions are clearly more recent constructs for coffee advancement. But for each legitimate advancement, there are dozens of examples such as the Japanese siphon brewer: a modern spit-shine on manufacturing design applied to 1830s coffee extraction technology.

Coffee punk’d

Even if most “future of coffee” claims are vapor, what’s the harm in a little excitement, right? Well, things have gotten so ridiculous, and consumers have been so duped into thinking things are changing too fast for them to keep up with, that we have things like this video published a few days ago: How to brew a good cup of coffee Boing Boing.

From the post on BoingBoing.net:

Simple steps for brewing a right proper cup o’ joe. It’s really the “handsorting” step that trips up the less sophisticated coffee drinkers, but then, failure to prime one’s coffee filters is also a common mistake

Huh?! And then looking at the comments on these pages (and other online references to the same video), the great majority suggest that viewers took this video quite seriously … that they were completely oblivious to how much they were being punk’d into believing anything about innovative coffee technique and technology. Here’s the direct video as published by Ben Helfen, who works at Octane in Atlanta, GA:

Not long after posting this, Ben later had to add a disclaimer on the video’s Vimeo page, worried that people would take it seriously and make themselves horribly sick in the process:

DISCLAIMER: This video is meant to be a joke for my coffee industry friends. If you were to actually try this, it would taste nasty and probably make you sick.

Former US Barista Champion, Kyle Glanville, was obviously in on the joke with his excessive use of exclamation points in his Twitter feed. But despite its great humor, unfortunately the joke went over most people’s heads. That merely reflects how bad false expectations about coffee innovation have become today — and it is clearly what Ben Helfen was exploiting.

UPDATE: Feb. 4, 2010
“Fourth Wave Coffee” or Third Wave Hyperbole? The New York City arrival of the Slayer has brought out more bombast (as if we had a shortage): Baristas Test The Slayer, the New $18,000 Espresso Machine | Serious Eats. We still wonder how serious “Serious Eats” can be if it follows the crutch of the clueless: referring to new espresso machines by their MSRP price tags in its headlines.


UPDATE: Feb. 10, 2010
Thankfully, the New York Times wasn’t as easily duped by MSRP price tags: What Kind of Coffee Do You Get for $18,000? – Diner\’s Journal Blog – NYTimes.com. They correctly noted that the $18,000 quote for the Slayer machine isn’t out of line with a standard La Marzocco GB/5, for example. But interesting that the Times should cite the Slayer’s pre-infusion for single origin espresso shots as one of its big advantages. Particularly given the faddish nature of single origin espresso shots and quotes like CoffeeGeek.com’s Mark Prince’s, “I still have yet to meet a single origin coffee I’ve truly enjoyed as an espresso.”

The Slayer could make the single origin shot more palatable in theory. But is all that devotion to a second-rate espresso shot made from trendy beans with a limited flavor profile worth it?

Publications frequently run out of ideas, which is why the Wall Street Journal seems to be jacked on coffee articles of late. (But don’t worry — we have no plans to tell you what investments to have in your portfolio.) Just two days after making the ridiculous assertion that Illy is taking on Starbucks, the Journal published a more thoughtful piece on Asia’s “best” coffee: Ground Rules – Asia’s Best Coffee – WSJ.com.

Fortunately it’s nothing like America’s Best Coffee — one of coffee’s greatest product-naming let-downs. The article highlights the history of Taiwanese coffee culture, making mention of siphon pot coffee and last year’s salty coffee fad. The article also offers small sections on coffee culture in Japan, Malaysia, and Vietnam — offering glossaries on the coffee in each country and brief tips on where to find a decent cup.

A bit slow out of the gate (by a year), Slate magazine filed this article on the Clover brewer, naturally focusing on the device’s expense in the article’s title (“Could a Coffee Maker Be Worth $11,000?”): How the Clover could change the way we think about coffee. – By Paul Adams – Slate Magazine. It’s a timely follow-up to our post yesterday.

When it comes to “bragging rights” over who has the bigger price tag (?!?), it’s interesting to compare the Clover brewer to James Freeman’s siphon bar. While the Clover brewer allows a lot of variables to be tweaked and tuned, as cited in the Slate article, it is largely the Northwest American digital engineer’s approach to better brewed coffee. Meanwhile the siphon bar is more like the artist’s approach to the same problem — with at least as many variables and nuances to adjust, but it’s more like the violinist who prefers to ignore the constraints of precision frets on their instrument to produce something they can more fully control in an analog world.

However, the author of the Slate article, Paul Adams, seems to miss the forest for the trees. A new brewer doesn’t change how we think about coffee. In fact, the only reason the Clover brewer exists is because the coffee itself is getting better; the nuanced flavors and aromas these higher-grade coffees produce won’t otherwise be lost on a precision machine like the Clover. But considering the origins of the beans and the roasting styles applied to them, not every coffee makes sense in a Clover — just as not every coffee makes sense as an espresso. A good microscope and a good telescope may both require precision optics to effectively refract light, but I wouldn’t use the same device to examine both the heavens and the structure of cells.

Advances in brewing equipment and technology are an important element to appreciating better coffee. But to focus exclusively on gadgetry and price tags as the only measure of good coffee is akin to purchasing a $4,000 Viking open burner range top to reheat canned soup. Or, in some cases, to roast a turkey.

“Mystery” solved. As one of our readers commented on a previous post, Starbucks recently purchased two $11,000 Clover brewers for who knows what unholy purposes. However, today Bloomberg reported that Starbucks is testing them in at least one of their Seattle retail stores: Bloomberg.com: Exclusive – Starbucks Tests $2.50 Premium Coffee to Boost Sales.

Between this and recent news of their new “dollar days” promotion, you really do have to wonder if their recent corporate shake-up included replacing their executive VP of corporate strategy with a Magic 8-ball. But whereas the $1 bottomless cup of coffee strategy seems aligned with Starbucks’ continued downmarket spiral, the $2.50 Clover-brewed coffee experiment is quite an anomaly.

Unclear on the Concept: Starbucks Beans…in a Clover?!

There’s been a lot of media coverage and squawk over coffee brewing technology these days. But a big reason why we’re even talking about brewing technology is because the coffee itself is making it relevant. We can use siphon bars and Clovers and notice the difference in our cups because of vast improvements in bean sourcing (Cup of Excellence coffees, etc.) and a more rigorous commitment to quality roasting and to keeping the inventory of the roasted beans as fresh as possible. Without the advancements made in the bean, the roast, and its freshness, the whole exercise of these high-end brewing machines is rather pointless.

Thus it’s not clear that Starbucks even comprehends any of this. Starbucks still sources their beans from mammoth-sized suppliers (to ensure consistency and an appropriate volume to supply their over 15,000 cafés) and uses roasts that they do not dare date stamp. Even Starbucks’ “Black Apron Exclusives” beans aren’t held to the standards that most Clover-using cafés have. This makes Starbucks’ use of the Clover a bit like playing AM talk radio through a $30,000 sound system. What’s the point?

After a decade of relentless focus on growth at all costs, Starbucks is clearly experimenting with quality and other long-ignored factors in the hopes of finding something that sticks with consumers — to revive their flagging brand. We still haven’t ruled out the possibility of Starbucks re-launching some of their cafés as “Starbucks Select” (think “Target Greatland”, etc.) to allow them to focus more on quality at some of their cafés and help buoy the impression of quality at the rest.

What will those wacky Swiss think up next? Apparently, it’s an espresso-tasting machine: A machine with a taste-for espresso.

Yes, it’s the latest invention from the people who brought us yodeling and clandestine overseas bank accounts. But with the Swiss, it’s not all good stuff. They have also brought us brain-dead, monkey-operated, superautomated espresso machines — such as those manufactured by Franke, Nespresso, the Schaerer. (The latter of which is responsible for the dreaded Verismo, part of a secret Swiss plot to bring about the downfall of Starbucks.)

So the nation that has built robots to do everything from stacking wheels of cheese to pumping out sickly cups of espresso has turned its attention to espresso tasting. (More sophisticated coffee industry robots that also wear hoodies and bike messenger bags, collect tatts, and listen to Cat Power on iPods are apparently still in the works.)

The machine operates by analyzing gases released by a heat­ed es­pres­so sam­ple. By evaluating some of the over 1,500 aromatic and flavor compounds in a brewed espresso, the developers hope to replace a lot of the human profiling that still goes on in coffee production. A study on the effectiveness of the device, which is rumored to be nearly as ac­cu­rate as a pan­el of trained hu­man es­pres­so tasters, is planned for publication in the March issue of An­a­lyt­i­cal Chem­is­try.

Robots to brew, robots to drink

The coffee industry still relies heavily on human senses for evaluating what makes a good cup. While some day a Swiss-made, espresso-tasting robot may put CoffeeRatings.com out of business, I was also struck by something James Freeman told me yesterday at his new Blue Bottle Cafe. He took a moment to sample his siphon bar coffee after serving it — noting how he was impressed with how the bartenders at his neighborhood Nopa often sample their cocktails from the ends of stirring straws as a way to keep tabs on the resulting product.

Technology can go a long way towards modeling the physical world. But until coffee is served by robots for robots, chances are that some things just can’t be replaced without the human touch.

UPDATE: Feb. 12, 2008
More news of this story is starting to hit the presses. This includes the Royal Society of Chemistry, which uses espresso-tasting profile charts as illustrated by the Centro Studi e Formazione Assaggiatori: Machines get a taste for espresso. There’s also the actual ACS publication: When Machine Tastes Coffee: Instrumental Approach To Predict the Sensory Profile of Espresso Coffee, where other blogs have excerpted some of its illustrations. Plus a weak, one-minute audio spot from Scientific American: Scientific American: Coffee Tasting Machine Stirs Industry.

Today Blue Bottle Coffee Co. opened up their long-anticipated Mint Plaza café — their first true space (besides kiosks and outdoor carts at the Ferry Building and in the East Bay) to showcase James Freeman’s commitment to freshness.

The café is located at a bend in Jesse St. in the Mint Plaza alleyway — in the corner of the old San Francisco Provident Loan Association building (SF’s largest jewelry-only pawn shop, if that gives you an indication of the neighborhood’s dicey past). It’s a bright space with tall ceilings and tall windows that look out on Jesse and Mint Sts. Along the windows is a series of stools with counter seating. Inside there is limited seating at the siphon bar (more on that below) and one long, high table surrounded by stools.

Of course the emphasis is coffee in all its various forms. But there’s also a worthy dessert menu (Caitlin A. Williams is their pastry chef).

For their “routine” espresso blends ($2), they use a three-group La Marzocco GB/5. As you would expect from Blue Bottle, the barista concentrates on timing a slow and deliberate shot — producing an espresso with a richly textured, medium brown patterned crema. It has a beautiful color in the light of the space, a potent aroma, but a thinner body than you might expect for something of this quality. Still, it has a classically robust Blue Bottle espresso flavor of roasted tobacco with an edge of a sweeter honey. Served in a classic brown Nuova Point cup with a glass of water on the side.

Single Origin Espresso

Of course, as a showcase for Blue Bottle Coffee, this is just the beginning of the coffee experience here. James has established a weekly rotation of single origin espresso shots, served from a dedicated old copper, manual, two-group La San Marco machine. Today’s special single origin roast was a Brazilian Camocim Bourbon. Producing one of the very best, if not the best, blended espresso in town, Blue Bottle’s single origin Camocim Bourbon will knock your socks off and comes highly recommended at $3. (James apparently knows me too well, as he personally served me up one before I even had the chance to ask!)

It has an exquisite aroma. The crema is a rich, mottled, and frothy medium brown — a touch thinner in size, as you might expect from a single origin espresso, but it has texture for miles. It has a robust flavor — there aren’t any elements noticeably missing, which is common to single origin espressos — and tastes of chocolate and some tobacco smokiness. Served in a white ACF cup — it is an outstanding recommendation over the “standard” blend.

Siphon Bar

For this café’s opening day, the siphon bar earned Blue Bottle a front-page story on the “Dining In” section of the day’s New York Times. And the place buzzed with the feel of a grand opening. James was beaming over his latest pride and joy, cameras were about still taking photographs of the place and its coffee, and many of the local coffeescenti came by to welcome the place (including Eileen Hassi of Ritual Coffee Roasters while I was there).

So what is this “siphon bar”? For one, it’s not necessarily anything radically new or different. It is essentially vacuum pot coffee made with a special system imported from Japan, except it uses halogen lamps as a heat source and cotton cloth filters that James told me should last a whole year. (Cafe Bello, for example, has offered vacuum pot brewed coffee for the past four years — even though it’s no longer listed on their main café menu.) The New York Times may have gone ga-ga over their fixation with its price tag — which they quoted as $20,000 for the setup — but James dismissed some of that figure on many of the peripheral parts they purchased, training, etc.

However, the siphon bar presents a unique way to experience some of Blue Bottle’s most exquisite coffees. They offered three different bean options. I had their Idido Misty Valley Ethiopian ($10) — which comes accompanied with chocolate sea salt caramels. The pairing may sound a bit pretentious (I’m leery whenever coffee people try to shoehorn familiar wine tasting rituals on themselves), but it works quite well — enhancing both the flavors of the delicate, clean coffee and the richer chocolate and caramel. In any case, the café could barely keep up with the novelty demand for their siphon bar coffee.

James Freeman may have made his start in the East Bay, but as a resident north of the Panhandle, he has made this location a showpiece and a true coffee destination for the city. Some Blue Bottle loyalists might piss and moan because “Blue Bottle was way cooler when you could drink espresso shots made by a tattooed slacker over a sewer cover in a back alley,” but we’ll take good coffee over misplaced adolescent attitude and poser angst any day.

Read the review of Blue Bottle Cafe at Mint Plaza. — with ratings based on their standard espresso blend.

Today’s New York Times revealed the “very special machine” to be showcased at Blue Bottle Coffee’s Mint Plaza grand opening today: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee – New York Times. One-upping the now-blasé Clover, it’s a $20,000 siphon bar for brewed (i.e., not espresso) coffee, imported from Japan via the Ueshima Coffee Company. Yes, UCC — the aforementioned, Kobe-based king of Japanese canned coffee who sports the barista-T-shirt-ready slogan, translated to English: “Good Coffee Smile”.

So what is more amusing? The trumping escalation of high-end commercial coffeemaker prices, or the media obsession with these prices? It’s as if to suggest a Times headline for the brand new Mercedes-Benz CL Class: “At Last, a $118,127 tank of gas.” (Either that or this reporter must think the siphon bar is disposable after a single use.) You can always tell when a reporter is in way over his head when the only vocabulary they have to describe the qualities of an item is its price tag.

Yet the article rightfully ponders whether “the age of brewed coffee” has arrived. To a degree, it has. We’re not ones to take away from the luxury of a great espresso (something that the great majority of cafés still flounder at, and even the best get a little wrong now and then). However, espresso is just one limited method of showcasing the complexity and wide variety of flavor profiles that the world’s coffees have to offer. Now that we’re in an era of coffee quality exploration — with the rise of single origin and Cup of Excellence coffees — it makes complete sense to introduce brewing methods that best highlight those nuances.

Have the Coffee Wars Moved on to Good Old Brewed Coffee?

It doesn’t mean we stop enjoying a little quality washed Indian robusta in our favorite espresso blend — or that we are calling for the death of the quality blend. But tasting a delicate island coffee, like a Kona peaberry or a St. Helena, in a vacuum pot can make a world of difference, and improvement, over forcing it through an espresso preparation.

If anyone should be freaking out over this turn of events, it shouldn’t be the eyes-rolling, look-at-what-those-rich-geeks-are-paying-now-for-coffee reporters. It should be Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz. With all his lip service about getting the insanely expanded Starbucks to reclaim it’s spot at the zenith of the consumer coffee world, they cannot afford to participate in this new brewed coffee arena. Because you can not only forget capably training 99% of their 150,000 low-wage employees on how to properly work a siphon bar — you can’t even trust many of them after-hours in the same room with this equipment. And without a strategy for quality brewed coffee, Mr. Schultz is merely fighting the last decade’s coffee war.

In the meantime, San Franciscans should be proud that the likes of the New York Times are spending a lot more time these days reporting on the coffee revolution that’s playing out in our very own backyard.