A few things have changed since our last trip report from the Crissy Field Warming Hut. Some of the changes are related to an electric car that mysteriously burst into flames here exactly two years ago; the water damage from putting out the fire shut The Hut down for repairs for most of 2007. But more to the point of this post, The Hut changed their espresso set up — and surprisingly for the better.

The Warming Hut is an old army shed converted some time ago into a café and bookstore. When you’re standing there in the billowing fog and blasting winds from the nearby Golden Gate, you immediately understand how it got its name. Inside locals and tourists alike warm up to soup, sandwiches, baked goods, juices, and espresso among a few indoor tables. For the courageous, there’s also plenty of picnic tables outdoors.

The greening of the Warming Hut

As part of the evolving Presidio, and the repairs from water damage, today The Hut clubs you over the head with its sustainability and green themes. In secular San Francisco, social and environmental causes have become our surrogate religions, and public spaces such as Crissy Field and the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences have become our temples.

It’s all a matter of personal taste, but for us, just as with The Organic Coffee Co., there’s a fine line between supporting a cause and opening what almost feels like a religious theme park. And because American marketing is about as subtle as Whitney Houston passing a kidney stone, and since it relies on frequently changing campaigns to retain top-of-mind attention, we get the feeling that some of these over-earnest “green branding” efforts will seem painfully dated within a decade.

So although The Hut previously made quite respectable espresso from a three-group Mr. Espresso Rancilio and a custom blend of Mr. Espresso beans, the sustainability wonks here must have decided that Mr. Espresso just didn’t measure up to the public image they wanted for their new temple. So they upgraded to a nicer two-group La Marzocco GB/5 machine, and they switched to a more prominent “cause” coffee in Equator Estate Coffee.

From their La Marzocco, arguably employing less skilled baristas to operate their equipment than in prior years, they serve a correctly-sized espresso in a short paper cup. It has a decent layer of light-to-medium-brown crema and a rather potent aroma. The flavor here has more depth and pungency than before — suggesting richer spices and tobacco suspended in a decent body. This place originally overextracted their shots a bit, but that (and their espresso) has since improved with shorter pours in recent years.

The question of Equator Estate Coffees

Equator co-owner and roaster, Brooke McDonnell, posted here prior about the very subjective nature of coffee tastes and preferences. And she was entirely correct. Since we were largely underwhelmed after sampling Equator Estate coffees at dozens of restaurants and cafés, we questioned whether there was just something about Equator’s coffee that just didn’t suit our fancy (Thomas Keller be damned).

We also questioned whether Equator Estate was a victim of their resellers: coffee is often only as good as the people preparing it for retail. But after buying whole beans of Equator Estate for home use on multiple occasions, the underwhelming results pointed a finger back to Equator’s coffee and our own taste buds.

After five years and over fifty shots of espresso made with Equator Estate beans, we were finally impressed last week at The Warming Hut. This now paints a slightly different picture of our opinions: the majority of our disappointments with Equator Estate coffees likely stems from a personal preference for only some of their roasts and/or the post-roasting handling in their retail distribution chain.

Whatever the case, unlike most examples of Equator in the area, this is a major exception. Equator finally has a retailer who can showcase their coffee somewhat (regrettable paper cups aside) — something the French Laundry couldn’t even achieve. Whether if this is by freak accident or through deliberate intent remains to be seen. But for now, appreciate this oddity of a café as one of the better examples of good espresso in the city.

Read the updated review of the Crissy Field Warming Hut Bookstore and Café

Fort Point’s slow and steady Renaissance

As SF locals, we’d also like to make a shout out for all the positive changes going on at nearby Fort Point, a brief walk up Marine Drive from The Warming Hut — just beneath the San Francisco end of the Golden Gate Bridge. We’ve been visiting this site on and off for nearly two decades, but things have really accelerated in the past couple of years.

On the negative side, the post-9/11 threat of terrorism has made the “No Trespassing” chain link fence encroach from just under the bridge to now encompassing most of the fort itself. But inside the fort, they’ve invested in building out historical exhibits, and they opened up access to the roof of the fort for some pretty amazing views. It’s always good to see investment in the preservation of SF landmarks (something we’re bound to see less of given the current economy), and surprisingly access is still free.

Yesterday’s NovoMetro (a rough-around-the-edges local online guide to Oakland) published an article on a new café coming to downtown Oakland called Awaken Café: NovoMetro. It’s scheduled to open in early August with an emphasis on community, slow food, sustainability (and all those other obligatory feel-good adjectives you need to operate a coffee shop in the Bay Area these days), a performance space, and good coffee.

We’ll be the judges of that.

According to the article, “the team, which consists of green builders, community organizers, and seasoned baristas, are longtime Burning Man veterans”. It’s not the Burning Man that concerns me, it’s the Itching Man.

Earth Day couldn’t pass last weekend without a multitude of feel-good press releases from coffee peddlers. We already knew that our coffee could support Ernie & Bert‘s ambiguously gay lifestyle on Public Television. Now we read about how our coffee could save chimps, help solve the energy crisis, and even how it could stamp out poverty and save planet earth itself. That’s a lot for one cup of coffee — especially when a couple years ago all you could hope for was that it didn’t taste like an oil change.

So I should get the warm fuzzies now that my cup of coffee just nudged Mother Theresa of Calcutta out of line for canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, right? Wrong, actually. Not to take away from the many good things going on around coffee, but for some reason coffee has attracted all the kooks-with-causes like flies to a bug lamp. When did buying coffee get to be like wearing ribbons at the Oscars? These days you can’t even smell a morning cup without subscribing to at least four causes and a making a dozen more statements about your personal morality. What gives?

The cynic might say that the best way to sell coffee these days is to package it with rich man’s guilt relief. Certs has Retsyn (a.k.a. “vegetable oil”), and my coffee saves the Western Wood-Pewee. But if it were merely that, why isn’t tea given anything close to the same treatment? Tea is nearly as popular, with as rich a history, and is harvested by the poorest of the poor in the world. And yet to buy a cup of tea today, consumers seem free to buy the Sri Lankan Child Labor Exploitation Blend with impunity — no questions asked.

The fact is that the world problems of hunger, poverty, exploitation, etc., go far beyond coffee. Trying to solve these complex issues as coffee-related problems is commendably better than doing nothing, but let’s not kid ourselves.

My advice: buy the best coffee your wallet and conscience can afford. Then donate cash to the causes of your choice. Every time someone has tried to meter out charity and activism by piggybacking it on a commercial product — whether it be socially conscious mutual funds or long distance telephone service that donates a percentage of profits to charity — consumers have always ended up with weaker products, less control over their charitable contributions, and less effective donations. If the research and choices involved are too much of a headache, pick your causes and labels and outsource it all by proxy. Otherwise, nothing beats D.I.Y.

Now we’ve written before about the importance of a good cup when drinking espresso. And we’ve written that there are times where what’s right for flavor and what’s right for the environment go hand-in-hand. The paper cup issue is the perfect example, and some governments are contributing to the cause: Taiwan to ban paper cups in offices, schools.

This news will cheer American greenies and encourage hopes of similar actions here. But even if we are a nation addicted to convenience, I’d welcome more cafés that would at least offer the option of getting my espresso in a dirty cup. Too often the cafés here — including even good cafés serving good espresso — don’t even bother. Why should your customers take your espresso seriously if you can’t even do the same?

UPDATE: May 17, 2007
In Canada, a regional Councilman from Toronto is proposing that an incremental tax or fee be added to take-out coffee purchases served in cups not made of recyclable material: Osprey Media. – Niagara Falls Review – Ontario, CA.

Today the Chicagoist blog published an interview with Intelligentsia founder and CEO, Doug Zell: Chicagoist: Chicagoist Grills: Intelligentsia Coffee & Roasting Works CEO Doug Zell.

Intelligentsia not only boasts some of the best roasted coffee in the country, and the reigning U.S. barista champion from one of their cafés, but they also helped set a standard for sustainable coffee growing. Last year Intelligentsia stopped doing business with Fair Trade, due to its many shortcomings, and instead developed their own standards and certification process, called Intelligentsia Direct Trade™.

In the interview, Doug reveals their plans to open a new café in Los Angeles, of all places (how he did so through an introduction by Chicago celeb chef, Charlie Trotter), how he got started in San Francisco selling bottled iced tea (he got his coffee inspiration from S.F.’s Spinelli Coffee, which was later bought out by Tully’s in 1998), and how Intelligentsia is customizing coffee blends for high-end restaurants.

Yesterday’s Sunday Times (London) ran a story concerning McDonald’s UK’s announcement of a coffee supply partnership with the Rainforest Alliance: McDonald’s brews up £1m fair trade deal – Sunday Times – Times Online. At first read, I opted not to add a blog entry on how the Rainforest Alliance served as another alternative example to Fair Trade certification — to which some have errantly afforded an ethical monopoly status. I didn’t feel the need to add to what’s becoming a tedious Fair Trade debate. (Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade differ, for example, in that the former does not attempt to guarantee minimum wages for growers.)

But then the news really caught on in the U.S. today, and with a different competitive twist with regards to Starbucks: Marketplace: McDonald’s coffee one-ups Starbucks. McDonald’s UK is putting forth a nearly $1 million advertising campaign for their coffee supplies, highlighting that “our coffee doesn’t cost the earth”.

Greener Than Thou

This seems like another evolutionary stage in what many have considered the market perversion of Fair Trade coffee. Back in the 1980s, Fair Trade was envisioned as a means of protecting the small grower from big business interests who would steamroll over them faster than you can say “16¢-a-pound robusta”. After years of stiff resistance, many purveyors of Big Coffee changed their position and soon embraced Fair Trade. While some argued this was a positive step for the coffee trade overall, others would eventually go on to say that Big Coffee has since co-opted Fair Trade for their own purposes: using it to shield their corporate entities from unfair practice claims and ultimately altering its mission to support larger corporate goals.

For example, Kraft, one of coffee’s Big Four, began buying Rainforest Alliance Certified beans in 2003 for worldwide use in their consumer coffees, including Yuban — a mass-produced coffee that CoffeeReview.com’s Kenneth Davids recently described as, “steamed to remove the sewery taints these coffees acquire through being dried inside the fruit in rotting heaps.” Mmmm, mmmm. Nothing says “good morning” like a steaming cup of sewery, rotting coffee. And a year ago, we also reported on Kraft’s Big Four brother, Nestlé, and their investments in sustainable coffee farming.

The quantum leap here? McDonald’s is now wielding their newly acquired badge of ethical behavior as a marketing weapon against the likes of Starbucks. “My coffee is more ethical than yours, and I’ve got friends to back me up. Nyeah.”

UPDATE: January 10, 2007
This story still has legs. This time, the question is whether or not McDonald’s tipped the balance — tarnishing and dragging down the image of fair trade coffees perhaps more than the coffee afforded McDonald’s a free pass on ethical standards: Who’s lovin’ it? McDonald’s splits opinion with fair trade coffee. To wit: “The fair trade movement was established to challenge the practices of companies like McDonald’s, a multinational with a notorious record on key issues such as decent pay and conditions for its workers.”

One of coffee’s big stories of the past year has been the seemingly sudden discovery and public awareness of Fair Trade coffee. Twenty years after the founding of Equal Exchange, Fair Trade coffee awareness reached critical mass this year in the U.S., the U.K., and many other nations around the world.

This awareness began with a select group of activists who recognized the inequities that globalization was bringing about in the world. Then it was a number of coffee industry specialists. Then more social and environmental activists. And finally, in the past year or so, it has taken hold with more of the mainstream: socially and environmentally conscious consumers, bloggers, journalists, the coffee-obsessed dinner guest, etc. But to read newspapers and blogs in the past year, you’d think the only controversy surrounding Fair Trade was that there were still places that sold or used coffee that wasn’t certified Fair Trade.

The good news is that after years of public campaigns to help make people aware of the plight of coffee farmers who cannot make a living wage under the current systems, and the many ills of industrialized coffee farming, consumers are now responding en masse to the concepts of Fair Trade. Consumers are now asking questions about where their coffee comes from and how their decisions affect the people and land elsewhere in the world.

The bad news is that there are now millions of people entirely new to the concept of Fair Trade. Many of these newly initiated consumers have essentially afforded Fair Trade with monopoly on ethical and sustainable coffee farming practices — at least subconsciously. Some even go so far as to absurdly believe that to use, sell, or purchase coffee that isn’t certified Fair Trade is unquestionably immoral, irresponsible, and destructive.

The Fair Trade Mafia

Earlier this year, I recall a specific incident where Eton Tsuno, owner and head barista at SF’s (regrettably) now-defunct Café Organica, was cornered by coffee consumers who complained that only 80% of the coffees he used were certified Fair Trade. Here’s a coffee expert who knew a tremendous amount about the industry, quality coffee, and its various social and ethical implications. And yet he was being talked down to by boycotters, armed with a flimsy three-paragraph article on Fair Trade coffee, who essentially accused him of unethical practices over 20% of his coffee supplies. This was insane — and yet another example where a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

As with most problems with worldwide social, economic, and environmental implications, there aren’t simplistic solutions. Nor are there convenient black-or-white decisions. The reality is a lot more confusing for the average consumer. If you asked Frederick Engels how to address the huge, worldwide problem of worker exploitation in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Communism sounded like a pretty good idea on paper. But you would probably get a wholly different story when asking someone who lived under Communist rule for how well it worked out in practice.

“Look for the Fair Trade label” seems like the most obvious, simplistic strategy for the consumer who can only scratch the surface of this issue — in a busy life full of dizzyingly complex ethical consumer decisions. However, Fair Trade has also hurt a number of other coffee producers who hold practices at least as ethical and sustainable (locking them out of access to certain markets, placing conform-or-perish ultimatums on some family farms, requiring thousands of dollars in certification fees, creating price ceilings for growers, not rewarding higher quality, etc.). Furthermore, Fair Trade itself is also rife with problems. For example, earlier this year, the London Financial Times reported on several problems with Fair Trade, including weak enforcement of certification, allowing farmers to plant in protected rainforests, and certifying growers who do not pay their employees a living wage.

Ethics beyond Fair Trade

Since Fair Trade’s origin, some professionals in the coffee industry have said that something is better than nothing, while others have long stated Fair Trade is worse than nothing at all. Perhaps one of the greatest statements on Fair Trade’s shortcomings came this year from Chicago’s Intelligentsia, one of America’s premiere specialty coffee roasters and home to the 2006 U.S. Barista Champion. Intelligentsia found enough problems and inconsistencies with Fair Trade that they opted to define and pursue their own alternative certification system, called Intelligensia Direct Trade™, and no longer do business with Fair Trade. Yes, it turns out that there are many alternatives to Fair Trade — just without a commonly recognized “brand” label.

All of this isn’t to scare off people from wanting to improve matters by patronizing Fair Trade. Fair Trade has done a number of great things that have improved things for coffee quality, coffee growers, and the environment. However, Fair Trade is not a cure-all, and it’s not without its controversy and shortcomings. The Fair Trade brownshirts may have the best of intentions, but that doesn’t mean that they will succeed at achieving them. Unfortunately, at least today, there are no ethical shortcuts to solve the global coffee problem — consumers still need to read all the facts and make their own decisions for themselves.

UPDATE: May 15, 2011
In the 4 1/2 years since we wrote this post, there’s fortunately been a lot more questioning and debate about who Fair Trade is truly helping and where it the program has failed, if not where it has outright backfired. Yesterday’s National Post (Canada) offers just one of many counter perspectives, this one particularly on the negative impact of Fair Trade on African coffee farmers: Fair-trade coffee fix.

With coffee prices reaching new highs, suddenly the premiums that organic and Fair Trade coffee beans used to command are dwindling in comparison to the additional overhead required of growers. Or so suggests an article today from Reuters: Reuters AlertNet – FEATURE-Farmers question value of ‘responsible’ coffees.

The article points out that coffee farmers that follow these ‘responsible’, sustainable practices are promised more of a consistent, living wage — rather than a guarantee of profit sharing in an up market for coffee commodities trading.

But to make matters worse and more confusing in the area of Fair Trade, today London’s The Financial Times published a couple of articles that questioned the worker wages and authenticity behind some coffees that carry the Fair Trade seal of approval:

• Euro2day :: ‘Ethical’ coffee workers paid below legal minimum
• Euro2day :: The bitter cost of ‘fair trade’ coffee

Things have gotten so questionable, in fact, that Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago — one of the premier, high-quality, smaller-batch roasters in North America — recently stopped working with Fairtrade for their certified coffees.

UPDATE: Sept. 18, 2006
The Los Angeles Times also picked up on this issue in an article today: Fairtrade Coffee Not Living Up to Label in Peru – Los Angeles Times. It also notes the Financial Times discovery that some Fair Trade coffees are being illegally planted in protected rainforests.

Today Reuters reported on organic coffee’s diminishing financial appeal for Nicaraguan growers: Organic coffee loses appeal for Nicaragua growers | World Crises | Reuters.com.

Organic coffee certification involves a process where a farm typically takes years to demonstrate itself “chemical free” (of pesticides, growth additives, etc.). Between this expense and the lower per-acre yields of organic coffee, organic growers are not finding the crops economically viable. Organic Nicaraguan beans are currently selling at only an additional five percent margin over beans produced at chemically dependent farms.

This is a perfect example of how consumer behavior can help influence coffee sustainability and farming practices.

Opening just this month, this café was started by The Rogers Family Company (perhaps best known for their ‘inorganic’ and dirt cheap San Francisco Bay Coffee Co. beans, available at Costco) and other investors. It’s heavy on the Fair Trade organic coffees, and that’s just where its social causes begin.

They heavily brand their devotion to community, economic, and social development — and they appear to live up to their word in where they buy their beans, how they support farmers, how they contribute to the local community, and even in hiring ‘challenged’ staff. Even in SF, the list of causes and do-gooderness is so in-your-face, it’s honestly a bit too much here — giving the place a cult-like feel. I applaud them for their well-intended causes, but I like to have a good espresso without feeling like I’m marinating in them.

Inside there are five wooden tables, and in addition to espresso they also serve salads and sandwiches. They offer about ten bean blends: Hurricane Espresso being their choice for espresso, and three decaf blends. They serve espresso as double shots only, filling a large shotglass if you ask for it — otherwise it’s a small paper cup (they do offer brown Nuova Point cups for larger drinks, such as cappuccinos). They pull shots from a two-group Futurmat F3 with a good amount of even, medium brown crema.

The espresso itself has substance, but it unfortunately runs a bit too bitter and ashy for its otherwise deeper tobacco flavor (oh, the irony in that). They get a lot down here save for the final flavor in the cup — they are almost too busy saving the world to make a great-tasting espresso (it’s the one cause they neglect a little). However, the place offers plenty for SF’s espresso drinkers with a cause.

Read the review.