A New Year’s Non-Resolution?

First, a Happy New Year to everyone. I may be in the camp that believes celebrating January 1 is about as arbitrary as celebrating March 6 as “New Year’s Day,” but I can still appreciate much of the sentiment behind it. Namely: leaving the past behind and trying to set a better course for the future.

Which brings us to our Trip Reports — the last of which I wrote in October. Over the past year, I’ve become embarrassingly self-aware of the kind of social monster I’ve contributed to (and even helped create). Namely: the problem of mobile device zombies. We’re written before about the cultural blight of laptop zombies, but the mobile device zombie has also reached rather epidemic proportions.

It’s become that much harder to enjoy the vibe of public spaces without an acute awareness of zombie armies staring into their mobile devices, each dutifully penning their Foursquare check-ins, Yelp reviews, and Facebook status updates — if not also photographing everything put on the table. Things sort of reached critical mass for me when I found it impossible to enjoy pupusas at my favorite neighborhood El Salvadoran dive without encountering at least one table of gringo hipsters glued to their mobile phones, penning some kind of check-in or review.

Yet my guilty streak runs long. Nine years ago I was tapping in review notes into my old Palm Vx at various cafés for this Web site. Back then, I was just a freakish novelty that my coworkers would parody. But today it seems nearly everyone is guilty of some form of mobile device zombiedom, and witnessing it is a bit like a horrific visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. Engrossing ourselves with our mobile devices has become something of a public ritual or rite by which we consume anything in the public spaces of society.

The big joke being that all this is classically a First World Problem of the highest order. Even so, there’s something to be said about making a conscious effort to be present and experience life in the first person — and not through some application on your mobile phone. Being the type that dismisses New Year’s resolutions, I really can’t say what this means for any Trip Reports here in the future. But I can say I am keenly aware of contributing to the problem.

West Marin and Toby’s Coffee Bar…

One place that still seems relatively untouched by the mobile device zombie invasion is West Marin County. Thanks to a low population density and a rugged coastline, mobile phone networks like AT&T continue to offer one of their best services: an excuse for why you cannot be reached by the outside world while you’re out here. There are still major dead zones for voice calls, and 3G Internet access seems about as far off as astronauts landing on Mars.

It’s still Marin County, so you can’t escape the crystal healers and obsession with Westernized yoga. Stare a few locals in the eye, and you’ll undoubtedly find a few who choose to believe that Stevie Nicks is still spinning in gauzy robes as a member of Fleetwood Mac.

Not surprisingly, the coffee options in West Marin are generally heavy on the organic and Fair Trade sourcing but light on quality. One of the better exceptions is in the tiny town of Point Reyes Station.

Toby’s is something of an institution in the area. It’s a general store with a rear feed lot — complete with haystacks, bags of feed, strings of prayer flags, and — you guessed it — a neighboring yoga studio. It’s at the entrance to the feed lot, sort of sharing a wall with the town post office, that you’ll find a kiosk window branded as Toby’s Coffee Bar. There are a few picnic tables and other outdoor tables in front. You can also buy organic baked goods, newspapers, and teas.

Using a newer, two-group Nuova Simonelli machine inside their small service cubby-hole, they pull shots of Taylor Maid Farms in saucerless cups (which seems customary for West Marin). It comes with a dark brown crema, small bubbles, and a lighter heat spot. As espresso shots go, it’s deep and dark: no fruit bombs here. It has a nuttier flavor mixed with cloves and other herbal pungency and is served as a default double shot.

Read the review of Toby’s Coffee Bar in Point Reyes Station, CA.

Today’s East Bay Express published a good, and long-overdue, cover story on some of the quality coffee changes going on in our fair East Bay: Surfing Coffee’s “Third Wave” | Feature | East Bay Express. Its use of the Third Wave crutch is unfortunate, but also par for the course these days. Meanwhile, we will try to avoid becoming too tiresome (and absurd) by limiting our Third Wave mockery to only one post per week.

Luke Tsai’s article was fair and somewhat balanced in its reporting — even if it had to make mention of two of our least favorite (and, IMO, least reliable) Web resources for café reviews: the insufferable gluttons at Chowhound.com and the social networking gamers with arbitrary standards at Yelp.com. We even made page 3 of the article for our routine Third Wave ridicule. The article touches on one of our Third Wave stereotypes, lighter roasts, and even our defense of coffee Nazis.

The notable cafés and roasters in the article include Local 123 (and their Flying Goat coffee), Remedy Coffee (Ritual Coffee Roasters), SubRosa Coffee (Four Barrel Coffee), Blue Bottle Coffee Co. (for their new Jack London Square roasting facility and café), and Awaken Cafe (Taylor Maid Farms). The article also makes mention of notable pre-Third Wavers, Cole Coffee. A number of these truly are a gaping hole in our current review database.

Mr. Tsai had originally contacted me for this article back in early October. So coincidentally, just yesterday I searched the East Bay Express Web site to see if his article had been published yet (it hadn’t). However, a search for “third wave” on the site did amusingly produce articles mentioning third-wave ska, third-wave environmentalism, and third-wave feminists.

UPDATE: Dec 23, 2009
A regular coffee column in the Seattle Times picked up this story yesterday: Coffee City | How seriously should people take their coffee? | Seattle Times Newspaper. Interestingly, the author, Melissa Allison, took upon defining “third wave coffee” this way:

A term coined around 2002 that aims to define an evolved coffee scene in which baristas, roasters and farmers know each other and are connoisseurs of a product to which they’re all passionately connected.

If you go back to our post from April 2006, our debate in the comments with Nick Cho was about how the term “Third Wave” may have been originally conceived about “letting the coffee speak for itself,” or enjoying coffee for coffee’s sake, but the phrase has since been completely co-opted for marketing purposes. That is: what started with more of a consumer-focused perspective was redefined for the convenience of business-focused uses — i.e., uses by baristas, roasters, and farmers.

Note that there is no mention of the coffee consumer in Ms. Allison’s definition above.

This bakery/café runs as a collective between the San Mateo County coast’s Pie Ranch, Glen Park‘s Destination Baking Company, and the Mission‘s Mission High School. If that doesn’t sound a little confusing, just try finding the place by its address.

Its 2901 Mission St. address will direct you to the corner of Mission & 25th Sts., where you will encounter a local NPR (not that NPR: Neighborhood Public Radio) broadcasting booth and a non-profit community arts center/mapping project that have taken over most of the space (Southern Exposure). While you can reach Mission Pie itself by crawling through the cramped hallways of this space (past various offices and past the bathrooms), it’s much easier to enter through the plain-looking entrance along 25th St., east of Mission St. There you’ll find this bakery/café with a few indoor tables, a long church bench, and a lot of pie.

Using a two-group La Marzocco Linea, they pull slightly larger shots with a lighter brown crema — serving it in a saucerless cup. It isn’t extracted quite properly, and thus the great ingredients give way to a more watery flavor of mild spices. It clearly lacks flavor depth. Still, SF hasn’t seen the regular use of Taylor Maid Farms coffees at a café in over a year now, so that alone may be worth the visit.

Read the review of Mission Pie.

I have a lot of respect for Nick Cho, owner of Washington D.C.’s murky coffee. He’s established a place that pulls some of the best espresso shots on the East Coast. He’s arguably the primary brainchild behind the Portafilter.net podcasts. And he’s also known for his quality coffee industry “altruism”: supporting aspiring baristas and café owners who want to commit their livelihoods towards making some of the best espresso on the planet.

However, Nick Cho’s reputation will unfortunately always be marred by his association with one of the most arrogant and proposterous claims ever made in America’s modern day quality espresso business. It’s the notion that quality coffee is in its Third Wave, a.k.a. the “Third Wave of Coffee”.

This is particularly unfortunate because the idea isn’t even Mr. Cho’s to begin with. As even he once pointed out, the blame lies squarely with Trish Skeie — who otherwise is one of quality coffee’s luminaries, given her role behind the Sebastopol, CA roastery, Taylor Maid Farms. (She is now Director of Coffee for Seattle’s highly respected Zoka Coffee.) In my mailbox today, I found this month’s Barista Magazine, which features an article by Trish Skeie under the self-serving title, “Third Wave In Its Third Year.”

“Hey, baby, what’s your Wave?”

To boil this whole pompous wave theory down, a few years ago Ms. Skeie postulated that coffee consumption and preparation was progressing through three distinct transformations.

The First Wave is consumption — marked by America’s early preoccupation with poor quality coffee, often instant or freeze dried, that was more a caffeine and heat delivery mechanism than anything with an enjoyable flavor. The Second Wave is about enjoyment and defining specialty coffee — characterized by the selection of arabica beans over robusta, Colombian coffee’s Juan Valdez marketing campaign, and the proliferation of espresso and Starbucks.

So where are we now? Supposedly, this Third Wave is all about letting the coffee speak for itself — or enjoying coffee for coffee’s sake. Confused yet? You should be, because here are the problems with this logic and how people in the industry are misusing and abusing it…

Quality Espresso?: Not Invented Here

The whole Third Wave concept has since been bandied about in the specialty coffee industry as a sort of pompus and self-congratulatory marketing hype about their products and services — a self-appointed seal of approval. Yet this wave theory doesn’t describe the coffee or even how it is prepared. In actuality, it most accurately describes the coffee consumer. It has little, if anything, to do with the actual businesses that are now proudly tattooing Third Wave across their chests.

And here’s another problem with all those who like to think of themselves as Third Wave: the wave theory concept essentially presumes that quality espresso simply did not exist on this planet until three years ago (e.g.: Trish Skeie’s recent Barista Magazine article). In the world of quality coffee, this is akin to saying that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America — while ignoring the brain anyeurism that must have lead to our overlooking the Lucayans who had lived in the Bahamas for centuries prior.

The facts are that great espresso has existed long before naked portafilters, single-origin bean roasts, and other gimmickry that some might associate with the Third Wave. In Italy, for example, the four Ms — miscela, macchina, macinatura, and mano (or the beans/blend, the machine, the grind, and the “hand”) — have been widely recognized as the fundamental keys to great espresso for generations. Even to this day.

Even here in our backyard, businesses such as Mr. Espresso have been promoting the highest quality standards in beans, roasts, equipment, and barista training for multiple generations — i.e., since the likes of some of these self-proclaimed third wavers were still in Pampers. Quality espresso is not the sudden confluence of modern scientific discovery and magic. It’s been around for decades, and its supposed “secrets” have largely remained unchanged throughout.

Unfortunately, since people like Ms. Skeie had their first “real” espresso in recent years, many will keep on presuming it’s their own discovery and that they are at the vanguard of something new. But when we talk about any Third Wave, what constitutes quality coffee hasn’t really changed. What has changed is the education and sophistication of the American coffee consumer palate. It’s just a lot more convenient for some businesses to take credit for what rightfully belongs to their customers.

Comic relief: Paulie Walnuts and Big Pussy of TV’s The Sopranos ponder the Third Wave

A barista championship in Petaluma?

Yesterday (Saturday, March 4) I attended my first SCAA barista competition. Held at the Sheraton Sonoma County in Petaluma, the Western Regionals are a competitive prelude to next month’s U.S. Barista Championship. (Petaluma: it’s not just world arm wrestling championships anymore.)

The annual Western Regionals covers competitive baristas across California and Hawai’i, but the emphasis is clearly on Northern California. Last year they were held at Roshambo Winery in Healdsburg, California, with 15 competitors. Thus year there were 22 competitors (most first-timers), with the top six from the Saturday preliminaries advancing to today’s finals.

To the uniniated, the barista competitions modelled for the U.S., and World, Barista Championships are a bit like Iron Chef for espresso — just without the improv. Is it for coffee geeks? You bet. What else would get a couple hundred people to drive up to Petaluma on a Saturday morning to watch people make coffee? But it’s a great crowd of baristas, roasters, café owners, and coffee enthusiasts who all share a love of great coffee. What makes it a sort of family is that everyone there pretty much wants to see better standards so they can drink more of the good stuff. And oh, is there good stuff to be had around the competition…

Competition format

Walking into the hotel conference room, I was first greeted by a many people standing around (with quite a few familiar faces), talking with each other, and drinking a lot of the great coffee that was available in spades. In the back was The 4th Machine — where various sponsors and coffee vendors took hourly shifts pulling their best competitive shots while the competition proceeded in the main conference area next door. More on that later…as I spent a lot of time getting to know the 4th Machine. But I will say here that this was not the place for anyone with a love of great coffee and a low tolerance for caffeine. (Bring your own defibrillator paddles.)

In the main area of the competition, there are three stations consisting of three-group La Marzocco Linea machines, and the process goes something like this…

Competitors each get 15 minutes of prep time at their stations to become acquainted with their equipment and to tune their shots. Usually during this time, another competitor is finishing up at another station or the emcee (such as Barefoot Roasters‘ legendary Andy Newbom) is passing the inbetween time with trivia questions and commentary.

When the prep time is up, the judges file out … sometimes announced like San Jose Shark hockey players as they take the ice. And there are plenty of judges. There are four sensory judges who are the primary tasters, and they contribute to 2/3 of a barista’s total score. (They also need to pull different shifts to hold up to all the caffeine.) The remainder of a barista’s score comes down to technical judges, who monitor a barista’s every move. The technical judges also serve as something of a team of forensic detectives at a crime scene: after the barista serves a round of shots, they check the consistency of the coffee puck in the portafilter handles, inspect the cleanliness of the barista’s station after a wipe-down, etc.

Each barista must produce a dozen espresso drinks in under 15 minutes: four espressos, four cappuccinos, and four specialty drinks (call them “espresso cocktails”) — the last round of which is akin to a “freestyle” event in Olympic ice skating terms. While the order of the rounds is flexible, most baristas serve their cappuccinos first (starting their judges off with a mellower flavor), followed by their espressos, and finishing off with their specialty drinks.

There are even some “compulsories” in the competition — including the barista serving each judge with water, a spoon, a napkin, and sugar. The sugar is the odd requirement — as the judges never use it, and any good barista would be mortified if they did.

Many competing baristas bring their own equipment: beans, frothing pitchers, espresso and cappuccino cups, sometimes grinders, milk (Clover Stornetta seems to be the milk of choice), and any necessary props and ingredients for their specialty drinks. And like Olympic ice skaters, they even bring their own music as an audio track to their competitive performance. Wearing headsets hooked up to overhead speakers, they either narrate their presentation and answer questions from the emcee. (I was particularly amused by one barista’s fitting selection of Queen & David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”.)

And to further complete the Olympic ice skating analogy, there’s a backstage area where baristas get their carts together with their equipment before taking their stations. Some of them were joking about a barista pulling a “Tonya Harding” — easing some of the pressure with humor. If you thought the sensory judges were jittery from all their tastings, the high pressure of the event made both veteran and first-time barista competitors unable to hold a milk-frothing pitcher steady (though unfortunately not in a way that helped their latte art).

The 4th Machine

With three machines in competition, a fourth La Marzocco in the back was reserved for hourly shifts of different baristas and different roasts for complimentary espresso drinks. They included Ecco Caffè, Taylor Maid Farms, Flying Goat Coffee, Pacific Bay Coffee Company, Calistoga Roastery, Barefoot Coffee Roasters, and Petaluma Coffee & Tea Company.

Like many other attendees, I did my part to tell the time at the event by the espresso I was currently drinking — as this next series of photos indicates:

Crowning the winner…

From the trivia questions being asked by the emcees between performances, I learned a few things:

• Despite the fact that robusta is sold in commodity trades by the ton and arabica is sold by the pound, 70% of the coffee beans sold in the world are of the high-quality arabica variety.
• When coffee was first introduced to Europe in the 1600s, it was first called “Arabian wine”
• Finland is #1 in coffee consumption among the world’s nations
• There are currently some 17,000 coffee houses in the U.S, representing an 80% increase since 1998

In my next installment on this event, I’ll cover some of the people in attendance: the barista competitors, the roasters, and the café owners alike. At the time of writing, the event is now over and the winners have been announced. But before I review the final honors, I’ll leave you with the unique trophies for the event, designed by local artist David Dexter Anderson.

If only the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games offered these beauties to the winning athletes…