California’s Santa Barbara County is a lot like the rest of America when it comes to coffee: it should face a tribunal for atrocities committed against the human taste bud. What makes these many crimes particularly heinous are the various local media outlets in these communities that celebrate certain local coffeehouses as some of the region’s “best” — and yet these examples turn out to be foul enough to give any self-respecting Italian or Australasian coffee fan the dry heaves. Baseline standards are completely lacking, and the local populace is kept deaf, dumb, blind, and tasteless from realizing things could be any better for them.

Not to devalue the many efforts of great coffeeshops to make their brews with exquisite care and precision. But in this day and age of quality coffee awareness, information, and access, there simply is no excuse for any community within a civilized First World nation to have local coffee standards so pathetic as to hold up a cup of mass-produced, push-button Starbucks as the gold standard. Sometimes we honestly don’t understand why entire counties simply do not rise up and riot in the streets over the horrible coffee to which they are routinely subjected.

With Starbucks listed as a runner-up finalist on SantaBarbara.com’s “Best of” list, Santa Barbara barely salvaged some of its culinary dignity with its recognition of The French Press. Because The French Press makes some great coffee that’s otherwise unheard of in this part of the country. And because naming Taco Bell as the finalist for Santa Barbara’s “Best Mexican” would be no less ridiculous.

Opening in 2009, this Upper State coffeehouse puts most others in Santa Barbara County to shame. A sort of hang-out for the biking set, you can recognize this café by the gathering of young people on the sidewalk in front. They offer a few outdoor café tables and chairs under the entryway, but much of the seating is inside — zinc-topped café tables located along and past a long hallway of artwork that runs along the service area. The service area itself is decorated with painted art skateboards.

Using a shiny two-group La Marzocco GB/5 and Mazzer grinders, they pull shots of Verve (Sermon and other blends) into black ACF cups with red saucers. It comes with a lightly mottled medium brown crema with lighter heat spots.

The espresso here has the tease of a brightness bomb, but without the full-swing delivery. This results in an acidic cup with some balance coming from the chocolate and pungent spice end. They’re also notable at milk-frothing: it’s deliberate and not overly abundant. Their caffè macchiato has a great chocolate flavor with substantial milk density. And of course, they also serve their namesake French press coffee.

All towns should aspire to have at least one coffee place this good. It’s criminal that this is still the exception rather than the rule in this country.

Read the review of The French Press in Santa Barbara, CA.

A viral video is going around these days on “The Coffee Wars of San Francisco”. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek with its Ken-Burns-documentary-style humor — though that largely reminds us of how much Ken Burns can lull us to sleep like a bottle of brandy.

While the mockumentary oscillates between the mildly funny and the painfully overwrought (and sorry, 7×7, we don’t see the connection to BlueBottleGate), we have to bite our tongue when it comes to its historical inaccuracies. Such as suggesting Ritual Coffee Roasters was the start of a new era of SF coffee snobbery. In fact, it was the touristy Ferry Building Marketplace‘s Frog Hollow Farm — then under heavy influence of Blue Bottle‘s James Freeman — that arguably first kick-started a coffee revival in this town.

Even this ignores that CoffeeRatings.com‘s #1-ranked coffee shop during that era was the defunct Café Organica, located North of the Panhandle. And that even today, on the basis of the actual coffee alone, our favorite Bay Area purveyor is based in a very hipster-unfriendly strip mall in Santa Clara, conveniently located next to various mattress shops that you’ll never need after all that caffeine.

But even if San Francisco is already so abruptly short on its memory of its recent coffee history, mockumentary or not, we’re happy that there are even jokes of a “coffee war” — i.e., that there is good enough coffee in this town to at least have a war of words over. This was a vision that still seemed well out of reach as recently as 2003.

Frog Hollow Farm reserves a rather anonymous place in the retail coffee history of San Francisco, but it was a watershed for the coffee quality in this city. As much as we roll our eyes at the hackneyed and abused third wave term, by many definitions (theirs, and definitely not ours) this was SF’s first third wave espresso bar.

But its rise to prominence and its influence was very short-lived. A variety of changes internal and external to the shop caused the quality here to plummet from #1 in our rankings to #91 in just two years — as reflected in our first Trip Report for Frog Hollow Farm posted four years ago. But the good news is that a recent change in management here has brought something of a coffee revival.

A little Frog Hollow Farm history…

The relatively brief coffee story of Frog Hollow Farm, located at the rear of the Ferry Building, is a genuinely complicated one. In its 2004 prime, this was home to the best espresso in San Francisco.

This claim may ring a little odd today now that SF is flush with the nationally acclaimed likes of Ritual Roasters, Four Barrel Coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee, and many well-regarded independent coffee shops in between. But when we started research for this Web site in 2002, the answer to the question, “Where can you get the best espresso in SF?” was genuinely complicated. So complicated that most answers from the public varied from Peet’s to Starbucks to battle-of-the-bands-like ballot stuffing for neighborhood favorites such as Dolores Park Cafe.

Frog Hollow Farm opened in Oct. 2003 as an outlet for an organic peaches/specialty fruit/pastry business. For whatever reason, they decided to also take their espresso efforts very seriously. To that end, Frog Hollow Farms enlisted the help of a then-relatively-unknown James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee fame. Back then Mr. Freeman was known for his small batch, fresh coffee roasting in Oakland — for cart service oddities such as the Berkeley farmer’s market, but he had no presence in San Francisco. Even his Ferry Building cart service wasn’t yet up to speed.

With Mr. Freeman’s guidance, Frog Hollow Farms invested in a new, shiny red La Marzocco FB/70 (still in use today), deluxe wood tampers, the first commercial appearance of Blue Bottle Coffee beans across the Bay Bridge (which were also available for retail sale), and barista training from James himself. In a sense, this made Frog Hollow Farm SF’s first de facto Blue Bottle Coffee café — even if not in name. We can literally trace the decrease of our own home roasting operations to the initial sales of Blue Bottle beans here in 2003.

But by 2005, James Freeman had his own designs to open SF coffeeshops under the Blue Bottle name. He soon pulled out of this location and their coffee operations. The espresso immediately went downlhill and continued years of decline from poorly trained baristas, mishandled McLaughlin beans, and thin, watery shots.

Santa Cruz to the rescue

A real measure of salvation came with a management change in Sept. 2009. Cameron White moved up from Santa Cruz to take over the coffee operations here, and he brought along Verve coffee and barista training (all baristas were trained by Chris Baca and Jared Truby). He replaced their aging Nuova Point cups with a set of classic brown ACF cups and installed a sort of bar with seating among six stools in front.

They now serve a solid, two-sip short shot of Sermon blend: with a medium brown, textured crema and a flavor that includes tobacco smoke, herbs, pepper, and a few others all well blended together. Only the body is a shade light for its pedigree. They operate two Mazzer grinders, dedicating one for Vancouver decaf, and also sell bags of Verve beans. They even talk about bringing in more grinders so that they can also showcase Streetlevel and other Verve roast varieties.

The quality change here is significant. They are currently rated tied for #17 in our SF ratings. However, with SF espresso quality standards as improved as they are these days, there’s a lot of compression at the high end: meaning, a lot depends on your personal taste. Fans of Verve’s flavor profile will not be disappointed.

Read the updated review of Frog Hollow Farm.

We published our first trip report for Sightglass last July: Sightglass Coffee, Version 0.3. Back then, Sightglass was a tiny espresso-serving kiosk at the front of a vast, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 14-kg Probat roasting operation planned to start in the Fall of 2009. We revisited Sightglass this week to see how much things have changed.

It’s perhaps both bad and good news that things haven’t changed much at all since our first visit. They still operate as a tiny kiosk of a service station in front, offering espresso, Chemex brewing, and some salt caramels. Their roasting operations are still being built out; the current completion estimate is now June 2010. Instead of facing the permit issues that delayed Four Barrel’s roasting operations, the delays at Sightglass were primarily zoning: given that there are two other notable roasters in the SOMA district, the environmental impact of another neighborhood roaster required a rather thorough evaluation.

One other major change here was a highly publicized switch of their espresso machine. What was a beautiful, rare, refurbished, two-group La Marzocco GS2 espresso machine — straight out of the 1970s, and a sister to the one recently installed at Intelligentsia‘s fabled Venice Beach location — has since been replaced with a two-group Slayer machine. (Just like the one at Matching Half Cafe.)

Fourth Wave Espresso Machines — aka The Mother of All Hyperbole

Ah, the infamous, fetish du jour: the Slayer. While the verdict is still out on the merits of the Slayer as an espresso machine, its merits as a hype machine are unquestionable. For example, two months ago one barista/blogger made the ludicrous claim in Serious Eats that, with the Slayer, “fourth wave coffee has arrived”.

First of all, remember that the term third wave was originally coined to describe a level of consumer appreciation for coffee. Thus, the author literally suggested that an espresso machine will single-handedly make consumers appreciate coffee in such a significantly novel way as to change consumer culture. By comparing waves, her statement suggested that once consumers compare a Slayer-made espresso with a run-of-the-mill Blue Bottle shot, for example, public coffee-drinking habits will change as dramatically as when people raised on cups of Sanka brewed in 1950s percolators discovered the espresso made at Rome’s Sant’Eustachio il caffè.

Wow. Talk about Mother of All Hyperbole. We’re honestly incredulous at how someone could make such an absurdist claim.

Thankfully, the New York Times tempered the post’s price-tag-based hype: the Serious Eats post lead with sensationalist $18,000 price tag headline, completely oblivious to the fact that a decent, three-group La Marzocco GB/5 will set you back more than that. But then Salon magazine echoed that piece with a post titled “Baristas gone wild”, and local culture & clique rag, 7×7, anointed the Slayer at Sightglass as “ushering in coffee’s fourth wave”.

Has the Sightglass switch to a Slayer revolutionized how we appreciate coffee?

We love a taste test challenge. But to make a fair and reasonable comparison, a number of variables must be held in check: location, barista, coffee roast, grind, ambient temperature and humidity, etc. Unfortunately, controlling all of these is a next to impossible task. However, there are a few things in our favor: the same place (Sightglass) using the same roast (a Sightglass blend made at Verve Coffee Roasters) and the same grinding equipment.

On the negative side, the baristas were different (but were hopefully trained to the same standards), the weather may have been different, the age of the roasts could be different, etc. But since we couldn’t reasonably get lab time to compare a Slayer with a La Marzocco GB/5, we’ll have to settle for a taste comparison made months apart.

The other thing in our favor is that we’ve historically found our own espresso tasting descriptors and rating system to be very consistent between visits at cafés with good standards and consistency. We’ve been surprised many times when, having a “blind” test at a place we haven’t visited in over a year, we’ve compared our notes and scores with our previous visit and discovered that they completely agree. And if the Slayer truly created an entirely new wave of consumer coffee appreciation over the old standards, our lack of precision should theoretically matter little.

Comparing the Sightglass GS2 and Slayer Shots

We found our Slayer-pulled Sightglass shot to have a dark crema. Comparing it with the La Marzocco-made shot of old, the crema is a little darker but a little less substantial. The body is a touch thin, but that was true before here also. One greater difference was the focus of the flavor profile: instead of a potent flavor dominated more in the pungent range of the flavor spectrum (more of cloves, herbs, etc.), the Slayer-made shot had a darker, more earthy flavor dominated more in the smoky/muted tobacco end of the spectrum. And while their La Marzocco shot had a pretty limited dynamic range of flavors that were still executed well, the newer shot had the same limited range with the exception of a surprisingly acidic bite to its finish.

Even so, these differences were subtle. We noticed the $0.50 increase in their shot prices more than any tasting differences (namely: more smokiness than pungency plus a brighter finish). In fact, when we tallied our espresso rating scores, they were identical with the GS2 shot from last July.

So does that mean the Slayer isn’t a great machine? No. But it does suggest that the 2010 issue Slayer, for all its hype, imparted no noticeable difference to the resulting shot in the cup — from a 1970′s-made La Marzocco. At least from our espresso consumer’s perspective, this supposed fourth wave looks identical to the so-called third. We honestly couldn’t tell them apart.

Sure, we have taken a bit of poetic license to its literal extreme with this semi-facetious comparison. But if you are going make audacious claims, we ask that you back them up.

Of course, the Slayer’s prime advantages are manual pressure control and pre-infusion capabilities that are perhaps best suited for single origin coffees rather than blends. The reason we found little difference from the Slayer at Sightglass could be due to the coffee being a blend, or because they’ve tuned it to produce shots that meet their previous flavor profiles, or because their baristas haven’t yet learned how to take advantage of the additional controls.

But perhaps the biggest telltale sign as to why Sightglass switched from a perfectly reasonable GS2 to a Slayer can be found in their most recent cash register system, which is now based on the Apple iPad released just this week. Is there any better way to indicate how much you’re enamored with the new and less with the reasons why behind a switch?

Read the updated review of Sightglass.

The former One World Cafe needed a serious upgrade, and this is it. Gone are the beat-up furniture and odd house plants that made this space look like a medical marijuana co-op in aging neglect. The place now looks more like a sushi bar, with clean, angular lines, dark and solid colors, nicer wood floors, and a half-dozen bar stools and a few café tables.

They also added wine to their menu here, but the coffee is the real attraction — as noted by the pretty two-group Slayer machine as you enter the space. Yes, it is the legendary, silly-named Slayer machine — espoused by many a barista who can actually say the word “‘spro” without spraying microfoam out of their nose in uncontrollable laughter. We know we can’t pull it off. (Perhaps Slayer’s next-generation machine will be called the Slaughter? … That’s “laughter” with an ‘S’.)

Matching Half uses Verve Coffee from Santa Cruz and sell it retail at the register. This additionally makes this café a real asset to this neighborhood.

They pull shots with a medium brown, moderate layer of crema. It is a pretty solid, albeit not exceptional, cup. But be warned: this is a citrus-driven brightness bomb, which isn’t to everyone’s espresso taste. It’s one of the few espresso shots we’ve ever rated with a true dominant citrus brightness to it. Served in a classic dark brown ACF cup.

Read the review of the Matching Half Cafe.

Thanks to Tim of espressophile fame for giving us a heads-up on this article posted yesterday from GQ magazine: The Most Important Drink of Your Day: Restaurants + Bars: GQ. Tim got his heads-up from the guys down at Verve Coffee Roasters, who are among the handful of regional coffee shops highlighted in this best-of article. Also cited from the ‘hood, with photos, were Blue Bottle Coffee and Ritual Coffee Roasters.

Even if GQ doesn’t register on our respectable reading list — after all, they have a sub-section on their Web site dedicated to Megan Fox — we liked a few quotations from the piece, including:

So why, every morning, do you pay $4.79 for a watery latte that was lovelessly made on a push-button machine that could be safely operated by a 4-year-old?

But, as always, things get stupid when they stumble over this “Third Wave” business — what we’ve long dismissed as delusional, fabricated nonsense perpetuated by people who think they just invented good coffee or just discovered consumers who appreciate good coffee. (Or perhaps worse: naïve journalists that take this nonsense as fact.)

For example, in one paragraph, GQ presents a statement about these cafés returning to the quality practices of yore:

In case you haven’t heard, we’re living in a Golden Age of Coffee. (Note: Please don’t actually go around calling it that.) Thanks to a new generation of purveyors bent on returning craft and artistry to the beverage

Then to completely sound like they’re talking out of another bodily orifice, a few paragraphs later they commence mumbling about the “Third Wave”:

Here’s the deal: Vacuum-packed stuff like Folgers and Hills Bros. is considered coffee’s First Wave in America. Peet’s and Starbucks, which brought us espresso, are Second Wave. Third Wave? That’s the painstakingly crafted brew we’re talking about. Here’s how the new breed does it.

So which is it? New breeds, a new wave? Or is it a throwback “returning craft and artistry to the beverage”? The article should have stuck with its own final advice: shut up and drink it. All that time staring at January Jones’ cleavage on the cover has clearly affected their coherence.

Holy crap. This is one of those rare finds where a small town and a strip mall can produce some outstanding coffee and espresso that competes with the best. Although we were aware of Coffee Cat’s elevated reputation among the Scotts Valley locals when passing through, at first we were guilty of dismissing it relative to its neighbors to the south: Santa Cruz’s Verve Coffee Roasters and the Abbey Coffee, Art & Music Lounge.

Not that we’re hounds for summer farmers’ markets, but we found Coffee Cat when we stumbled across the inaugural Scotts Valley Farmers’ Market this past Saturday. Unlike the chaos of SF’s Alemany Farmers’ Market, Scotts Valley’s could have been called “White Folk on Parade.” Reflecting the locals, of course. But it also reminded me of an old joke I told as a Palo Alto resident many years ago: “In Palo Alto, ‘diversity’ means owning a Macintosh”.

At the Scotts Valley Farmers’ Market, Coffee Cat offered some excellent, flavorful coffee as Chemex and French press. Their Honduras Maracala in a Chemex caught our attention, so a visit to their storefront — just a couple blocks south — became obligatory.

Located in a shopping strip mall next to a Safeway, the signage for the café won’t even be visible if you approach it from Hwy 17 to the east (the signage faces west). But when we stepped in, it exhibited many of the cues for good espresso that we noted in a recent post. In fact, they had all of them besides offering more than one kind of bean for espresso and serving a glass of water on the side.

It’s a deep store with comfy leather chairs towards the back and a number of free Wi-Fi users. But the on-site roasting operation in front with a Diedrich roaster, surrounded by lots of green beans, leaves a major impression. They also date-stamp their roasts for retail sale, and they keep the inventory fresh.

They also emphasize the use of organic foods, but it’s primarily about the coffee here — even offering drinks such as the Spanish cortado. Using a two-group La Marzocco Linea, they pull espresso shots with an encouraging-looking, medium-to-dark-brown crema. While the short cup (itself a classic brown ACF demitasse) doesn’t carry a lot of aroma, the shot comes with a whopping level of brightness, a syrupy flavor and texture, a dense body, and a potent sweetness mixed with herbal pungency and some spice.

This is the classic North American brightness bomb that some espresso purists find a little overwhelming — if not outright off-putting. But it is the sort of thing that’s only achievable with solid quality-awareness throughout the entire delivery chain. This is some of the most potent, flavorful coffee we’ve had in the greater (Monterey?) Bay Area.

Their “classic cappuccino” (a mere $2) is also quite good, with the coffee standing up strongly to the milk. While they do a little latte art here, it is simple if not primitive and minimalist. Their milk frothing is quite good, even if it is not quite to the standards of their coffee. But those are some pretty high standards. This place is definitely worth a special trip.

Read the review of Coffee Cat in Scotts Valley, CA.

Thanks to a reader tip (which are always welcome and encouraged, btw), we were alerted to the opening this week of Sightglass Coffee in one of the danker parts of SOMA. Note that by “opening” we mean “unlocked” — and not much more than that.

If this sounds a lot like the “modest” opening of Four Barrel Coffee, it’s no coincidence. Owners/brothers Jerad and Justin Morrison have years of veteran experience that includes roasting at Blue Bottle Coffee and the opening of Four Barrel Coffee.

You’d miss this space if you weren’t looking for it. We honestly had to duck under a half-open garage door to get in, and the place looked like it was closing up shop. But despite the tiny serving space at a serving cart on wheels, this is just one corner of a vast, 1924-built, 4,000-sq-ft space with a 25-foot ceiling — or about the size of a typical large auto-body shop in the area. Except this place serves coffee … and not much else (if you include the salt caramels).

They have a Chemex brewing station, which is somewhat unique for the area, but the main attraction is their refurbished two-group La Marzocco GS2 espresso machine — straight out of the 1970s, and a sister to the one just installed at Intelligentsia‘s fabled Venice Beach location. Replace cheesy 1970s leather with wood, tune up the parts, and they’ve got a pretty serious machine for enthusiasts.

Of course — as with all these Works-In-Progress Cafés, Inc. — it doesn’t stop there. Since the new model of opening notable coffee bars these days is to open stripped-down with many promises to upgrade later, the Morrison brothers soon plan to employ one of those fancy new Slayer espresso machines in the near future — as showcased at the 2009 SCAA conference — putting their Slayer customer ID in the single digits. Will its manual control of brewing pressure blow our minds? Only time will tell, folks. In the meantime, we can’t help but snicker every time we hear the machine’s name — which conjures up images of Stumptown‘s Duane Sorenson head-banging while playing air guitar to “Disciple“.

It’s just not the machine that’s slated for an upgrade, either. They currently have access to Verve Coffee Roasters‘ inventory and equipment until the 14-kg Probat roaster is installed and fired up for their own local roasting. As always in this town, the permit process is one of the key roadblocks. Though they hope to have things up and running in September, we wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still waiting in December.

The resulting shot has a dark, healthy crema. It’s a touch thin on body, but it has a potent pungent flavor of cloves, herbs, etc. There isn’t much to the dynamic range of the flavors, but what’s there is handled well. Served in classic brown ACF cups.

Don’t mind the 90% of the floorspace that’s still being prepped for their lonely Probat. This place will need revisits, as so much is bound to change in the future. For now, it’s a good shot with the promise of becoming better down the road.

Read the preliminary review of Sightglass Coffee. In the meantime, here’s a video of Sightglass making a cap in action:

Opening just a week ago — in the space previously occupied by the Illy shop, Caffé Il Latte — this tiny café is the first in San Francisco to use beans from Santa Cruz-based Verve Coffee Roasters.

The tiny space relies on mirrored walls to add depth, and there is a little bit of a kitchen to prepare their local, organic foods. But it seems largely about the coffee here — even if people are apparently always coming in asking for bagels. There’s a single square wooden table inside with wooden bench seating on two ends.

Meanwhile, their three-group La Marzocco Linea at the front counter almost dominates the space. The place is run by two former Blue Bottle staffers in Kate and Shannon Amitin, and Verve was convinced this was the right place to start an SF presence.

For their standard espresso shot (reviewed here), they use Verve’s All-City blend — which was custom designed for the café. Shannon indicates he wanted an espresso blend without “trendy” fruitiness in its flavor profile, and the All-City delivers a potent, sharp, extremely bright shot that reminds us a little of Stumptown‘s Hairbender. They were going for an Italian-style espresso, and it is served relative short and with a very potent herbal flavor. (It is not for the meek who like their coffee mellow or with milk.)

They considered forgoing the whole “single origin thing”, but they offer a unique Sumatra ($3.50) that contrasts greatly with their espresso blend: more floral and smooth-bodied. Served in classic brown ACF cups. And to appeal to the trendy misery coffee market, they also sell cans of Café Bustelo. Kate’s SF-famous sea salt caramels are also on offer.

Read the review of Farm:Table.

A San Francisco Espresso Milestone?

Farm:Table represents a sort of milestone for us — and a good one at that. In the six years we’ve been publishing espresso reviews here at CoffeeRatings.com, we’ve witnessed a number of coffee bar openings…and closures. We see Farm:Table representing the natural turnover from a previous generation of coffee bars to a new one with much better standards.

We’ve long been noting how often new coffee bar openings crack our Top 20 rankings for the city. Many of them have been highly publicized and located in SF’s “trend-friendly” neighborhoods. But when the replacement for a hole-in-the-wall café opens up in a less-traveled coffee neighborhood, offering excellent espresso and featuring a new roaster for the city, we have to take a step back and appreciate how much local standards have improved in San Francisco.

In the nearly two decades that we’ve been visiting Santa Cruz, they’ve arguably lacked a vibrant café that excels at both coffee and as a student hang out. Recent café openings in town, such as Verve Coffee Roasters, have helped tremendously — but at Verve the focus is squarely on the coffee. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

With the Abbey Coffee, Art & Music Lounge, Santa Cruz has a solid contender at both — though a bit unexpectedly in the form of a non-profit operated by the Vintage Faith Church. Open since mid-2008, their slogan is “made with love.” And given the quality that goes into the coffee and the commitment of the staff, it’s hard to argue with that.

The staff here, volunteers, are incredibly friendly and coffee enthusiasts to boot. Inside it’s a packed scene of collegiate youth, with occasional jazz performances at night. The space is vast and somewhat dark, with an odd, edgy feel of someone’s old antique store: mismatched sofas, tables, chairs, church benches, hanging window panes, pianos, candles, light fixtures, and found art.

Using a two-group Nuova Simonelli at the front bar, they serve Verve‘s Sermon blend (how appropriate) with a dark brown swirl of modest crema in traditional brown ACF cups. (Date-stamped Verve coffee is also available for retail sale.)

The resulting shot is a little light on body, but it carries a lot of flavor in an appropriately sized shot: some dark caramel notes over a pungent flavor of cloves and herbs with a sharp brightness at the bottom of the cup. Sermon blend never knocks you over, but it has a nice balance of spice with just a hint of sweetness. Served with a small cookie on the side.

Their cappuccino is typically “traditional”: lighter on the milk and volume (so you can taste the espresso) with thick and creamy milk just barely frothed in as a thinner layer. Maybe not the best Verve shot you’ve ever had, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better place to enjoy one.

As for negatives, while our espresso drinks were solid, rumors among the locals have it that consistency can be a problem. Quality control could be an extra challenge with their volunteer staff.

And when we purchased some of the Sermon blend here for home use (from beans they packaged for us out of the supply they were using at the coffee bar), we audibly encountered the first bit of rocky debris in our Mazzer Mini in the seven years that we’ve owned it. There are few more alarming sounds than a pebble coming into contact with your burrs; small pebbles make big, bad noises. We wouldn’t think much of it, but after seven years of home roasted and retail roasted coffee in our Mazzer, it’s very unusual that a “defect” like that came through in their coffee supply.

Read the review of The Abbey Coffee, Art & Music Lounge.