Just when you think the profession of the coffee “middleman” was on its way out in this era of the Internet, in come a number of entrepreneurs trying to reintroduce them. What we’re talking about are consumer retailers that intermediate the sale of roasted coffee — with examples that include Citizen Bean, GoCoffeeGo (see Man Seeking Coffee’s recent review), and ROASTe.

These e-retailers provide online storefronts for consumers to review, order, and purchase roasted coffees from a variety of specialty coffee roasters. Virtually all of the participating roasters already have their own online storefronts with support for direct ordering. So the value of these e-retailers is supposedly in the discovery of new roasters and the convenience of buying your roasted coffee from one Web site. Or so the PR machines behind them have stated in our stuffed e-mail inboxes over the past few months.

Business model challenges

In some ways, this reflects the ambitions of entrepreneurs who wish to shoehorn the specialty wine merchant business model on coffee’s ever-popular wine analogy. Other elements seem like attempts at coffee’s wine-of-the-month club. In either case, a major flaw in this model is that coffee, unlike wine, goes stale immediately after roasting. To address this, these e-retailers have established on-demand roasting relationships with their roasters.

Another major challenge with this business model concerns pricing. Adding a middleman always costs more money than a system without one, as they have to make expenses and payroll on top of all the other costs in the supply chain. It’s for this reason that coffee middlemen have been extremely unpopular in recent years. They’ve been demonized by the Fair Trade movement as unnecessary leeches, siphoning money from the coffee trade supply chain that should otherwise be going to coffee farmers.

In fact, the entire financial premise behind Fair Trade and Direct Trade coffee is to get rid of the middlemen. So who is paying for these e-retailers? Right now, it seems to be an arrangement akin to that of travel agents before the age of the Internet: the seller picks up the additional costs as a marketing and distribution expense, and no additional costs are passed on to the consumer. But how long will this last once the consumer novelty wears off?

It’s indirect trade: buying coffee through these roasted coffee brokers effectively cuts into the coffee roaster’s capacity to pay top dollar to their coffee farmers.

Dinosaurs before they’re hatched?

The travel agent analogy to these e-retailers is fitting, as there’s little you can do with them that you cannot already do directly, and more cheaply (total supply chain cost-wise), over the Internet. Like travel agents in their heyday, the value of a middleman comes when there is a lack of consumer information and/or a lack of direct public access to the suppliers. The Internet has rendered both as non-issues when buying roasted coffee. And we all know what happened to travel agents. So unless the individual roasters themselves completely screw up their business at sales and distribution, a middleman will have a very limited opportunity to improve upon these relationships.

For a comparison, over the years I have purchased green coffee beans (for home roasting) from distributors such as Sweet Maria’s and The Coffee Project. Why? For one, I simply cannot find supplies down the street. It also helps that a Web site like Sweet Maria’s provides a lot of flavor profile information and roasting recommendations. But if individual farms I knew and trusted started selling directly over the Web, that would change things.

Does this mean that these e-tailers don’t provide a valuable service customers want? Absolutely not. A number of them already have vocal, loyal customers. There may turn out to be a sustainable long-term market for one or two of these middlemen for a limited set of customers. But given the economic and disintermediation forces of the Internet, we foresee a pretty ugly commercial bloodbath on the horizon for a number of them. Travel agents did give way to travel-aggregating Web sites, but then we already had an established need for travel agents well before the Web came along.

San Luis Obispo County is not known for a whole lot, even among Californians. There’s Hearst Castle, Cal Poly in SLO proper, and the burgeoning Paso Robles wine growing region — or what the locals simply call “Paso”.

But as is happening in many lesser-known regions around the country, SLO County’s appreciation for better food and drink is quickly rising from an earlier background of fast food chain stores and local pizza joints. Nicer, or at least more deliberately thoughtful, restaurants have opened up alongside upgraded old stand-bys. There are still small backroads wineries that retain the wine country feel of 1970s Napa, not unlike the movie Bottle Shock. But now grand new tasting rooms, funded by the wine ambitions of construction tycoons, spring out from the hills baring spared-no-expense modern architecture.

This is the sort of general progression that is happening most everywhere in the country, albeit expressed in regional ways. Some insular, forest-for-the-trees types in the coffee industry would certainly call it “Third Wave“, but yes, this progression also extends to the local coffee scene in the SLO County area.

San Luis Obispo County now boasts a few of their own local roasters and more cafés sporting La Marzocco machines. Last year the local free press, the New Times, followed baristas from SLO’s Linnaea’s and their participation at the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition: Black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love.

This has marked a real improvement for the area. Who would have expected that you could step into a café in Templeton, CA (population 4,962) — or even the tiny seaside town of Avila Beach (population 797) — and be offered a choice of beans for use in your espresso shot? Joe Mamma’s Coffee in Avila Beach even serves the ever-elusive “traditional cappuccino“. Although the coffee here hasn’t yet reached the quality heights that put them on the map as a coffee destination, the locals do have a little something to be proud of.

Despite a growing interest and emphasis on locally grown, organic, and sustainable food in the SLO County region, we also discovered that it’s not exclusively local. Last Sunday we visited a quintessential example in Templeton — a deli/produce/coffee shop called Farmstand 46. They were marking up a blackboard menu for their drinks at their new espresso bar, even though their espresso machine hasn’t even arrived yet. The coffee they sold on their shelves? Roasts from SF’s own Four Barrel Coffee.

Joe Mamma’s Coffee in the aforementioned Avila Beach (which unfortunately we didn’t get to this time), is known to serve beans from both Intelligentsia and SF’s Ritual Coffee Roasters.

Name	Address	City	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
Black Horse at Uptown	1065 Higuera St., Unit 101	San Luis Obispo	6.80	7.20	7.000
Linnaea’s	1110 Garden St.	San Luis Obispo	7.00	7.50	7.250
Joebella Coffee Roasters	1121 Rossi Road, Suite C	Templeton	7.40	7.80	7.600

Today’s Daily Californian, an independent student newspaper for the UC Berkeley campus, published an article on Berkeley’s venerable Caffe Mediterraneum: Historic Cafe Grounds For Coffee and Conversation – The Daily Californian. Sure, the coffee isn’t so great here. But for a place that is over 50 years old and is most often credited as the birthplace of the caffè latte, they are due some props.

Caffe Mediterraneum is also located just a few blocks from the site of last year’s Western Regional Barista Competition. Coincidentally, the 2009 version concluded yesterday in Los Angeles, with each of the top three finishers hailing from Intelligentsia L.A.:

1. Nick Griffith
2. Devin Pedde
3. Ryan Willbur

Congratulations to the winners. Intelligentsia sure knows what they hell they’re doing, no question. Though one might suggest these results add to the theory that barista competitions have a “home field advantage”. (Last year’s runner-up at the WRBC in Berkeley, Intelligentsia L.A.’s Kyle Glanville, went on to win the 2008 USBC.)

With Spring upon us, that means it’s time for the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC): ‘Attention to every detail’ at Berkeley barista contest – San Jose Mercury News. Starting this past Friday and ending today (check out their photo album), the 2008 WRBC performs a time-honored ritual to select a barista champ representing our region to send to the nationals, the U.S. Barista Championship (USBC), to be held in Minneapolis this May.

The WRBC is the biggest of the nation’s ten regionals and includes competitive baristas from California and Hawaii. This year they even drew in a couple of competitors from Seattle’s Zoka Coffee.

But the big question was whether Coffee Klatch‘s (San Dimas, CA) Heather Perry, the WRBC’s “Iron Barista” of the past several years, could be unseated from her usual first place finish. Last year, Heather defended her WRBC title yet again, went on to win the 2007 U.S. Barista Championship (a feat she also accomplished in 2003), and then placed second in the 2007 World Barista Championship (to the UK’s James Hoffman).

But there was more at stake than just Heather’s streak. After spending a few years in Petaluma (where we reviewed the 2006 WRBC), this year’s WRBC moved to downtown Berkeley. And this year there were more seminars, training opportunities, and awards.

Berkeley, we have a problem…

Many baristas and coffee fanatics in the Bay Area were enthusiastic about the WRBC’s choice of a new location and venue — including us. But when we attended today’s competition finals, we found both negatives as positives with the switch.

The good

• Location, location, location — A block off of BART? In downtown Berkeley? In a town where Alfred Peet started his specialty bean and leaf business back in 1966?
• An upper balcony, for viewing the competition from above — The Gaia Arts Center provided the public with more and better angles to view the competition.
• Video projection — And where Gaia’s upper balcony views weren’t enough, the WRBC used video cameras and two projection screens to zoom in on the action — providing detailed, hands-level views to many attendees.
• The Clover brewer at the 4th Machine — Introduced for the first time at the WRBC, just in time for Starbucks to buy them out, some area roasters featured Cup-of-Excellence-quality coffee. Maybe these machines have little place in a barista competition per se, but they have good company around coffee lovers everywhere.
• Merchandising — Every event planner needs to raise a little cash to keep operations going and improve the event (especially at this price: free). The WRBC seems to have expanded beyond the T-shirt offerings and is now hawking espresso cups, cappuccino cups, tampers, shot glasses, etc. All of which seemed to be doing a brisk business at the entrance.

The bad

• Cramped facilities — Despite the location and the upper balcony, the facilities themselves seemed woefully inadequate. The space was too small, and crowds packed in the main competition area so much that some attendees had to fan themselves from the build-up of body heat. People crowded the stairs leading to the upper balcony just to find space for a better view.
• No barrier between the competition area and the 4th Machine — “Kitchen stadium” (to use an Iron Chef term) was always at the mercy of the noise and distractions coming from all of the socializing by the 4th Machine — where attendees lined up for a free espresso, cappuccino, or Clover-brewed coffee. You couldn’t hear the baristas nor the emcees over the din.
• No press box, no sponsored booths — The WRBC isn’t a conference. Or is it? There already are speakers, trainings, etc. But if this competition expects the media coverage it craves, it needs to think bigger. That will irritate many die-hard, DIY baristas as “too corporate” — the event still has the strong feel of their private, exclusive club or party. But coffee is also a business — it must decide to either continue to play coy with the real world, and favor their own anti-corporate Hipsters in its own private sandbox, or it has to reach out to play with and compete against the big boys in order to be taken more seriously.

The ugly

• Is there a steady cam in the house? — While the use of video projection was a plus, unfortunately very little of it was useful. Perhaps the cameramen had too many espresso shots from the 4th Machine to hold anything still, but we couldn’t help but feel we were watching The Blair Witch Project turned on to coffee.
• The emcee — Maybe it’s just impossible to replicate the coffee street cred, public speaking skills, and infectious enthusiasm of Barefoot‘s Andy Newbom as when he emceed the 2006 WRBC. But emcee Sarah Allen was not terribly dynamic nor engaging in her role. Coincidentally, Ms. Allen is the editor of Barista Magazine — a magazine subscription we’ve recently let expire because, well, as much as we like the subject matter, we find the writing to be rather poor at best. (For example, most articles from the far corners of the world are activity logs rather than actual writing. With the exception of Ritual’s Gabe Boscana and a few others, good espresso artists aren’t always good writers. Public speaking isn’t far behind.)
• The other emcee — While we did not have the privilege of hearing the other emcee for the event — Jana Oppenheimer, a regional sales manager for Franke — having a sales rep from Franke emcee a barista competition makes about as much sense as having an SF Muni official emcee a NASCAR event. La Marzocco GS/3 distrubution included. But given that Krups is once again sponsoring the USBC in May, this is one of the prices of going corporate while still keeping the event free to the public.

And the winner is…

Of the six finalists, half was a posse representing Intelligentsia‘s Silverlake (LA) location. But in the end, the “unthinkable” happened. The final results?:

• 1st Place: Chris Baca of Ritual Coffee Roasters, SF
• 2nd Place: Kyle Glanville of Intelligentsia, Silverlake
• 3rd Place: Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch, San Dimas

Congratulations to all winners, all finalists, and all contestants…

UPDATE: April 4, 2008
Today NPR’s The California Report aired a radio segment on the 2008 WRBC, interviewing Kyle Glanville and Chris Baca: KQED | The California Report | Crowning the Best Barista.

Many congratulations are in order for Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch in San Dimas, CA: Specialty Coffee Association of America Names 2007 United States Barista Champion. Heather entered the 2007 U.S. Barista Championship as a reigning three-peat winner of the Western Regional Barista Competition (or WRBC).

Yesterday at the 2007 SCAA conference, Heather beat out the competition for America’s best barista — including 2006 USBC champ, Matt Riddle of Intelligentsia. The win marks Heather’s second national championship since last winning it in 2003. It is also likely her last victory, as she now plans to retire (at age 24!) following her upcoming appearance at the World Barista Championship in Tokyo, July 31-Aug 2, 2007.

Disclaimer time: Although I may be a subscriber to Barista Magazine, I’ve made it no secret that I’ve grown just a little fatigued by the somewhat insular and self-congratulatory hoopla surrounding what I call barista gymnastics. Too many people in the industry try to make overreaching parallels between competitive baristi and celebrity chefs — a comparison that is more flawed, and does quality coffee credibility a greater disservice, than the ever-popular wine analogy. Meanwhile, so many other quality factors leading up to a great cup of espresso are given no public face nor voice.

That said, and even if Heather hails from the Southland, she has regularly made the trek to the Western Regionals to compete and excel. So I hope I may be excused for exhibiting a little (misplaced?) local pride for her victory. Congrats, Heather! Show them how the Western Regional baristi get it done!

UPDATE: Aug. 31, 2007
Today the Press-Enterprise published a detailed interview with Heather Perry: Inland barista takes silver in world competition; her espresso wins gold | San Bernardino County | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California.

Congratulations again to Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch in San Dimas, CA. Over the weekend, she successfully defended her 2006 title at the 2007 WRBC: Western Regional Barista Competition March 16-18, 2007. Also placing were Kyle Glanville of Intelligentsia in Los Angeles (yes, you read that city correctly) and Chris Baca of SF’s own Ritual Coffee Roasters.

Congratulations are in order for all three baristas, who will be competing in May at the U.S. Barista Championship. Photos of the competition have been posted online.

Some of you may recall just how much the zombie children of the Fair Trade cult scare the bejeezus outta me. Ritual Coffee Roasters barista, Gabriel Boscana, wrote a much more tactful and civil approach to these single-issue customers in this month’s issue of Barista Magazine: FebMarch 07 – Certified Coffee Pusher. It was oddly reassuring to read that Gabe, while similarly appreciating their concern for creating a better world, also found many of them to be close-minded to a fault.

IMO, the faux transparency of the “look for the Fair Trade label” mantra is as much an over-simplified, denial-laden cop-out as the person who wants to believe that all their meat originates from sanitized cellophane and styrofoam packaging. This month’s issue of the industry rag Coffee Talk discusses the murky world of coffee certification programs, such as Fair Trade, and the difficulty of knowing if they are really achieving their stated intentions: Certified Coffees: Who Really Benefits? [p8 of the PDF file].

On a related topic, this month’s Barista Magazine also published a primer on organic coffee: FebMarch 07 – An Organic Primer. Of course, seeing how Fair Trade was co-opted (and, to some degree, subverted) by the big coffee producers it originally intended to counteract, organic probably won’t trail far behind. Mark my words: Organic Coca-Cola is ultimately coming to a supermarket near you. Then what? Are we ready for the implications? What was once an alternative is now becoming co-opted and industrialized in the name of product marketing — for all the good and bad that represents.

Btw, Gabe and his partner in Ritual crime, Ryan Brown, will be judging at the 2007 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC) next month in Petaluma (March 16-18). I probably won’t make the trek this time around. But this year, as at last year’s event, they promise to stage the 4th Machine (arguably my favorite part) in addition to some educational seminars for both industry pros and the home geeks.

As a former resident of Palo Alto for several years, a trip down Santa Clara’s Stevens Creek Boulevard conjures up images of discount mattress stores, Denny’s, and strip malls as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, that’s commercial real estate in the Silicon Valley — regardless of the hidden gems tucked away in Northern California’s answer to The O.C.

One of those gems is Barefoot Coffee Roasters — three-time winner for best coffee in the local free weekly, Metro (and one of those rare occasions where a popularity contest gets it right). Despite all my peripheral encounters with Barefoot and its well-deserved accolades, I finally paid my first visit this week.

Barefoot starts with Andy Newbom (owner and CEO, or “Chief Espresso Officer”), and I couldn’t think of a better person for the role. I first met him as emcee at the last Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC). There are many great inside stories of how he’s offered his time, energy, and even his spare bedroom to support the training and development of budding, high-quality cafés throughout the West. But most of all, he exudes an infectious enthusiasm for good espresso. Andy visibly loves good espresso the way Homer Simpson loves donuts.

Outside this small café there are several sidewalk tables and chairs for scoping out the nearby freeway traffic. Inside, there’s a handful of artful tables and sofas — and a long corridor leading past their famous Probat roaster to their less-famous bathroom with its brooding, Central American-themed mural walls.

Barefoot is religious about the need for, and its support of, professional barista training, and it shows. They have mounted numerous framed training certifications on the back wall behind their three-group La Marzocco GB/5 station. The barista will demonstrate a detailed level of quality control — rejecting shots that didn’t come out to their professional standards.

For espresso, I first sampled their Bare Espresso — a double shot made with a standard blend ($2). They served it with a medium brown crema without distinctive markings or froth, and it was a little lighter in color and thickness than I expected (or experienced at the WRBC’s The 4th Machine). The cup had a sweet, herbal earthiness with a lot of bright, acidic notes, but the body was surprisingly lighter.

I moved on to their Single Estate Espresso ($3.50) — a variant to their usual blend, typically made with a rotation of estate coffees (as modelled in very few other cafés, such as Palo Alto’s Caffé del Doge). As a single origin espresso, as in the case with single malt scotch, it often has a very distinctive, unique, and intense flavor profile. The day’s offering was a Panama Finca Hartmann, which they recommended with spouts (as opposed to a naked portafilter).

One of the things I really like about Barefoot is that they don’t succumb to the latest popularized specialty coffee trends. For example, some baristas have recently glommed on to the (not-so-new) Cup of Excellence phenomenon — as if Cup of Excellence-competing coffees have a monopoly on unique, distinctive, high-quality flavor profiles. But Barefoot knows there is plenty more out there to choose from, like Finca Hartmann. (We’ve arguably witnessed a similar phenomenon in the past year with socio/eco-conscious types discovering Fair Trade coffees en masse and attributing it with a monopoly on ethical and sustainable growing practices — putting a blind eye to Fair Trade’s many shortcomings and problems.)

The Finca Hartmann espresso hit paydirt. Not that the Bare Espresso was a slouch, but here the cup came with dark red and brown flecks in its thinner crema (expectedly thinner, given its single-bean profile). It had a more robust aroma, a round and robust body, and an intense sweetness with a sharp but pleasant bite at the back of the throat to complement its herbal pungency. Outstanding.

Read the review of Barefoot Coffee Roasters (Single Estate Espresso).

Here’s an update for the fellow home roaster geeks who have lamented the demise of Hawaii’s Ka’anapali Farm … from today’s The Maui News: Buzz over coffee has come back to Kaanapali. As reported here in March, I first spotted the return of the Maui Moka bean — easily my favorite bean stock for homemade single-bean espresso — at this year’s Western Regional Barista Competition. Production of the Maui Moka bean had collapsed with the shut down of its parent farm, Ka’anapali Estates, in 2002.

According to the article, James “Kimo” Falconer, formerly of Ka’anapali Estates, has succeeded in saving the Maui Moka bean — plus three other other former Ka’anapali Estate varieties — and returning them to production. They are reappearing under the MauiGrown Coffee label with the harvest of this year’s crop ready to begin later this month.

Naturally, I’ve already e-mailed James for my order of greens. If you’re remotely curious about this bean, I strongly suggest you do the same (either as green or roasted beans). This is a great story of one man’s commitment to revive an exquisite coffee varietal.

And the winner is…

The Charlotte Observer posted an article today covering the final rounds of the 2006 U.S. Barista Championship, held yesterday on the final day of the annual SCAA conference: Charlotte Observer | 04/11/2006 | Coffee artists grind toward national title.

For all those who scratched their head thinking, “A quality coffee conference … in North Carolina?!,” it should come as little surprise that no Carolinas baristas made it to the finals round on Monday. However, three of the seven finalists came from one of my favorites in the U.S.: Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Chicago. Bay Area coffee drinkers may recognize Intelligentsia Coffee as the bean supplier to Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery. However, the difference in espresso preparation and equipment between Specialty’s and Intelligentsia is like night and day.

Matthew Riddle, a graphic designer and barista at Intelligentsia, was ultimately selected as the 2006 U.S. Barista champion at Monday’s finals. Matthew’s fabulous cash and prizes included a $1,000 check and a trip to the World Barista Championship in Berne, Switzerland.

Also included in the article is a photo of local coffee luminary, Andrew Barnett, owner/roaster of Santa Rosa’s Ecco Caffé and judge at the 2006 USBC. (Andrew also served as a judge at the recent Western Regional Barista Competition.) You can check out more photos of the competition at the Charlotte Observer photo gallery.