God in A Cup of Coffee

Hey guys, I wrote an interesting post about the Hacienda La Esmeralda auction yesterday and somehow failed to post it. I hope you will read it–I will have more to say about this auction in the next few day.

The auction post is right below this post.

Also two reviews of God in a Cup have been published, one in print and one online that I am proud to share. I am particularly proud that Murky Coffee’s Nick Cho thinks that “I get it” regarding the specialty industry. I know its tough being under a journalist’s microscope, but I hope the folks in the industry will see that I get it and that my impulses in writing about them and the industry were basically benign–I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the specialty industry with readers. I wasn’t out to trash anyone.

Here are the links to the reviews:

file:///Users/michaele/Desktop/www.portafilte

r.net:.webloc

file:///Users/michaele/Desktop/God%20in%20a%20Cup%20PW%20Review%20March%2031%202008.doc

I got an email from Rachel Peterson touting the online auction in which this year’s entire Esmerelda Special will be auctioned off to sanctioned coffee buyers on May 22nd. Last year as everyone in the specialty coffee world knows, a small amount -250 pounds– of Esmeralda Special was auctioned off online for the mind boggling price of $130 a pound at the best of Panama competition. What many do not realize, most of the rest of the Peterson’s Esmeralda (aka Geisha) was sold per pre-competition contracts, for $12.50 a pound.

This year the Peterson’s did not enter their most famous coffee in the just completed Best of Panama competition. Instead they are offering their entire Esmeralda/Geisha supply at what they believe is Latin America’s first independent, single estate coffee auction.

In Rachel’s email she explained how the auction will work. “Approximately 26,000 pounds of the prized Esmeralda Special geisha coffee, divided into 300 pound individual auction lots will be sold in the first ever Single Estate internet Auction on May 22nd, 2008. There are 10 different batches of this outstanding coffee to choose from, a distinct taste for every seriously discriminating palate. Differences between batches are determined by harvest dates and areas. The cost of the set of 10 samples ($225) will be rebated against the actual purchase of an auction lot. Bidding starts at $5 per pound with a total of close to 90 auction lots to bid on.”

According to Rachel, “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity ” for roasters to select their favourite batch of Esmeralda Special Geisha, “since the Hacienda’s success in this auction will determine whether or not to go back to the regular allotment of geisha coffee. If you are interested in participating, but have never bid in an internet auction before, consider contacting your coffee broker.”

For as long as I have been reporting on coffee, coffee guy like Doug Zell has been telling me that the market for artisan coffee today is where the market for artisan wine produced int he US was 30 years ago. For that to be the case, high end producers like the Petersons need to have more control –some control — over the market. Up to now, buyers and middle men (some passionately committed to producers) have held most of the cards.

Now that might be changing. Or maybe not. May 22nd will tell a lot…

I am in Florida drinking a cup of coffee made from beans that I ground and brought down here in January-Aida Batelle special from El Salvador. My Mom stuck the leftover coffee in the freezer after our visit three months ago. As compared to what my Mom drinks–canned coffee flavored with vanilla–three month old, preground specialty from a great grower is, well, actually it tastes a lot better than most of the coffee being served right this minute to guests staying at four and five star hotels. I am drinking it black It is not fresh, but in its unfresh state, it is still quintessentially good. Coffee is not like, say, French bread, that if it isn’t fresh, it loses nearly all of its soul. Even unfresh, the essence of this coffee shines through and gives pleasure.

….That’s a pretty good lead in to what’s on my mind: which is why I write about specialty coffee. With my book coming out, I have been thinking a lot about my relationship to the specialty coffee world. Lots of people who write about coffee are (regardless of gender) what I call coffee guys–meaning they are coffee obsessed. As Geoff Watts put it shortly after we met back in 2006, “Coffee is my life.” These are folks who can discuss the nuances of particular beans nonstop for five or six hours. Not only are their palettes extraordinary, but they share particular qualities of mind, a relentless energy and interest for their subject, a caring about getting it right, an obsessiveness that I find completely admirable and utterly interesting. I am energized by their energy. But I am not one of them. I am not a coffee guy. Don’t get me wrong. I love coffee, I love all the products that come from the earth with a kind of (almost) religious enthusiasm–my feeling is that these good things are what we have been given. That and each other. I love coffee, but I love finding the story, discovering the compelling narrative, the coherence that illuminates a complicated world, even  more.

–more about my immersion in coffee world and finding the story tomorrow….

……

I am making a quick trip to Florida to see my Mother. Tomorrow is her 88th birthday.

My Mom doesn’t have WiFi, but her neighbors do. On my last few trips to Florida, I have been able to “borrow” their signal and work online while sitting on my mother’s screened in porch–that’s where I did some of the final editing for the book.

Before my mother’s neighbors went wireless, my husband and I used to go to a nearby cafe when we wanted to check email and work online. The cafe owner, a Colombian, roasts beans in a small gerry-rigged roaster that I believe started life as a popcorn popper. To call the coffee mediocre is a compliment. He buys Colombian beans, though he told me what originally lured him to the US was the idea of growing coffee in Florida– odd idea given the humidity and lack of altitude.

In this guy’s opinion the coffee he roasts in his popcorn popper is the best in the world. I told him about the SCAA, and suggested that he might want to become a member, partake of an educational offering or two, meet other coffee roasters, immerse himself in the specialty world.

He was surprised to learn that an organization like SCAA existed. He had no interest in it at all. His lack of curiosity made me wonder if his shop was a money laundering operation for a well, no need to linger on cultural stereotypes…

But here’s the deal. Guys like him make me crazy. I can’t stand their ignorance and their lack of passion for coffee. If I have learned anything hanging out with specialty coffee buyers for the past couple of years, I have learned how totally, manically, obsessively passionately devoted they are to coffee. These are guys, as I was saying yesterday, who will ride in a sprung truck with piss poor brakes on a road with pot holes deep enough to launch small ships to get to a coffee farm in East Bumblefuck. Of course they want to make money. Of course they want to be the best, beat the competition–they have all the crass ambition that drives us all. but beyond the ego, the guys at the top of the quality pyramid care about the coffee. The idea of exquisit coffee stirs their souls. This is not hyperbole. It is love, and that is why I get so mad when someone lacking passion presents himself as a coffee guy. Hey, man, buying cookie dough in the refrigerator section at Safeway and baking it in the toaster oven is not artisan baking.

Ok, so that’s my rant.

Here’s a picture of my mother and her cousin Anita sitting beside the swimming pool. My Mom is

wearing the black shirt.

Twenty four copies of my book arrived in a big brown box yesterday.

Seeing the books, feeling their weight triggered lots of memories for me.

I found myself thinking about riding in trucks with some of the world’s most talented specialty coffee buyers –Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture Coffee, Geoff Watts of Intelligentsia Coffee and Lindsey Bolger of Green Mountain Coffee, to name the three who were particularly welcoming to me.

Turns out, riding in trucks is the iconic coffee buyer experience.

Hours and hours and days and days bouncing in trucks with shitty shocks and no air conditioning –windows open, dust and heat and noise assailing skin and nose and eyes — on roads that are not always recognizable as such on the way to meet with coffee farmers and their reps in the highlands of Nicaragua, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Panama.

In my experience, the ratio of truck time to meeting time tends to run three or four to one and that’s on a good day. For a two hour visit to a coffee cooperative high that includes a tour and a meeting, count on six or seven hours in a truck. Each way. If you are lucky, there’s a nice joint in a market town on the road where you can stop for lunch. and if you are really really really lucky, it has a clean bathroom.

Even people in the specialty industry get it wrong. They think buying specialty coffee is a glamorous job.

So why do they do it. When I asked Stumptown coffee buyer Aleco Chigounis, why he choses a life on the road, here’s how he answered. In this case, I think Aleco was speaking for himself and for some of his  colleagues:

“The allure for me is getting off a plane in Burundi or Peru and feeling energized knowing I am going to go out to go out and spend the next ten hours in car or truck…stay at the crappiest place you have ever seen and eat guinea pig for breakfast, knowing I am going to have the opportunity to impact an entire community by making their coffee potentially more valuable, and bringing everything I have worked into the encounter. It is an incredibly empowering experience. I have a chance to have an impact on a world stage.”

–more riding in trucks tomorrow…

My husband returned home from San Francisco with a gift: a small white ceramic one cup coffee filter imported from Japan. He bought the device at Blue Bottle cafe, and it cost less than twenty dollars.

Here’s the joke. In a world of overpriced, underperforming coffee makers, the one cup ceramic filter makes fabulous brewed coffee one cup at a time, and it is completely easy to use which may be a drawback, given the snobberies of coffee guys.

Here’s how the ceramic filter works. You rest it on top of your cup. You grind one portion of coffee in your Burr–I have a noisy, unpleasant Capresso because I can’t bring myself to spend more than $100 on a coffee grinder, though I recognize this is probably a mistake.

Once the coffee is ground and the water is boiling, you put a paper filter inside the ceramic filter, and wet it. Then you add the coffee and pour almost boiling water into the device. In seconds nearly perfect brewed coffee pours through the two small holes at the base of the into your cup. The base of the one cup filter is about four inches across, which means it needs to sit on a fairly small cup, one with a circumference of three and a half inches or less. The cup I use holds maybe ten or 11 ounces. This is coffee to taste. Not coffee with which to narcotic-ize yourself. Coffee to enjoy without obsessing about the details.

My husband was in San Francisco attending a conference, and I asked him to stop by and Blue Bottle Cafe and try the coffee. I haven’t been to San Francisco in a while, and I was curious. I had heard that Blue Bottle is the ne plus ultra of San Francisco cafes and that its $20,000 halogen-powered glass siphon bar brewing system is the ne plus ultra of brewing systems. Hand-made in Japan, the siphon vacuum brews individual servings of coffee in elegant glass beakers. Blue Bottle’s owner, James Freeman told the New York Times back in January, that, “siphon coffee is very delicate. It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light that it’s almost mousse-y.”

Blue Bottle is located on Mint Street, near the corner of Mission and Fifth, not far from the Conference Center. One evening John and his friend Henri, another electrical engineer who is French and has a French passion for fine food and drink, wandered into Blue Bottle after dinner. They checked what coffees were available, picked one from Yemen, and asked that it be brewed in the siphon –too bad I wasn’t with them, because I would have urged them to choose a smoother, less earthy, more consistent bean to test run the siphon.

Two electrical engineers! Needless to say they watched what happened closely. They weren’t impressed by the siphon’s technical complexity. You can buy the glass beaker and the other gear for a hundred bucks, John said, adding that he didn’t see the value of using halogen to heat the water.

Their skepticism, however, may have had less to do with the (overpriced) machinery and more to do with Yemenese coffee which John described as a little muddy. Had they ordered a washed Yirgacheffe, they might have come home telling a far different tale. Sweet and silky, lemony and fragrant. who knows what they might have tasted in their finely brewed cup, if they had chosen a more elegant coffee. Instead: disappointment.

Once again we see just how crucial is the human-human interface in America’s coffee bars. Had the barista talked these neophyte siphon drinkers through their choice of coffee, they might have had a far different experience. Instead, they left bemused. Two electrical engineers with pretty good palates left Blue Bottle thinking this high end coffee thing is well, ever so slightly over-hyped.

–tomorrow more on siphon coffee and that dethroned darling, the Clover.

I just got home from Chicago. My friend Marcia and I had lunch on Monday at Blackbird on West Randolph, one of the restaurants fueling Chicago’s reputation as a foodie destination.

The store front dining room was cheerfully austere–dark wood, white linens and, on the bar, a vat of fresh daisies. We sat at a banquette and drank Sancerre, spicy and light, my favorite mid-day wine: yes, it is true, I am contemplating a campaign to bring back alcohol at lunch–not deadening martinis, but a simple glass of white or red on those special days when one takes the time to enjoy a meal at mid-day with a friend of work associate. (In Switzerland, wine prices are pro-rated by volume, and you can order half a glass without paying extra for the privilege.)

The lunch met, shall I show my coastal bias?, New York and Los Angeles standards. We ate like girls, sharing four courses: a leafy salad with dainty slices of Berkshire blue cheese; the seared Maine diver scallop appetizer flavored with black truffles; the (delectably moist) grilled sturgeon served with a few bites of braised oxtail; and the milk chocolate cremeux served with a saffron-colored dollop of curry ice cream. The sturgeon and the cremeux were standout dishes.

With the cremeux we ordered coffee–a Colombian blend from Intelligentsia. Blackbird serves Intelli without a lot of fanfare. A simple line on the menu says “coffee provided by Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters.” Just one coffee is offered. There is no French press. No speech by the waiter. No espresso machine. No wildly expensive equipment. But here’s the deal. The coffee, made fresh every 15 or 20 minutes and stored in a caraffe (what could be simpler?), was strong and smooth with a satisfying chocolaty depth that paired beautifully with the milk chocolate cremeux. I skipped the adulterants and enjoyed the coffee black.

Drinking Intelli at Blackbird taught me something about restaurant coffee. It doesn’t have to be a big fancy deal. It doesn’t have to break a small restaurant’s budget or make overwhelming demands on a busy staff. Fresh high quality beans. Freshly ground. Freshly brewed. Simple brewing method–and, of course, clean equipment—and you have an ending to a meal that honors what has come before.

Love Starbucks or hate it, you have to be impressed with how quickly Howard Schultz has changed directions. A billion dollar corporation heading down the track in a downscale direction has a hell of a lot inertia. In just weeks, Schultz has slammed on the brakes, turned that train and nimbly sent it in the direction of upscale and coffee-centric.

Will his strategy work? Will he once again convince consumers that Starbucks is about coffee? High quality specialty coffee? Don’t know. But my hunch is that Starbucks can draw on a well of consumer good will which will help it rebuild its brand. I detect some of this good will in myself, based not on the taste of Starbucks coffee, but on its real estate:

I think Starbucks changed American social life for the better by providing consumers with space, real estate, that is neither public, nor private, but some useful and welcome amalgam of the two. As a freelance journalist with an office in her home, I depend on half a dozen nearby Starbucks stores to serve as downtown office/conference room/ meeting places. Meeting at Starbucks gives me an excuse to get out of my house and it provides a less intimate, centrally located and safe place to talk to sources, colleagues and others. Would I prefer to hold my meetings at a non-chain cafes? Yes, of course, and if I lived and worked in downtown DC where there are more choices, I would do so. Still, standardized Starbucks stores provides a bland, non intrusive background for business meetings that works for me. Works for a lot of people.

Here’s a picture of me drinking a beautifully executed cappiccino

I skipped lunch yesterday and fifteen minutes before my 2pm appointment,  I stopped in at a Washington, DC Starbucks (New Mexico Avenue)  and  I ordered a decaf and a cookie–decaf because I was feeling  jumpy about my next appointment.

The barista-gal mumbled something about Pikes something or other.  I didn’t get her drift.

“That’s our new Pike’s Place decaf,” a  dude in a baseball cap standing next to me said.  Turns out he was the regional supervisor for ten Starbucks stores in the area.  “It’s the smoothest blend we have ever created,” he added.

“You mean it is not roasted to death,” I asked.

“Taste it,” he said.

So I tasted it black. The coffee was smoother than I expected. Sweet. A bit innocuous, but no choking acidity.  (Not much good acidity either.)

“Not bad,” I said.

“Pike Place and Pike Place decaf,” he said.  “These are the best coffees we have ever offered.  We’ll be offering these blends every day of the year,” he said, then went on to deliver a little speech about how the Pike Place coffees are blends of Latin American beans that would be  delivered superfresh to stores every ten days or two weeks all year long.

Since coffee is a seasonal product, I expressed a bit of skepticism that a Latin American blend could be  roasted fresh all year long.

The guy said something about coffee growing all over the world, indicating to me that the blend would change seasonally throughout the year.  He went on to repeat the freshness/quality mantra I know so well from reporting on the high end of the specialty coffee sector for the past couple of years.

Ironic that Starbucks, the company that helped to launch the specialty industry’s Second Wave is now copying the words and strategy of specialty Coffee’s Third Wave.  Still, the decaf was better than expected.  I am curious to taste  Pikes Place with caffeine.

Starbucks has played such an important part in creating the market for specialty coffee.  It’s gotta be a good thing for the   industry if Starbucks customers learn to recognize the flavor of better quality coffee.