God in A Cup of Coffee

In the last couple of weeks, I have been a guest on a number of foodies radio programs, on the east coast, the west and in the middle. Wiley, the publisher for God in a cup arranged these appearances to promote my book. I like to talk, and I have had a lot of fun parrying with the different hosts, whose age, sex, culinary sophisticatiaon and backgrounds vary greatly. One thing they all have in common, though, has taken me by surprise: few of them know much of anything about coffee. Remember, these are professionals—folks who know enough about food and drink to warrant air time on a radio station in a major market—well, OK, some markets are more major than others.

It surpises me that professional foodies are still so uninformed about a beverage that most of them, most of us, drink every day, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about why that is. Especially since we are in an era which to quote coffeegeek empressario Mark Prince described on a recent podcast as “a golden age of coffee.” (He said that to me, on the podcast on which I was a guest which he posted a day ago.)

If this is a golden age, why are so few civilians, those outside the specialty coffee industry and the barista and café communities, so oblivious? And is there any likelihood that this disconnect between the coffee and the culinary worlds will be remedied in the near future?)

I think those inside the specialty business don’t understand the barriers: I am not a coffee professional or a trained taster, but it seems to me that coffee is hard to get. It takes a a lot of exposures in a comfortable environment to start to get the range of flavors in a cup of black coffee. The arcane language that has come to dominate the discussion is off putting too. Most reasonably senstive foodies don’t discern the wild strawberry, the bergomot and licorice in coffee .

Even folks with sensitive palettes feel put off.

Part of the problem has to do with the contentious debate about FairTrade. So much screaming and shouting, so much vitriol in the discussion has turned foodie’s off to the subject of coffee. It’s not the debate that is the problem, it’s the terms of the debate. The hatred and anger that makes outsiders weary of the discussion and lose sight of the coffee. I experienced this hijacking first hand two years ago when I organized a Slow Food coffee tasting at Murky.

Another part of the problem, I think, has to do with the wine analogy. People in the specialty business are always comparing specialty coffee to the wine business and predicting that high end coffee in this century is just about to take off, as the us wine business did in the 1980s.

While some aspects of the analogy may be true, there are problems. Wine is easier to “get” than coffee. The tastes of wine, the mouthfeel, the start and finish are more accessible. And everyone already knows that wines come from different grapes, different regions, different colors and that each of these categories comes with its own profile. Even before you ever taste a burgundy, somewhere in you mind you have absorbed the fact that a burgundy and a pinot noir are different. You expect them to taste different and then when you taste them you go looking for the differences.

But that’s just part of the problem that prevents foodies from entering coffee world. Wine is what you drink when you are relaxing, eating nice food, taking the time to savor life. You pay attention to the taste of it, because wine is all about slowing down and tasting. But coffee!!!! Coffee is about the caffeine. About drugging yourself into a heightened state of productivity—I am sitting on the train to Philly (another radio show) typing this blog, the train is rocking, my eyes are slowing shutting and I am thinking, oh god it was five hours ago when I woke up and made my self a cup of coffee (Yirgacheffe, that, admit it, I barely tasted as I raced around packing and doing last minute email. Many—but not all — of the rituals and ceremonies that surround coffee drinking, are anti-sensual. You don’t pause and taste and contemplate, you drink, maybe have a moment of tasting, and then you revv up and start going—unless it is Sunday morning.

And in restaurants, when people are more relaxed and perhaps would take the time to savor the coffee, well, their palettes may be alcohol soaked and degraded by the time the coffee is served and even more disastrously the the coffee is generally blechhhhhhhhh!!!!! Hideous. No training the palette here to taste the beans.

The subculture surrounding the specialty world, both the brewed coffee and espresso worlds, also keep people out. A lot of the people who inhabit the specialty world are making up for high school: now they are the cool kids and they have no intention of welcoming the uncool and the unhip into their special universe.

…..It all adds up to an exclusive little universe disconnected from the culinary world, and that, I believe is profoundly bad for business. If the specialy industry is to grow and meet its potential, more customers have to be invited in.

I

A number of thoughtful women who work in the specialty coffee industry have told me that they find my use of the term “coffee guys” in God in a Cup annoying and, well sexist.

Coffee buyer and consultant Trish Rothgeb (aka Trish Skeie) has said she hopes my next book will be about the inspiring women who are transforming the specialty coffee industry at origin. She points in particular to some of the advances made by women growers in Butare, Rwanda, for whom coffee is a livelihood and a vehicle for reconciling the political hatred between Hutus and Tutsis.

Here is a picture of Trish, who is a very talented coffee person:

Regarding Trish’s suggestion, I am not sure what I will write about next, but the idea of writing about a woman or women coffee growers certainly appeals to me.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about my own attraction to the “guyness” part of the specialty coffee industry. Why is it that when I first started writing about coffee and interviewed young (male) coffee buyers, roasters and entrepreneurs, they were so compelling to me? Why did I cast my story as a book about young coffee guys when their certainly are many women in the industry and many men who are no longer young, who have made great contributions to the industry.

iMy first book, A History of Women in America, published by Bantam, written with Carol Hymowtiz, establishes my credentials as a writer who is interested in the lives and experiences of women.

But I think it is my second book, Deadly Consequences, written with Deborah Prothrow Stith and published by HarperCollins, that says explains why I found young “coffee guys” such compelling subjects. Deadly Consequences is about teenage violence in the African American community. Writing that book, I learned how tough life can be if you are a guy, especially a guy from a non-elite background. Though reporters and scholars are always splitting the world into racial categories, I figured out that it didn’t really matter if you were black or white. If you are poor and male and have no non-violent male figure in your life to lead you out of adolescence and into responsible manhood, you are kind of screwed. Under the best of circumstances, it is often extremely difficult for young guys without fathers, or young guys from strained economic circumstances to find a place for themselves in the world. I had never really understood how fragile male identity can be. I got interested for a while in Marky Mark and wanted to write a book about him. All that talent. All that raw sex appeal. All that dumb inability to control himself. He fascinated me as a potential literary subject.

When I started reporting on specialty coffee and began meeting young coffee buyers and entrepreneurs, I recognized some of that vulnerability in them.

Being the mother of a son deepened my interest in writing about guys. Growing up female, I really did think the world belonged to guys. And the world does belong to guys, sort of. But when you are bringing up a son, you get to see the complexities.

….and I guess it is the complexities of maleness that fueled my writerly interest in the young “coffee guys,” and eventually led to me writing a book about them.

Stumptown founder Duane Sorenson, Stumptown coffee buyer Aleco Chogounis, and Stumptown marketing chief Matt Lounsbury brag that their company, based in Portland, Oregon owns the most exquisite and the most expensive supply of coffee in the world. And the thing is: they do.

During a nine hour online auction yesterday, Stumptown outbid companies based in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia, winning ownership of the best of the best of Hacienda La Esmeralda’s 2008 Geisha crop.

Stumptown partnered in the purchase of some of the coffee with Tom Owen, owner of Sweet Maria’s, the Oakland, California company that sells green coffee to home roasters. Together they outbid feverish competition in order to command all five of this year’s top lots. Each lot consisted of 300 pounds of coffee. That means Stumptown and its partner paid approximately $135,000 for 1500 pounds of coffee.

Batch one, consisting of two identical lots, sold for $95.25 a pound. Batch two, also made up of two lots, sold for $105.25 a pound, so in a certain perverse sense you could say Stumptown got a bargain, as coffee from the batch two location sold online last year at the Best of Panama auction for $130 a pound.

Batch three, the fifth lot of coffee purchased by Stumptown and Sweet Maria’s was made up of peaberries and sold for $50.24 a pound. (While most coffee beans grow as twins, peaberries are small singlets, and some contend they are fuller flavored than other coffee beans.)

Batch Four, the controversial raison-like, partially fermented superripe beans that the Petersons, owners of Hacienda La Esmeralda, plucked out of the water, separating them from seconds called floaters, sold for $28.00 a pound. 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters located in Vancouver bought all 300 pounds of these beans. (I would love to taste this coffee, which I imagine will have the sweet juiciness of Geisha, but lack the tea-like delicacy. I guess that says something about my not entirely refined palette.)

Rachel Peterson, in charge of marketing for Hacienda La Esmeralda, expressed delight today at the auction’s outcome, which brought in approximately $500,000. Still, Rachel noted, the auction results were not what she expected.

“My idea was that all the buyers would mix in a middle area, giving us a better idea of a (uniform) price for the entire 3,000 pound supply of Esmeralda,” Rachel said today on the telephone from her home in Puerto Rico. In other words, she expected all the Esmeralda to sell for around $15.00 a pound–instead a huge gap emerged between the super premium, high altitude Geisha, harvested and processed on optimal dates and the rest, much of which sold for $12. or $13. a pound, although the least favored batches sold for $6.00 a pound and change.

Information about who bought what for how much is posted online at: http://coffee.stoneworks.com. Having this information out there for all to see, Rachel said, is important to ensure that all the roaters operate on the up and up and no one tries to fool customers into thinking their 6 dollar a pound Esmeralda was purchased at auction for twenty times that price.

Will there be another auction next year? “At the moment we don’t know if we will do it. We have to wait and hear the feedback. Our buyers spent nine hours at their computers yesterday bidding on our coffee. That’s more than a full work day….And it turns out the auction was not so great for overseas buyers. Two of our customers in Hong Kong and Europe told us they fell asleep at their computers and when they woke up the auction was over,” and they had been shut out. “We have to keep this in mind as we consider what to do next year,” Rachel said.

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 ……..and in case you have been following the drama of my wine soaked MacBook, I received a check in the mail yesterday from the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis for $755, what it would have cost me to repair my computer.  (I bought a new one.) Pretty nice customer relations, I say.

I talked to Rachel Peterson yesterday, and she told me close to sixty buyers had signed up for the auction later today at which all of Hacienda La Esmeralda’s famed Geisha will be sold online. This is twice the number of buyers who last year drove the price of a few hundred pounds of super premium Geisha to $130 dollars a pound.

This year, like last, there is a small supply of the best of the best being offered.   The top two batches, (each weighing 300 pounds) of coffee were harvested from the highest hill on the same optimal day in February.

If you are not bidding on Esmeralda, you can follow the auction today, starting at 9:30 AM Eastern time at http://coffee.stoneworks.com. The auction is supposed to last for just one hour, but processing bids on 101 different lots of coffee from eight different batches of Geisha harvested from different corners of the farm at different elevation on different days, including one batch of Peaberries will be time consuming. Rachel predicted that the action would take three hours or more to complete, noting that the Best of Panama auction earlier this week took three hours and in that auction there were 19 lots, not 101.

In addition to the eight batches of standard Geisha, if you can use such a word when talking about this coffee, the Petersons are offering one batch of what Rachel called beans that are “repasse”. “Raisens,” she said, “overripe beans, left on the tree for longer than usual. The mucilage around these beans are very sweet. That makes it more potent, like a honey. These beans start to ferment before we depulp,” ( Panamanian coffee is processed without fermenting.)

“These repasse beans are controversial,” Rachel adds, because they are floaters. “They are removed from the water with  beans that are seconds, but they are not seconds, just very ripe beans. They stand out in terms of aroma and fragrance,” she says.

Seems to me these repasse beans are sort of Geisha squared. If I were a coffee buyer, which I am not, nor do I pretend to have a coffee professional’s talents and knowledge, still if I were a coffee buyer, these are the beans I would bid on.

More later today on the auction. In the meantime, I apologize for getting waylaid and not blogging for a few days. So much to say about specialty coffee. So little time. And yes, I promise to get back to writing about Edwin Martinez.

I have a theory, a hunch really, that there is another Third Wave brewing in the specialty coffee world. This is a Third Wave of producers–young, bilingual, quality driven, tech-savvy coffee growers– who have observed the dramatic changes in the consuming end of the specialty world driven by young entrepreneurs who call themselves or are called the Third Wave. (Yes, yes, I understand this is an extremely imprecise term.) Observing these changes in the consuming world, continually stymied by the difficulty even the most elite producers experience in their effort to make growing coffee a profitable occupation, I believe these young growers are seeking to change the way they do business in order to duplicate some of the successes of Third Wave entrepreneurs in the coffee consuming countries.

I think Daniel Peterson of Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama as such a “Third Wave” producer. I view the single estate auction that the Peterson family is holding on May 22nd in order to sell the entire 2008 crop of their famed Esmeralda as a manifestation of an inchoate effort by an unusually sophisticated producing family to redraw the terms of engagement. To re-right the balance. Don’t be blinded by the prosperity and worldliness of the Peterson family. They still have had to operate in markets where the rules were essentially colonial. As a family, the Petersons are not “everyman.” But, I believe their desire to claim more control over the way boutique quality coffee is sold is shared by many young growers. In the last half dozen years these growers have had a chance to see how high end roasters are changing the way specialty coffee is marketed in the US, Europe and Japan. Now a few of them are beginning  to think about how they can change marketing practices on their own end of the coffee chain.

(The Cup of Excellence competitions have played a big big part in educating growers, especially growers who speak English, introducing them to the changes taking place on the consuming end of the coffee chain.)

This week I talked on the telephone to a young “Third Wave” grower, one whose landholdings are far less extensive than the Petersons. He is Edwin Martinez, 32, whose family owns Finca Vista Hermosa in Huehue Tenango, Guatemala. Edwin is bi-national, Guatemalan and what he calls United Statian.

He divides his time between Guatemala and Bellingham, Washington.

Here’s a picture of Edwin and his wife Nina:

Edwin’s lives half the time or more in the United States, he is immersed in the ways special coffee business here and he is passionately devoted to finding way to make coffee growing in Guatemala profitable and sustainable. To this end, he decided that he needed to become his own exporter and importer. With great difficulty that is what he has been trying to do so.

Many people who toss around the term “direct trade” don’t really know what this involves. They think that a roaster and a farmer get to know one another, and that they sit down and hammer out a contract between them and then the farmer ships his coffee to the roasters warehouse where it is quickly an beautifully roasted in a gorgeous old Probat machine. And that cash payment flows directly from the roaster into the pockets of the grower.

Well, it ain’t like that. Virtually all the coffee in the world–direct trade or any trade–is shipped out of the producing country by a licensed exporter and received in the consuming country by a licensed importer. Almost never are the exporter and importer “coffee guys” who grow or roast coffee. Moreover, the most important commodity in the coffee chain, if you look at things dispassionately ain’t the coffee. It’s credit. Access to credit. Because the entire coffee business from farm to cafe is floated on borrowed money. And that roaster that you think bought that coffee from that farmer isn’t really buying it from the farmer, he (or she) is buying it in dribs and drabs from an exporter who owns a warehouse and often that coffee roaster is so cash poor he pays his bills to the exporter a tad tardily–and that was the case before the current recession hit.

In order to capture more of the value in the coffee chain, Edwin decided to become his own exporter/importer. This effort has not transpired on a lofty level of high finance.

Edwin and his family started a small coffee house in Bellingham, Washington.  At first friends and associates visiting Guatemala transported–if you can call it that–coffee from his family’s farm to Bellingham in their suitcases.

In Guatemala, Edwin tried to get a license that would make him a legally sanctioned producer/exporter. He was, he tells me, “the first person in Guatemala to seek a license who was not a large scale buyer/exporter.” The process wasn’t pretty.

“There are different types of licenses.  I heard the easiest one to get was the  producer/exporter.  So I applied for that.  Like many things with the bureaucracy, you you are told you have to have an application form for that category of license. But,. oh well, we don’t have any of those made right now.  So I asked can you print one?’ Actually we don’t have that form, we have never really used it.”

“So  where do you go from there?”  Edwin asks.

More tomorrow about where he has gone from there and where he hopes to go…

I wrote in painful detail describing the tragedy that befell my beloved MacBook at the SCAA convention in Minneapolis. Death by red wine. One little glass of pinot noir blew our the innards of my electronic avatar and that was that, although my hard disk was saved.

Before I left Minneapolis I discussed this tragic occurence with the general manager of the hotel, explaining that the small round table in the bar on which I was working possessed a fatal wobble, and saying sweetly and politely that I intended to hold the hotel accountable.

I returned home last Tuesday night, raced to the Apple store on Wednesday morning, and bought a new MacBook for $1250. The Apple store gave me a receipt spelling out the damage to my old MacBook and reporting that it would cost $750 to repair.

I called the hotel in Minneapolis –OK, it was the Millennium Hotel– and left a message for the general manager asking that I be reimbursed for $750, the price of the repair.

You won’t believe this, but the GM called me back in less than an hour and said, “Sure, that’s the least we can do.” And then he promised to send me a check as soon as he received the receipt from Apple.

Needless to say, I was impressed. I sent the Apple receipt to him last Thursday, or maybe it was Friday. I haven’t gotten my check yet, but I believed the guy. I will let you know when the check arrives.

….I had an interesting phone conversation today with Edwin Martinez of Finca Vista Hermosa in Guatemala. Edwin is one of the few growers in Latin Amer who is selling his coffee without benefit of an exporter. He represents what I think of as the Third wave among growers–a new generation of bilingual growers who are would like to rewrite the way business is done on the producing end of the coffee chain, replicating what Third Wave buyers and roasters have done on the other end of the business. More tomorrow….

Thinking about the ability of specialty coffee to withstand the current economic turmoil:

I continue to be amazed at the gap between the specialty world and the foodie world.  For me part of the richness of specialty world is its status as highly elaborated  subculture with its own folkways, traditions, inside jokes, expectations, history and arguments.  All this makes specialty coffee a rich and complicated world for a reporter like me to explore.  But subcultures are closed environments. You are in or you are.  You get the joke or you don’t.  You feel welcome or you don’t.  (It’s this very closed off quality, that is the raison d’etre of a book like mine.  To understand a subculture, you need a guide.  That’s the role I play for readers.  A guide to the subculture of specialty coffee.  And because I myself am an outsider, I  see  how singular this world is, while insiders take the eccentricity for granted.)

Trouble is in a  economy going south where every wholesale and retail customer is an important customer, this subcultural aspect of coffee is a problem.  It’s too exclusive.  It doesn’t welcome new folks into the fold.   Not unless they  undergo initiation rites, suffer a little, sign on as acolytes or apprentices.  Read the blogs.  Buy equipment.  learn about coffee.  Prove they are really really committed to specialty coffee.

The insularity of the specialty subculture keeps foodies out.  I continue to be amazed at how many people who  care about what they eat and drink, don’t know much about coffee.  And don’t feel empowered to learn more.  Maybe its the issue of the equipment.  Not only do you need to learn about the beans, then you need to learn about the stuff.  You have to invest all these electronics.  It is as if in order to love beer, you have to learn to make it at home.  (Maybe every specialty cafe in the country should give away or subsidize the sale of single cup ceramic drip cones.  These cones make great coffee and they are cheap and easy.)

And then, of course, there is the Starbucks factor.  How many foodies are out there who don’t bother to explore the world of specialty coffee, because they think specialty  by its very nature tastes burnt?

Last night I went to the gym and then wandered through a few stores, shopping, but not really shopping.

In one store, the sales person and I struck up a conversation. She was 36 or 37, willowy, blond, perfectly turned out. Turns out she is a kitchen designer hit by the downturn in the housing market. Until people start buying houses and spending on their houses, she is working two jobs, neither of them in her field. (Turns out she has a gift for retail: I left the store with an outfit I hadn’t intended to buy.)

Our conversation led me to ponder the impact of the economic downtown on specialty coffee. I have heard a lot of people say that boutique coffee is recession proof. The thinking is that specialty is an affordable luxury. When the economy turns down, foodies will give up expensive restaurant meals and other indulgences, but hang onto their visits to their favorite cafes and their purchases of $15 dollar a pound whole beans. That argument makes sense.

But is it true? And does it capture the whole picture?

I live in Chevy Chase, Maryland, an “inside the beltway” suburb, close to “the District –as in District of Columbia–line. The federal government is growing not shrinking , and the common wisdom about suburbs like mine is that they are recession proof. Looked at through a macro-economically lens, that may be true. But the macro view doesn’t account for micro realities. It doesn’t account for the thousands of mortgage brokers and stock brokers and bankers and clerks and tech people and kitchen designer and contractors and hardware suppliers whose financial circumstances are impinged upon by global occurrences, such as declines in mortgage and financial markets, by the rising cost of energy and by the lowered expectations of even those who are well off. For these folks, living in a so-called “recession proof” area is partially, largely or even entirely irrelevant.

So it is with specialty coffee. While some retail customers may cling to their beautiful executed cappuccinos and exquisite whole beans, and some wholesale customers may continue to buy high quality coffees as the dollar falls and transports costs increase and prices for milk and other ingredients climb, some customers may not be able to stay in the game. They may do what consumers do when struggling with rising costs and stagnating income–they may start downscaling their purchases.

In truth no one knows how the current economic downturn is going to hit the specialty business. The young entrepreneurs who are driving the specialty business today have never lived through hard times. They do not have experience riding out a recession. Most have lost some customers. Some have suffered major blows. Scuttlebutt indicates that some businesses may not survive. Only time will tell.

I thought you guys might be interested in reading a little of what I wrote about Kyle Glanville in my book.

In March 2007 I watched Kyle compete at the Western regional barista competition in Petaluma, California.  At the time he had recently been  hired by Intelligentsia and was busy hiring and training baristas for Intelli’s soon to open cafe in L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood.

His performance at Petaluma, described below, was impressive.  His performance on Sunday at the US Barista Championship in Minneapolis was  more so–all six contenders were pretty amazing.  ( I say all this in full humility, as a non coffee professional sitting in the audience, who did not taste anyone’s drinks.)

Anyway, here’s a portion of my portrait of Kyle Glanville, more or less at it appears in God in a Cup.  To read the complete portrait and a lot more about Intelligentsia’s barista team, you can buy (or borrow) my book:

from God in a Cup…

“I watched Kyle compete at Petaluma. A former theater major, the slender, dark- haired, blue- eyed Kyle has a polished stage presence and an actor’s understanding of the technical aspects of performance. He’s set his act to instrumental hip-hop that is both accessible and high energy. He  begins by whisking tangelo juice and sugar together for his specialty drink, Lady Marmalade. He sets those ingredients on a small burner to reduce as he begins making his four espressos, using a blend of Intelligentsia coffees from Bolivia and Brazil. He deftly pours his shots into four small porcelain cups that he sets on a tray with four water glasses. He presents these to the judges, and then he gets to work on the cappuccinos. His hands vibrate as he pours espresso and frothed milk. “I’m shaking to make the latte art, not because I am nervous,” he smoothly tells the crowd. He refills the judge’s water, cool as he can be, and serves the cappuccinos. Then he deftly returns to the burner, removes the reduction, adds organic cream, and infuses lemon zest into steamed milk for a multi-layered specialty drink. The rules allot each performer 15 minutes. Kyle completes his routine in thirteen minutes and forty-nine seconds. More than a minute to spare. A masterful performance.

I talk with Kyle in the Sheraton lobby after his presentation….He’ says he ’d grown up in Carmel Valley, California. His dad was in construction. His mom was a travel agent. The private school he attended on scholarship kicked him out when he stopped playing football… Like most kids, I was smoking some weed. My parents were divorced. I was the third of four kids. My mother had surpassed her threshold and she couldn’t deal with me.”

“‘Okay, fine,’” I said. “I’ll get a job. I read a lot.” Eventually he earned a high school degree doing independent studies, and wound up at a small college in Seattle studying acting. “I landed in Seattle as a huge number of people were being laid off. I tried for eight months to get a job. I had no financial support from my family. I was hustling, borrowing, eating a lot of rice and hot sauce.” Finally he took his resume to Victrola, an espresso bar where, “the lighting was dark and the people were too cool.” His co-workers at Victrola “became my posse. . ..  I was working the bar, learning my craft pulling espresso shots all day long and loving it.

“I was intrigued by the tiny things you did at the bar—–what a huge difference it made if you pulled the shot slightly more or less, faster or slower, the tamping, the whole preparing of espresso, which is so fragile and volatile. Espresso is truly an ART. It requires technical skill to serve so many good drinks. I started nagging my boss for more training. In the summer, I got the training job …”

end of book portion

This last thought: ….I wrote about Kyle at length in my book because he seemed to me to be representative of so many talented baristas.  So many of these coffee guys–of both and every gender/gender orientation–shared certain traits.  Tough adolescences.  Less than stellar academic records.  Tremendous native intelligence, combined with imagination and a bit of hipster edge.  And a commitment to and passion for coffee that those outside coffee world really can’t begin to comprehend.

Two dynasties were unseated at SCAA this past weekend. On Sunday, May 4th a Colombian coffee of corporate provenance called C.I. Racafe & CIA S.C.A. nudged Hacienda La Esmeralda’s Geisha and 120 other coffees out of the way, in order to win SCAA’s Gold Award as the world’s highest ranked –it’s “best”– specialty coffee. Hacienda La Esmeralda had taken first place in the SCAA competition every year since 2004.

A few hours later another brilliant and well known competitor, 2007 United States Barista Champion Heather Perry was unseated

when Intelligentsia’s Kyle Glanville, based in Los Angeles was named the 2008 Barista Champion.  (Kyle, by the way, is profiled in my book, God in a Cup.)

Kyle will represent the United States at the world barista competition in Copenhagen later this summer. Pete Licata of PT’s coffee in Overland Park, Kansas came in second. Heather came in second last year at the World competition in Tokyo last year, the highest placement an American has ever earned. She came in third in Minneapolis, which must have been a bitter blow as she was known to hunger for another shot at the World title.

Winning dynasties inevitably are the object of jealousy and much else. Many in the specialty coffee may well have celebrated the dethroning of specialty coffee’s “Yankees.”

But let’s get real. The human palette does not come equipped with the kind of mathematically precise equipment that you find in a physics laboratory. Cuppers and barista judges are for the most part well trained, earnest and talented individuals, but they ain’t machines. What tastes to them like a perfect cup at one moment, might strike them differently later in the day or on another day. We’re talking about the human capacity to perceive flavor and aroma — the human capacity to taste, which like all human capacities are shaped by our subjective experience within a given moment.

Does that mean I think the competitions are bullshit? No, I think they are a form of play. I think the coffee competition and the barista competition are compelling amusements designed to get civilians and specialty industry insiders riled up and interested in boutique quality coffee. They are ways to involve coffee professionals and coffee lovers in a conversation about brewed coffee, espresso and the art of the barista.

These competitions get the juices flowing. They tell you something about quality. But they don’t can’t really identify the world’s best specialty coffee, nor do they tell you who is the world’s best barista. They are snapshots of a moment subjectively experienced by judges working hard to fairly quantify their experience. That’s all, and they should be enjoyed and celebrated for what they are.