obviously, this is where you click, “close tab.” back to teh twitterz! right, yes, but it’s a question i can’t really escape. the main impetus is wendell berry’s old, seminal essay on the pleasures of eating. and if there’s anything this blog does any more, it is to cookerize steaming heaps of shaky food-coffee analogies. so we’re thinking aloud here, perhaps blogging for ourselves.

the idea is that the fatal problem with modern eating is that it has ceased to be an agricultural act. foodies and locavores aside, eating is largely an isolated, anonymous act of personal consumption. why is this? well, berry’s notion is that the specialization of production leads to the specialization of consumption. in the same way that hollywood has come to specialize in a certain kind of mindlessly entertaining movie, people have come to specialize in a certain mindless kind of movie watching — and they no longer have to bother with entertaining themselves.

this makes for a passive, uncritical, dependent consumer who can be rather easily persuaded to want a certain thing (often via advertisement, NOT via an actual exercise of personal taste). we know the food industry does this — the eyes are the tastebuds now. but this is where this blog’s brain comes to a screeching halt and wonders, “does specialty coffee do this too?” we aspire, of course, to deliver an excellent product while getting consumers to recognize it. but there seems to be a sense in which SOME of the marketing and delivery says, “drink this coffee. IT IS REALLY GOOD, LIKE BLUEBERRIES.” but the consumer is still being told what to like, and he isn’t being connected to anything more valuable than a quirky transaction, or maybe a status symbol.

when the industrial food world succeeds in persuading you to eat its food, via absurd advertisements in which the edibles wear an astounding amount of make-up, you end up with an entire culture that glorifies a pig in a poke. this is an awesome old term, resurrected by berry, for when someone sells you something — it used to be a pig in a sack — that is very cheap, in part because you haven’t seen what’s in the sack. there used to be a radio program when i was a kid in which, in the space of a few minutes, people bought and sold things such as couches and car parts via the radio announcer, and the goods were exchanged sight unseen. the program was called “a pig in a poke.”

in general, this is a dubious way to buy things. if you want to get all ron paul about it, it isn’t freedom. berry nails it:

We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

instead, most consumers have instead made a little deal with the food system, or even the movie system and the coffee system: give me a quick, cheap, adequate pleasure, and i will go away sated, oblivious to the work, value, adulteration or price adjustments that come to bear on this product. but this isn’t really a very good deal. the consumer is voluntarily exiling himself from reality, and for what? a cheap hit?

of course, specialty coffee has fought against much of this. industrial coffee had become a cheap con, a system of crappy commodity stimulants. the triple waveist squadrons try to restore value to the beverage, illuminating the farmer’s plight, focusing on taste and explaining fair pricing. but perhaps it’s worth underscoring what we’re up against — an entire culture that’s conditioned to prefer the sterile transaction, that doesn’t want to know too much.

and so here comes my second coffee question: how many cups do we sell that are purely commercial transactions? you can’t force a customer to care, and there’s a lot to be said for avoiding elitism and relentless gospel preaching on the espresso bar (this blog has said some of it). but if you resign yourself to a mindless exchange, isn’t that basically a surrender? it would seem that you’re succumbing to the narrow preference of exchanging money for goods (even superior goods) with minimal hassle.

but that anonymous, transactionalized system is why we have bad coffee in the first place! even worse, some coffee shops seem to be saying that because they know SO MUCH about coffee, a customer can’t possibly enter this rarified air, and so you’d better just pay up and shut up. it’s as if, by being specialized nerds about the production of our coffee, we’re asking people to be specialized consumers who focus only on that.

now that i think about it, this may explain why, in our regular coffee travels, we’ve seen a number of pretty good coffee shops interacting with customers in ways that feel downright weird or incongruous. perhaps now we have a better vocabulary for it.

to sum: i worry that we’re still telling people what to like (marketing over taste), that we’re selling them goods without contextual value (a pig in a poke) and that we keep agreeing to a bare commercial exchange that would actually seem to be at stark odds with efforts to make coffee great and valued. it’s not really a full pleasure.

this blog falls miserably short at providing answers to these questions. but it might muddy the waters with another blog post!

it’s barely a stretch — a counter-stretch! — to say high-end coffee learns a lot from trending food movements. this blog wonders if it’s not missing the cuttingest parts, though.

– credit card points took us to montana, domicile of the barista-poet. the green coffee truck still exists. right next to the chicken coop and splendorous, black-earth garden. there’s a former pirate next door. a lot of bears. neighborhood pubs breweries, and glaciers just to the north.

in missoula, they have a culture of dive bars, and, as it happens, dive cafes. establishments that are uniquely local, but decidedly poor in terms of beverages. the food, though. you might go to the place where the Savoriest Pizza Ever blows your mind with artichoke hearts and sausages. it’s the most montana of pies. you might head to one of three simultaneous farmer’s markets and buy local grass-fed bison, top it with garlic shoots, sauce it up with a fried quail egg. you might buy a pack of moose drool, a respectable craft brown ale — but in cans, the better to float down the river with.

these things are both distinctly of the place and downright good, by any measure. these things would by no means be classified as snobby indulgences, or geek pursuits. food, in this instance, has advanced beyond class symbols and is able to be both unpretentious and eminently laudable.

does coffee do this? rarely. the current version of the worthy coffee shop seems like it’s forced to be either the ultra-cool status symbol — intellivenice, say — or scruffy, neighborhood minded and with coffee that looks like it.

there are exceptions, but they glare so brightly as to make the norm obvious.

– le fooding has become an obsession — a franco-american food movement that seems to encapsulate so much of what the youngsters long for. excellence. spontaneity. flexibility. without hard rules and accredited certificates. food for the people, a little bit cheeky, and very attractive. it’s all about the context — chipotle can soar — and about making it diverse and accessible without pretension. it’s about eating and experimenting with the right attitude.

can coffee do this? yes, sometimes. this blog might argue (if it thinks hard enough) that the most liked coffee gurus in the current movement are those who exude some aspect of this excellence with attitudinal everymanism. hoffmann. owens. colin. peter g. and yet they, too, seem to wear an attitude that’s an exception rather than a characteristic trait.

the cranky scientists, haughty geeks and argumentative snobs are vastly more common. and they’re not connecting coffee to anything.

– here in the sweltering southern hinterlands, people are discovering farmer’s markets and course meals and bistro cooking like it’s sarah palin, and instantly turning them all into cliches. conversational trading cards. a nouveau legalism. which is all insufferably deplorable, of course, but the upside is, well, that there are now exploding farmer’s markets and seasonal bistros for the NASCAR fan with an adventurous streak.

like cullen’s. its local organic pork belly and coastal scallops on crocodile spinach — and for much less money than the status restaurants — are wont to make this blog unusually gushy. seasonal crepes, farm-inspired sides, dessert imaginations born of real limits, they’re all here. and somehow this place, with its budget decor and handful of tables, has managed to put a real dent in the local dining consciousness within a matter of months.

not by boasting, or being ostentatiously purist, or situating themselves where greenies might notice. they’ve done it just by being very, very good — and not even original, per se. it’s classic french cooking with modern twists and variations inspired by local seasons. it’s the way farm to table was meant to be. i daresay it even makes sense to a domino’s-addicted redneck.

is coffee doing this? doesn’t seem like it. instead of working within simple limits, allowing humble strictures to force creativity and better delivery, the good shops seem to be sprawling all over the place, offering so many coffees now the customer can’t keep track of them all, so many drinks they jumble all up on the menu. the coffee is exotic, the names multitudinous, the brewing devices scary and the sensory overload just enough to cause a regular person to have a meltdown and opt for a smoothie. the approach deprives one of the simple, local flavor of a thing. it bludgeons taste with options.

…

all of which to say, public coffee is getting better. fine shops are sprouting everywhere. people are becoming discerning. but the examples of “good” seem to be examples of coffee being fetishized, a codified end in itself. the attitude is often stifling, the cafe exalted to a status where lovers go drooly and haters hate. backlashes take shape, and the quality divides instead of unifying. it’s all “slow food,” which is nice but legalistic, instead of “le fooding,” which is open and scalable.

you know what this means, don’t you? it means this blog had a smashing time in montana, and thought so many interrelated thoughts that it must resort to bulleting them in meandering blog posts. so much was absorbed about radical communities and home brewing and mountain lions and huckleberries, it might be enough to get us hyperventilating again …

UPDATE: a fulsome, conversation-lengthening response from james hoffmann here.

it also stings to be told your espresso tastes like “bitter … burned citrus peel.”

sprodown!

alas, the offense on both sides was avoidable — and, to this reader’s eye, the fault of intelligentsia’s “good guys.” which isn’t to say they could have done anything about this rankled customer. but maybe they could’ve! safe to say this blog does not agree with tweeting coffee persons who think that l.a. times piece on emerging coffee snobbery was “bad” journalism.

the piece wasn’t postured as even-handed, facts-only reporting … it was first-person, opinionated viewpoint. which means only this: a person who takes the trouble to go to a high-end coffee bar on the way home was put off by the way she was treated, didn’t like how her coffee tasted — and was so frustrated by the overall experience she was spurred to ask (in writing) What It All Means.

what’s wrong with that? this person may or may not be “informed.” she may have been emotional after being told such-and-such about macchiatos. her pontifications may not be especially revelatory to specialty coffee persons. but if a thinking customer has such a reaction to one of l.a.’s acclaimed coffee joints, then i for one want to know. and if this person can write it fluently, and explain it lucidly, then i would like to read it. and what it seems like is that an intelly barista didn’t have to use an “icy tone” while refusing to make a macchiato to go. nor did he have to serve “bitter” coffee. and if neither of these things really happened — then i still want to know if that’s what it seemed like to the customer. to ignore that viewpoint is to seal one’s self in an insider’s doom machine.

my father had a similarly icy and totally rude experience at san francisco’s blue bottle (after searching out the place on my recommendation), and, at the time, i wrote that the shop appeared to have gone so endo on its coffee that it forgot how to effectively introduce people to it. a lot of customers are jerks, sure. but if a shop serves its coffee so much that it forgets to effectively serve the people who buy it, then this strikes me as a sign that the movement is ultimately self limiting. we risk liking coffee too much and people not enough.

this blog, obviously, appreciates the intelly stuff. it would be almost too fun to point out to the l.a. times writer that an intelly barista has won two straight national championships as scored primarily by, you know, taste. and yet, weirdly, i’ve had more than one friend come back from chicago or l.a. and describe an intelly beverage as “ashy” or “acrid.” this is always a bit stunning, but these are always fairly experienced consumers, people who drink regularly off my home bar and sample coffee and crema‘s stuff and know counter culture coffees fairly well — but who can’t suffer some random cup from one of the best-known bars in the country.

there’s no accounting for taste, or the occasional bad cup. but it’s certainly worthwhile to think about it. to demand that mainstream journalism always “get it” on specialty coffee — to assume it should reflect an insider’s values — is to use the same logic the tea partiers or the salon bloggers use when insisting that only their view of a political story should be covered.

now, snitty quote-fests about a $25 cup of n.y.c. coffee, or whiny jibes about coffee “culture wars” — those are “bad” journalism.

question is, would this be your fault? should you, as a parent of eclectic tastes (no, really!) be embarrassed? most disturbingly, is this cause for intervention by the department of social services?

… not that we frequent these establishments, really. but still, it would appear that they somehow register more strongly on the grade-school psyche than both bruster’s ice cream AND sophia’s house. this blog dearly hopes you do not tell anyone about this.