is this the world’s most compact quality coffee travel kit? this blog is positing the idea here, publicly, with full assurance that someone will come along to prove us wrong.

the mini iron, of course, is so that the vest will be PERFECTLY PRESSED WHILE POURING.

- porlex mini.
- kantan drippers.
- 4-inch, SK-2KG scale.
- coffee (not pictured)

the end.

flight back from london and monaco: ask the flight attendant for hot water, stealthily squeeze the porlex from the carry-on and start grinding a little stash of square mile coffee.

in truth, a pack of kantan drippers was the only way we stayed sane in england. turns out, these tea-loving peoples stock an electric kettle in every hotel room. #perfect.

but the plane, this was another matter. for one thing, terrorism precautions mean that boiling water is prohibited. more terrorist precautions mean you’re likely to get snagged at the security scanner for the sleek, metal, tubular device in your bag (this happened). and there’s the good chance that the mere act of loudly hand cranking a grinder full of crunch while trying desperately to appear nonchalant will also invoke terrorism precautions.

ultimately, hottish water was procured. the flight attendant was intrigued. the cabin filled with aromatic waft. and before long, this blog was serving costa rica naranjo to the flight crew while they poured the standard swill for other passengers.

it’s doubtful anyone was fooled. but this blog had to draw the line somewhere. that would have been a lot of kantan drippers.

monaco: crazy place! more ferraris than fords, more obviously forced royal wedding photos that any public should be required to see. and such a fine (nonexistent?) line between “personal yacht” and “cruise ship.”

and yet, it’s kind of amazing that for all the fine food, captive populace, french sensibilities and disposable income sloshing around in the place, there is NO FINE COFFEE.

right, yes. an old theme from this blog. and in paris, it would appear, a deplorable condition is finally changing.

still, you ponder the american hinterlands, and you nonetheless have fine establishments in places like nashville and charleston. you ponder france (and the little .75-square-mile country nestled in it) and you have a higher standard of food, a more deeply rooted history with espresso, a huge population of tourists, all the usual complements (chocolate, pastry) and MONEY to be spent … but still nothing. in monaco itself, people are literally walking around just browsing the new mclarens.

it’s like it hasn’t occurred to anyone. but this can’t possibly be true. at this point, such a market is so obvious you kind of wonder what the secret impediment is. and don’t offer “tradition” or “haughtiness,” things that play into french stereotypes but that don’t remotely hold up to rigorous examination.

perhaps there’s no one really pushing anything in france yet — a supreme irony if ever there was one. and perhaps, for all the internationalism of the fine coffee movement, it’s really not that international-minded, as far as business goes. or maybe it’ll take stumptown to make a leap this big.

nothing but a couple new and teensy places in paris. and just think, in monaco you could serve espresso on the beach to formula one drivers and their yacht parkers. such a thing!

yacht size relativity, illustrated.

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.

more than 60 points is the margin by which “sexyfoam” three-peated as champion. still as humble and aw-shucks as ever. cracked up the judges with his banter, poured milk into his cappuccinos from both hands simultaneously, dropped his extra coffee on anyone who would take some, took a detour to greet old friends, walked out with another trophy. that’s lem — a fusion of both crowd-friendly pure smoothness and judge-friendly pure skill. and he used established, no-nonsense coffee — counter culture’s la forza espresso blend, and the ethiopia shakisso. the latter, carted home to the blogbar this evening and pulled in tiny quantities on the old-school lever machine, reminded us of malted rose hips.

this blog was so busy minding the mastery and watching his utterly worry-stricken lady that we failed to take copious notes. here, in photographs, is your champeen and your duly proceeding finalists. corrections/elaborations welcome in the comments.

lemuel's way with a grinder is, more or less, to tell it what to do with powerful forehead mind-vibes, deity-like.

lem: “in the hole, i say. the spro goes IN THA HOLE.” lem’s girlfriend: “argh.”

lem concocts a drinkable thing. lem’s girlfriend thinks, “argh.”

lem pours his drinkable thing. has plenty of time to think idly, “hope the girlfriend isn’t too ‘argh.’”

2nd place: atlanta’s chandler rentz blew through his routine with a gruff assurance and elevated his shop (aurora coffee) and coffee company (batdorf & bronson) in a hurry. notable: flash-lit orange peels over his signature beverage. major piece of flair for chandler.

3rd place: octane coffee‘s dale donchey was demonstrably disappointed with third place. he expected to win. notable: a signature beverage that not only included tobacco-smoked blood orange, it also took something like 11 minutes to make in round one. and he still finished within the 15-minute limit. gratuitous, this blog says.

4th place: greenville‘s shannon hudgens might have easily tiptoed into third place if he had told the judges to stir his signature beverage — a drink, as it happens, that kept drawing raves. a sipping chocolate without a bit of chocolate in it, only espresso and mascarpone cheese. at what point, this blog wonders, is shannon no longer the darkhorse wunderkind of the southeast, but rather a thoroughbred heavyweight? to, ah, mix some metaphors.

5th place: a crowd favorite, that dustin mattson. all snappy fingers and redneck-hipster-geek and “let me just caress this mixer while i’m waiting.” also of octane, but recently of greenville. also with a fiancee full o’ nerves who is TRYING TO LOOK CALM.

6th place: dave delchamps, of 1000 faces coffee, had more niceness than kipper the dog. without question a classy, independent barista who happened to roast his own coffee. a two-time finalist with a trail of admirers.

the southeast’s motley posse, circa 2010. this was before anyone had won yet and knew whom to hate/love/glare at.

traveling to france seems to be the only trip this blog can’t contort into a coffee trip of some type.

but, ah, we will now strenuously avoid our annual tome on the deplorable state of coffee in france, just as this blog has tried to avoid the coffee itself this trip. abetting this effort: a stash of counter culture single-origin selections and one heavily distracted airprort TSA agent, who quite clearly targeted our airplane carry-on for scrutiny because of the nefarious-looking device within it. the fellow, however, was called away, and so we whisked the bag from under him and now drink fine siphon brews in a small franco-german village near strasbourg.

mouths have dropped, of course. eyes have widened at a brewing method so novel to most home brewers, yet already so ubiquitous in snobby circles stateside. weeks into this visit, the thing is still a spectacle. but instead of getting wound up in the mechanics of the thing, like stirring methods and coffee-to-water ratios, the recipients (mostly africa and europe-dwelling family members) tend to wade into a gradual exploration of what flavors this device has to offer. when it comes to new and wonderful coffee, in other words, they tend to take a long, warm bath in Taste instead of fiddling with the faucet and body washing aids.

failed metaphor alert! and yet, it seems kind of funny from this side of the pond how “scientific” the american approach can be. how ruthlessly mechanical, how very cause-and-effect this blog’s brewing debates and saturday experiments tend to become. south carolina drinkers always want to know how the danged thing works. they then tend to offer an instant opinion on how you might make it better. there is, of course, much to be gained from a methodical, scientific examination of coffee extraction. there is also much to be lampooned in the pontifications of a coffee drinker who wants to wax profound on every cup instead of just serving something excellent and getting out of the way.

but then, we’re in gothic cathedral territory. the stones for the local marvel were carved from the rocky hill beside our village. scientific prowess was required. but the point wasn’t to prove those methods, but to get to something else that transports you. the means was never the thing. this requires a sort of investigative vulnerability; it precludes a swaggering hubris.

so let’s apply this broadly, using absurd generalities, shall we? let’s! there seem to be numerous european coffee personalities who embody investigative vulnerability. they seem to be much respected for it. a significant slice of the americans, meanwhile, seem to carve entire identities out of something transient — a brewing method, a passing innovation, a staunch position in an argument. they are then loved or loathed, and sometimes both. exceptions are of course on both sides. but who’s counting? CI always categorizes simplistically!

alas, a caveat: it could be that an overly large sense of introspection and contentment is why french espresso continues to be so horrific. cultural navel gazing = deification of the mediocre and all that.

to compensate, this blog will now go measure its siphon burner flame height and correlate it with drop times in dry, northern french climates.

P.S. this blog, of course, normally uses the butane burner for its siphon heat source. getting that thing on board an international aircraft, however, was clearly a nonstarter. thus, the alcohol burner seen here, which required a sort of, ah, vulnerable investigation into the bowels of the fench supermarche’, in search of what they call “alcool a bruler.” #success.

here’s what it’s like walking into jason dominy‘s lair, an urban charlotte warehouse space not technically owned by jason dominy, but, you know, “owned” by jason dominy. at least, that’s what his raucous, all-night tenure at the microphone seemed to indicate.

shrouds of black denote the cool space. light ropes = party time! people clink their wine glasses around and sip and “sonicetoseeeeeyou!” for now, but OH THE MAYHEM of which they are capable. the DJ — surfer, magazine cover boy and former southeast barista champion lem butler, once dubbed “sexyfoam” by a cast of puppets — is clearly a favored part of the arrangement. he is in the action, as central as the pallet of cake, and the beats go shunk-a-junk and loudness happens almost before the place is fully populated.

“daddee,” the blogson says, all fixated on the moat of candy-capped cupcakes, “can i have one?” but in the din it’s all vowels, no consonants: ” ‘an i ‘ave uh?” “sure,” we scream, certain he couldn’t have meant a longneck, and then, oh, hey, a person we know! and another one! wow, let’s have a red-faced convo in which we laugh and shout and then shout the same thing again! and isn’t it funny that it looks like your tongue is in my ear! and oh, ow, i was trying to get my point across, not really butt your head! ha! wha?

these sorts of parties are great. maximum thoughts communicated in the briefest of primal screams. “rad!” someone says. “yup!”

that there was serious dilworth money plowed into the catered spread, no question. that a far-flung crowd from indiana to florida had made a substantial trek for a weekend of happy southeastery, absolutely. that the concept of a latte art throwdown, eye-rolled by some, was totally novel and awesomely radulous to much of the crowd, yeah. that this blog, being petrified in fear of the raging, all-or-nothing aurelia steam wands, was inevitably the first to be called upon to demonstrate these milky arts to the masses, of course it was!

“allllllll the way from greenville, south carolina,” the voice bellows, all mad-lib and no subtlety, “it’s the blogfamily mafia!” a phrase of indeterminate meaning, but oh, dominy was just getting started. as one listened to his full-throated commandeering, one almost felt compelled to gasp for air on his behalf. such a vent of exuberant, hysterical hyperbole, that dominy. in his verbal arts, atlanta’s octane coffee became “THE premier cafe in the entire southeast.” a possibility, yes, but maybe we could argue about it first? ben helfen was “the man i want to marry” or something equally stunning, and the crowd — the entire crowd, congealed as a single personality — was dubbed the “second most important person to me, after my wife.” whew, gasp. a party full of best men! the PARTY is your best man!

this colossal optimism, this overwhelming exuberance, of course, was a huge hit and an endearing thing for those present and, in the end, a sort of mascot for charlotte and southeastern coffee. lots of love and glee, very little of that west coast cynicism or angst.

turns out the latte art bash went something like three hours long, and this blog had told the son, “don’t worry! we’ll leave as soon as i lose!” hehe, yes. which ended up being in the final round, when we finally choked on a simple heart-topped rosetta and handed the entire 30-person competition to a very deserving chandler rentz of atlanta’s aurora coffee. by then the blogson was asleep on a table next to a longneck, and we had foolishly allowed ourselves to muse about that grand prize baratza vario grinder.

sigh. a reliably underwhelming bridesmaid, that’s what this blog is. always game to make a stab at it, never a real threat to take the prize.

not that second-place prizery wasn’t quite a haul. tamper, syphon, pitcher, scale, coffee, pallo tool, magazine. shamyeah. and to think, this blog hadn’t really used full-blast commercial steam before, always coaxed those big twisty steam wands to a relatively tame speed. the aurelia, with its snap-on steam lever, robbed us of all that comfort. which, hey, is like a prerequisite for artistic expression, no?

we left as dominy was, uh, chest-bumping(?) lem and making his way to the espresso machines. and hey, was that a bon jovi-m.i.a. mix that just left us newly deaf?

unlike last year, when this blog’s reaction was sort of bewildered bemusement, the result here was quite a head ringing. quite an expression of the coffee vibe in this part of the country. quite a night.

i SAID, “quite a night! quite an expression of the …!”

those coffee and crema boys check out the latte art wares. “is this how you shake it, yo?”

noted: this image does not denote cause and effect! the blogson, having rooted for his blogfather to pour winning latte art, ultimately resigned himself to the reality that doing so means we may. never. leave. and thus deposited himself on a table, next to some random empty.