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.

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!

there are epic things you do with a headful of intentions. and then there are escapades where the big idea emerges only in retrospect. and so, this piece of food thought kind of sums up last weekend after the fact. if we’d read this before all the insanity, we would have claimed it as our motive:

(T)he cheapness of calories (both in terms of price and time) has led us to dramatically boost consumption. Food stops being something we make and create … and becomes something we simply ingest. Eating just gets easier. And then we get fatter.

(there’s all kinds of fascinating backup for this assertion. read the whole thing.)

But maybe we’re not just consuming more calories because they’re available at such a low cost. Maybe we’re also consuming more calories because each calorie gives us less pleasure. …

Because we didn’t make the milkshake ourselves, because that dinner only required a few minutes of work, we need to consume more calories to get the same baseline of satisfaction. The solution to this problem, of course, is simple: We need to take time to make dinner.

the idea, then, was to build an outdoor oven made of cob — sand, straw and backyard clay — and use it as sort of a social experiment. we would produce a massive stream of food over four days. we’d invite as many weirdly different people as possible. a cured pumpkin (rouge vif d’etampes) would be the seasonal centerpiece and live-brewed coffee would provide the glue, the aesthetic shorthand: “this is elemental. this is good. and it is made right here.”

yeah, huh, this sounds insane on the front end. but in the wake of it all, events appear infinitely more insane. an open-ended, uncontrolled, virgin experience of unknown proportions. what could go wrong?

this blog knew nothing about cob, despite building a primitive oven in chad years ago. but the barista-poet’s wife, a potter and sculptor and oven builder, supplied the verbal sense. kiko denzer gave us a blueprint. and michael pollan lit the fuse in his recent moving times piece about an oven-centered feast.

the upshot is that there’s a lot of foot stomping involved. carolina clay is orange and dense, and mixing in all that sand with your feet late in the fall is not unlike skiing barefoot on a frigid slope of cheese graters. then there’s all that pounding with fists, clobbering the rough mix into a perfect dome, the walls nearly a foot thick. at one point, the office boss asked if my knuckles were fight-worn.

two layers on, 1.5 to go.

the menu was loose, the schedule completely unknown. colleagues, neighbors, slight acquaintances, social mainstays were invited to drop in any time and bring something to cook, possibly even for their consumption later in the week. such ovens were once the centers of social gravity, and they require adjustment to others’ cooking and the oven’s pace.

so thursday night started slow. crusty pain rond, muffins, cookies and toasted nuts were the openers — post-dinner fare. a couple rather good baristas were in the house. the home espresso bar soon belonged to them. by friday night, the experience was swelling beyond belief. venison and garden root vegetables baked to perfection. sirloin rice pilaf, ribeye steaks, korean pork, sticky rice and local apple crisp stunned. men cooperatively manned the oven, and our hand-packed walls stored waves of heat for hours. neighbors stood agog and talked of topics we’d never broached before.

in true ‘le fooding‘ spirit, boxes of cold krispy kremes arrived late into the night. they warmed inside the dome, and someone soon yelled, “hot doughnuts now.” people we barely knew stayed late, quaffing off the syphon pots of sundried ethiopia yirgacheffe worka and growlers of rugbrod julebryg.

smoke wafts from where it shouldn’t, beneath the 1700s handmade brick and old growth salvage timber. panic. PANIC.

the devastation began saturday morning, after stoking the oven through the night and firing it up again for breakfast pumpkin and cranberry bread with orange glaze. the cedar base caught fire. it was a testament, really, to the shocking amounts of heat stored and radiated by the cob walls. after more than 24 hours of charging, they’d begun to push infernos of heat downward through layers of fire brick and sand and cob insulation — far further than we ever dreamed it would travel. the base lit up, and the new lifestyle seemed to have ended soon after it had begun. depression took hold. incredibly, though, a bit of ingenuity from solis jake prompted a chancy decision to press on. lunchtime was on track and dozens of pizzas in line.

waves of children arrived. savory pumpkin-herb chunks, local grass-fed beef, garden pesto, heirloom tomatoes, garlic bechamel, sea salt and heirloom peppers swirled in inspired mixes. the base smoldered, and still we baked. calebowski’s stunning mac and cheese lured the 80-year-old neighbor for a plate. open-faced sweet roasted squash and garden salad, sweet nutmeg pumpkin ice cream invented by the ladye and more crusty loaves piled on. at this point, frankly, consciousness began to fade.

and still the fire strayed where it didn’t belong. hosing and ripping ensued. it became obvious the oven wouldn’t last far beyond this frenzied stretch: it was fatally flawed. but dinner was on as soon as lunch was done, and newspapering people showed up with cast iron pots of crowder peas and squash and excellent spanish wine. apple sausages, more venison chops and baguettes went in. we stuffed the vif d’etampes with bacon, butter and cream and gruyere and baked it until tender. brie spreads, heirloom peppers stuffed with herbs and local goat cheese and pumpkin pots de creme sort of melted everywhere while the best photographer i know expounded on his master’s thesis. a family lean in the budget ate their fill. a psychiatrist floated in from a massage, in a state of zen. toasted rosemary walnuts emerged, but no one had room.

by this point, we smelled like fresh-killed pelts of some kind and there were gallons of growlers formerly full of fall ales clanking around. the yirg worka and el salvador matalapa tablom al amate cappuccinos gushed periodically. the brick arch that covered the oven’s doorway had cracked, but held together — barely. it was a metaphor.

in the end, this blog perceived compression: incredible heights of coalescing people and disastrous lows of failure tightly packed in a short time frame. it witnessed accommodation: people adjusting to people they’d never seen, adjusting to the cooking pace of the oven, altering their imported foods to the current spread, moving toward sources of warmth and away from showers of sparks. it was not altogether comfortable. and we saw social engineering: when we threw in the towel on a smoldering project, jake found a way to salvage it. the entire structure was an amalgam of insight from carpenters and potters and tile experts and designers. when neighbor jason put the local beef in someone else’s mac-and-cheese, it made an already gluteous dish supreme and deadly. when this blog became consumed with fire and ash, coffee nerds stepped in to produce streams of superior brew.

every meal, for days, the emotional progression looked something like this: expectation –> frenzy –> dread –> helplessness –> stunned delight –> relish –> reflection –> exhaustion –> interpretation.

in all, roughly 30 people waded into each meal. when the food ran low, someone else arrived bearing pots of something more. and as this blog slept off the throbbing sunday morning, the door rattled. a couple friends had come by for the final course. fortunately, an overnight yogurt was on the warm hearth, and we added pistachios and sauteed apples. it went down easy, but tinged with wood smoke. we all had some form of severe bedhead.

and there’s no question: it all tasted better because the participation was so thorough. it satisfied, in ways we barely understand. a week later, people keep coming up to us, shaking their heads wordlessly at the memory. and we’re pretty sure we barely remember most of it.

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.

It’s hard to know which came first, the malady or the remedy.

Whole chunks of my life first came to be anesthetized by coffee at roughly the same time as I was losing whole chunks of my life. Patience, appetite, wit — anything that required reservoirs of energy to be deployed or restrained — all ebbed. Malaria was feasting on the underwire of personality, and the slow rot of immovement gradually set in. Most remarkably, I never noticed.

Doctors tell me I may well be able to blame the stealthiness of this metamorphosis on coffee, which had begun at about the same time to fill all neurological voids, sparked by a countertop full of hissing Capresso machines in our college newspaper office. Here was the Great Personality Putty, that which gave me what wasn’t there even as I failed to notice what had gone missing. Here, too, was a life space, caused by a disease, in which profound habits formed. Vigor would rise or fall, and like a swelling theatrical score the shift of gears would cue the thought, “I should like a cup of …”

And so a tide of caffeine obscured the underlying erosion of TSH and T3 and cortisol. The shoals of life, my adrenal system and hormonal infrastructure, were cracking up. Ten years in, at the limits of self medication, the debilitation was so thorough that a good night’s sleep suddenly began to require 12 hours. Waking up was not unlike a Lilliputian encounter in which one wonders how his limbs came to be strapped down. Dinner became an egg. To work was to exist, barely. Nothing sandbagged a day faster than a sip of wine.

As with all dominating health concerns, the medical remedy boiled life down to a corrective routine. A rehabilitation cycle. A green pill and a half-hour’s absorption and, ah, espresso shots for an immediate lift. Only coffee, once the great sustainer, then obscurer of the problem, was now a part of the rehabilitation, so it also lost its mysticism. Once a fertilizer of ideas, it was now a thin topsoil required for basic life. Exquisite single-origin beverages were reduced to their mechanical function, which was to connect neurons. I wouldn’t have said so, but delight vanished.

More than physical exhaustion, this may be the reason this space has been so silent. In a world where consumption plays such a defining personal role, it turns out no volatile foodstuff can possibly live up to the expectations one places upon it — the identity derived from it. Stripped to its essence, coffee becomes a neuron booster required by life’s tiniest transitions. This is disillusioning, of course, but in a constructive way. It ultimately freed me to enjoy the stuff quite “simply.” No fuss, no dissolved solids. Just a steaming cup of autumnal pine nuts. Maybe a hint of muscadine.

This is not to say that one can get that cup of hot muscadine juice without a proper amount of fuss, but it’s one thing to cram coffee algorithms into your head; it’s quite another to dip your head in a bit of coffee. Perhaps the clearest expression of this at the moment is the syphon brewer, all glass and curvature and open flame. It requires a command of stirring and flame tending, of course, but with an opulent visual accompaniment and nowhere near the surgical demands of an espresso machine. And when you’re done, you get your coffee out of a hot glass orb and you drink your muscadine-fig cider just like it is, and you begin to notice that your head and your musculature and life itself is being salvaged.

is panama’s famed esmeralda — now the subject of frenzied annual auctions and ever-escalating price records — the andy warhol of coffee? it’s a stellar, genre-bending, tell-your-neighbors kind of revelation, a cup this blog once offered to foldgers-only co-workers in full confidence that it would, in a sip, change their view of coffee. true.

but it’s also not 40 times as tasty as the ever-popular ethiopia idido misty valley, as the staggering price tag might indicate. in fact, this blog’s totally randomized aggregator of online esmeralda chatter (poaching mostly from twitter!) reports that tuned-in coffee drinkers overwhelmingly thought this year’s crop less amazing than past versions. (these people would be knowing and perceptive, but not *professional* cuppers. the point here being what serious coffee drinkers thought, as a proxy for specialty consumers, not what the credentialed cuppers said they should think.)

and so what’s to account for this year’s record-shattering price of $117 per pound — the same year most well-known western specialty buyers appears to have pulled back in the bidding? (for reference: 2008 prices)

to a dull and obvious blog like this one, ‘twould seem to be the marketing of esmeralda, as the world’s most expensive coffee, that confers this value. the name, the price, the growing notoriety, at some point, add to what pure taste is worth. the ever-higher auction prices could be spawning ever-higher auction prices!

which may not be bad for specialty coffee in the short term — we’re pretty sure this blog has previously argued somewhere on these interwoven nets that the notoriety and rising prices will surely benefit high-end coffee in general. but what if the Brand — the esmeralda cachet — is the herald of numerous future estate coffee niches … in which value is increasingly divorced from taste? in which marketability IS value?

warhol was, of course, a shape-shifter and cultural wizard with the acuity to pierce the consciousness of even magazine readers and soup-can buyers. but what he left in his wake is undeniably the commercialization of art — or even commercialization AS art.

it’s hard to not to be happy about sky-high esmeralda prices. it is, after all, an extraordinarily subtle and delicious coffee. but this blog wonders if the phenomenon doesn’t end up kick-starting an uneasy trend, at least for those devoted to taste as a measuring stick.

p.s. this blog is fully aware that pieces of this idea bubbled up on twitter WEEKS ago, and even on the slow-plodding blogs. so what? sometimes it takes us YEARS to come up with the right analogy!

p.p.s. yes, this blog was able to dip its amateur schnoz into this year’s top lots. our faves: the $27.50-per-lb caballeriza and $29 san jose, though the reserva DID offer some of the most delicate little twists of lily and lime we can remember detecting on our own …

UPDATE: further evidence that the esmeralda’s price can’t possibly be all taste-based: sweet maria’s is now selling one of last year’s top mesmeralda lots at less than half the original price — while claiming the beans “are fresh as they day they came in!” given the scrupulous storage method, this is probably true. so, what has changed from a year ago?

if a coffee customer feels like a moron, the hot salty shame will quickly drown out your hand-brewed floral notes. in which case, a fine coffee establishment contradicts itself — it’s not just a minor flaw — when it believes its swill to be so yummy that it tramples on the swiller. it suddenly doesn’t matter how good the coffee tastes. you’ve just smothered it in opprobrium.

…

the blogfamily, after a decade in remotest africa, must have made quite the sight traipsing around san francisco in their conservative bush-wear. children don’t appear in hipster coffee shops in cities like this — not to mention six children, one of them wielding a flashbulb. they’d been through seattle and l.a., veering out of their way to sample blog-recommended coffee joints and largely ignoring the stares. it wasn’t all that different: try being the only white people in an isolated village a day’s drive from a television set.

still, it’s safe to say they didn’t feel “comfortable” in the louche part of town where ritual coffee roasters exists, but it mattered little. they were there for the coffee, and genial “chris” at the register (baca? maybe?) easily bridged all cultural chasms. yep, here’s the deal with our coffee. hey, where you from? anything i can help you with, sir? all in all, a worthwhile detour, made so by the combination of fine brew and fine salesmanship. a relationship forged.

later in the day, a stop at bluebottle coffee in a decidedly more upscale section of town. “must try the siphon brew,” this blog had told them, on good authority. and so he asked the lady, and she grumbled something about it being after 4 p.m. and, thus, well past the siphon coffee window of opportunity. just so, said the blogfather, we’ve come recently from africa and probably won’t ever be here again. is it possible to procure one? hushed employee conversations ensued. pointing and staring. and eventually, an agreement was made. a exception to the siphon beverage rule!

flashes went off in the hands of the blogbrother. patrons stared. and the blogmother waited, late in the day, in the van. the siphon did its thing, and the blogfather, pressed for time, then turned to the lady and asked — brace for it — “could i have that in a paper cup?”

“haw, haw,” this blog said, upon hearing this point in the story. because, of course, we knew that porcelain would have been the vessel of choice at the famed blue bottle. what we didn’t know was that the lady would glare and say, “you want it in what?” she lived, apparently, in a perfect porcelain world where paper cups had never shoved their square pasty bottoms into her psyche. there was another, more agitated conversation with the manager. gesticulating and peering and annoyed discussions of Policy. and then the fellow came over, this new person, and said something like this: you know, when most people order this beverage they intend to appreciate it. properly. they sit down and have it in a porcelain cup. savor the Notes and such. we are against paper. etc.

he got his siphon in paper. but by this time, of course, the blogfather didn’t really want it so much — he merely wanted to exit the establishment and never come back. he wasn’t angry or hurt. he simply had little reason left to defer to coffee purveyors who were, essentially, ripping the customer’s attention away from the famed beverage — a coffee he had gone out of his way to find — and installing it instead on their cloddish version of service.

see, there was a cultural gap here too. but instead of bridging it, they turned it into a yawning chasm.

it’s worth noting here that if this blog were running the joint, it would most likely serve in porcelain. it would also seek to educate customers and impose standards on its siphon process. worthy goals! but then, we wouldn’t do these things because we cared so much for our coffee. we would do them because we cared about introducing people — as many as possible — to the coffee.

obviously, many western u.s. markets support a more elitist approach, and customers by and large support elite, self-affirming niches. but what if “the movement,” in some places, is so elite that it’s self limiting? what if, because one likes himself so much, he walls off segments of potential consumers? what if, outside any individual shop, “the coffee” is better served if we find ways to present it to anyone who walks in the door? and hey, it seems like that would kind of benefit the shop too.

“opiated adjacency” is what elaine scarry calls it. the effect when something beautiful transfixes you, and you become happy to gawk and marvel along with every one else, even if you’re outside your social class. a truly great sculpture or poem of cup of coffee, in other words, levels the playing field. it revolutionizes the masses. this, incidentally, isn’t that far removed from the definition of shakespearean genius.

we’re not down on any west coast coffee joints. and this isn’t about good ol’ customer service. it’s about highlighting the coffee in the way you interact with people. when innocent patrons are treated as morons, the coffee seems underserved.

the blogfam, unfazed, has traveled on to other and possibly odder coffee experiences at this blog’s urging. there was some charismatic arabic fellow somewhere in the northwest who bridged a much larger cultural divide as he captivated the blogfather with his turkish coffee brewing method (!). just today, in fact, we got some crackling call about some new and great caffeinated experience near yale.

“but wait!” you say. espressomap doesn’t show any fine coffee establishments near there!

right. exactly.

and so the surreptiti-blogger tacy made a rather pointy point while this blog was out about the black hole that is … well, it’s a black hole. thus lacking basic tenets of existence. and the hole that is, currently, black might otherwise be described — if it did exist — as a real authoritative resource on which to base your espresso purchases. a junkie’s black book of spro. an “espresso review,” if you will.

shockingly, this blog finds itself in abject agreement. alas, tacy’s blog seems only to want our cash tips, not our nods and comments.

perhaps many willing drinkers don’t immediately hew to the idea of quality coffee because quality is so elusive. not only does it vary within a single cafe, from barista to barista, but it varies amongst those espresso blends that this loose coalition of internet junkies recommends as “good.” much of this seems based on buzz. why not something a wee bit more empirical?

of course, taste is contextual. this blog can almost guarantee that your spro will taste worse if you’re studying for an exam about sock-drawer fungus, for example. still, we might just venture out and pay exorbitant shipping fees for a pound of someone’s ballyhooed house blend if a trusty rating agency told us it was, say, “better than cats! five thumbs up!”

we nominate standard & poor’s. oh, wait.

this idea was perhaps the most agreeably scintillating slice of last week’s coffee conference. keynote speaker sidney mintz, a genial, snow-haired research professor in johns hopkins university’s department of anthropology and an expert on the role of sugar in the carribean, joked at the conference that he felt like a fly fisherman who had accidentally walked into a hunting convention. but his speech was an energetic tour of the social forces that push us toward addiction to psychoactive substances, your pantry staples included. it was such a cheery presentation that it almost seemed like an apologetic for addiction, but wasn’t quite.

mintz’s take raises the question of whether social forces — instead of, say, pure taste — is what largely drives people to drink coffee. i believe james hoffmann has blogged about this idea, exploring the effort it takes to push people over the initial hump of what, to them, often tastes quite bitter.

the question, mintz said, is under what circumstances will someone taste for a second time?

his idea is that habits don’t emerge in a vacuum. something else, a social force, is pushing at the same time, be it status seeking or self medication. when these habits form, he said, they tend to be in the spaces in which concentration rises or falls. this is evidenced in the way that “cues” often prompt your habits: a certain kind of music, a smell or a lighting change — cresting as you look up from a book — can trigger cravings.

this is enabled, so to speak, by modern consumption, which is qualitatively different from pre-capitalist consumption. individualism, mintz says, has received a new definition. it’s called customer satisfaction. this is so ingrained nowadays, that the notion that someone would put the group above self — that a culture group would starve together — barely seems like human behavior.

this is society in which material objects have come to play a defining role. your soy latte, your porsche cayenne or you tag heuer watch, is who you are. the problem is, objects never live up to such expectations. a society of individuals seeking identity in objects is a perpetually disappointed society. in this context, addictive substances have an enhanced appeal, mintz argues, because they hold your attention longer and seem more reliable by comparison.

coffee is always there when you want it. what it means to be an individual is simply a different thing now, and so addiction holds more sway.

it’s worth noting that two primary modern substances to which western society is hopelessly addicted — coffee and sugar — gained prominence on the backs of slaves. it was the triangular slave trade route that prompted ships to fill their holds with coffee on the leg from brazil to the u.s., said steven topik, a history professor at the university of california at irvine. meanwhile, 13 million slaves were shipped — 9 million actually arrived — in a burgeoning industry whose primary reason was sugar cane, mintz said, and whose human cost on behalf of a psychoactive substance is staggering.

it’s not hard to remember why i first tasted a coffee beverage: it was a frothy, mysterious concoction that the parents drank during their evenings together once we were in bed. the initial taste notwithstanding, we couldn’t get enough of this privileged elixir. cementing the dependency, five years later, was the regular prospect of toiling inside a windowless college newspaper office until 4 a.m.

without these and other social forces, it’s questionable whether i’d have ever been propelled toward “good” coffee. without the psychoactive component, it’s questionable that i’d drink it every day.

Carlos Roberto Sáenz remembers an incident, as a 10-year-old, when trucks carrying roughly 50 masked gunmen pulled up to his family’s third-generation coffee farm in the middle of Guatemala’s bloody, 36-year civil war. The visit made palpable a threat that anyone farming coffee in those days already knew — the farm could go away at any moment, burned to the ground, the farmers kidnapped, more of Guatemala’s storied plantations left smoldering. Nothing calamitous happened that day, though Sáenz’s family continued to pay arbitrary and exorbitant taxes in an effort to purchase their relative stability until the war ended in 1996.
 
Sáenz is now the fourth-generation operator of Finca Las Brisas, and has himself decimated what the armed band left untouched, torching acres of coffee plants and the environmentally ideal shade trees that covered them. It was a desperate effort to climb out of debt and sustain what’s left of a family and national legacy. The move clearly haunts Sáenz. But so do his farming loans, some of which carry interest rates of as high as 24 percent.
 
PowerPoint photos of his now-sparse landscapes flipped before a silent group of academics, economists and coffee industry stalwarts last weekend, to the soundtrack of a doleful Enya tune. Sáenz, in a speech jolting for both its dire assesment and matter-of-fact tone, explained how he has diversified to cattle and rubber trees, started offering coffee tours, explored hydroelectricity using local river water — anything to augment a shrinking revenue stream.
 
He also bought a small roaster, and began making money in way almost unheard-of until recently: by selling the stuff to locals, roasted and bagged and not at all the leftover dregs of the crop that they’re used to. Many coffee farmers have never tasted their product. Sáenz is being forced to take control of the entire coffee-making process, or give it up entirely.
 
Sáenz gives a double-barreled reason for this agonizing wane in his livelihood: the global fall-off in green coffee prices — which economists say was comparable to Great Depression rates as recently as 2004 — and the rise of higher-altitude coffee farms that cater to specialty coffee buyers, who pay a premium for crops that deliver exceptional quality and taste.

He can do little about either trend. The historically low market prices, in his view, are the fault of cheaply produced coffee in Brazil and Vietnam. And although much of Guatemala offers ideal mountain growing conditions, Sáenz’s farm isn’t as well situated as those where hard-bean crops develop more slowly and offer the subtle, fruited flavors so prized by American coffee snobs. He’s pursuing quality, Sáenz says, but there’s only so much he can do.

Playing with fire
Sáenz’s story, presented at Miami University’s conference on the “moral, economic and social life of coffee” last weekend, underscores some grave economic questions facing the coffee industry at large and the specialty market in particular, which has of late trumpeted a direct-trade coffee buying model that proponents say is the key to more fairly compensating farmers.
 
However, the picture that emerged from economic data, trade history, industry test cases and farmer accounts was of a specialty market whose strategy of cultivating sustainably good coffee is at best extremely limited and at worst perversely detrimental to the very slice of the coffee industry it aims to help: farmers.

Saenz’s predicament is echoed around the coffee-producing world, where growers are feeding a Starbucks-driven caffeine frenzy in consuming countries while getting prices so low they can barely stay afloat. Kennedy T. K. Gitonga, a research officer and economist in Kenya, said the average age of coffee farmers in his country, one of east Africa’s most successful and innovative exporters, is now 56, because the younger generation sees no future in it.

From a high of 3 million bags a year in the 1970s, Kenya now produces 850,000 a year, though the name Kenya AA may be more familiar now than it ever has been.

In Burundi, 67 percent of coffee farmers fall below the poverty line — defined as income of less than $1 per day — and fully half of all coffee-dependent households fail to see any profit, though in many cases they continue because coffee farming opens the door to things they need, like regular cash and fertilizer, said Quentin Wodon, a World Bank economist who specializes in coffee.

Wodon, a fast-talking Frenchman with a wealth of data on the tip of his tongue, dismisses high-end specialty coffee as a niche that offers a select few farmers unusual prices but that has no effect on the poverty of farmers overall.

Ernest Carman, a Costa Rican farmer, said the price he gets per 100 pounds of coffee has remained unmoved for years, though the cost of labor and pest control has skyrocketed. Even Price Peterson, whose fabled Panamanian farm produces the most expensive specialty coffee in the world at prices that exceed $100 a pound — unroasted — told conference attendees that in order to stay alive farmers have two options: find ways to grow cheaper, or shoot for the heady prices specialty buyers can bring.

Given all the quality benchmarks a farmer can pursue — proper picking, attentive processing and careful shipping — the one thing that still stands in the way of specialty coffee, Peterson said, is altitude.

On its face, this appears to rule out the great, struggling middle of coffee farmers, the Saenzes, who can neither produce high-altitude gems nor the cheap industrial commodity of the vast lowlands of Vietnam.

This may seem ideal, from a specialty standpoint. If there’s less middle-grade coffee, then the choice between specialty and commodity brew becomes more obvious, no? What’s at stake, however, is the balance of trade at large. You should care, said Stuart McCook, a coffee historian at Ontario’s University of Guelph, because specialty coffee is relatively small — 20 percent is a generous figure — and because low-grade, anonymously sourced coffee sustains millions of people and entire economies. In that sense, it also sustains specialty coffee.

Does trickle-down work?
McCook suggests that the “seductive trajectory” of the American coffee story is part of the problem, because it’s deceptive about the past and unrealistic about the future. The commonly told story arc has commodity-grade Folgers giving way to status-conscious Starbucks and then to responsible, high-quality estate brews, and assumes by implication that someday soon most coffee will be sustainable and “good.” A look at history suggests this is unlikely. McCook charted the spectacular rise of low-grade, or robusta, coffee (from zero percent of the trade in 1900 to 35 percent now) and compared it to a high-end movement dependent on a more finicky arabica coffee plant known for “chronic overproduction” and catastrophic disease. Such a market, by implication, is unlikely to put much of a dent in the broad patterns of societal consumption.

Indeed, one of the most powerful and dangerous pieces of propaganda for capitalists is the notion that a thing can start out as a rare luxury and move toward a democratically consumed “good” item, said Bruce Robbins, a literature professor at Columbia University who made few friends at the Miami conference by referring to the specialty pursuit of coffee as “pathological” and a “fetish.”

His point, however, bears scrutiny if for no other reason than it describes exactly what champions of the specialty coffee establishment see as their great social mission: find great, rare coffee where it exists, pay the farmer a premium and then sell the delicious taste married to an estate brand, creating a luxury market along the way that will revolutionize the masses the way high gravity beer and single-origin chocolate have changed consumption in those sectors.

This is trickle-down economics, whereby the dramatically higher prices paid by a few (customers) to a few (farmers) is assumed to have a broader effect on the market overall. The more customers willing to pay $4 for a cup of Panama Carmen estate, the more farmers can get in on those kinds of deals.

There could hardly be a more difficult time to defend trickle-down economics, given the economic impotence of the Bush Administration tax cuts and the origins of the current financial crisis. But if you were to defend such a maligned economic approach at a time of widespread unpopularity, you’d want George Howell on your team.

Howell is a storied figure and ripe for parody. He is slightly stooped and gregarious. Unlike many in the specialty business, he says he does drink poor coffee while traveling, masked heavily with cream and sugar. In speeches, he is so effusive in his promotion of “transparently” stunning coffees and his derision of lesser varieties that his hand-waving, sing-song delivery can sometimes seem gleefully condescending. (Kopi Luwak, the expensive coffee famous for its sojourn through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet, is coffee “from assholes for assholes.” Barista competitions, where competitors are judged on the taste of their espresso beverages, are actually obscuring excellent coffee by promoting the latte “craze,” according to Howell.)

Howell presumably got rich by selling a highly successful Boston chain of coffee shops to Starbucks in 1994. He helped found the Cup of Excellence competitions that reward farmers in producing nations for high quality through competitive coffee auctions. He has pioneered lighter coffee roasts to uncover layers of flavor and is pushing to eliminate the traditional but disastrously porous jute coffee bags for green product traveling to the States. His contributions to the high-end market are virtually unparalleled.

Howell’s fundamental belief, as expressed at the Miami conference, is that a “luxury” coffee market analogous to that of top-shelf wine is “the answer” to the question of economic sustainability. “This is the answer!” he said repeatedly. To visualize this, Howell presented a slide show that included the simple animation of an arrow with a large, pyramid-like head. At the bottom of this pyramid is the wide base of commercial-grade coffee, with various strains of specialty coffee in the middle. At the top of the pyramid, at the point of the arrow, is luxury coffee — a tiny percentage of the whole but vital, he argues, to changing coffee’s economics. Without this point, the arrow doesn’t pierce the target.

Geoff Watts, a globetrotting coffee buyer for Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea in Chicago, espoused something similar in a presentation that highlighted his company’s widely recognized model for working directly with farmers. By creating a retail market for exquisite, accessible coffees — and charging more for the drinks — such buyers are able to pass more money through to the farmer.

Ken Davids, a longtime coffee author and reviewer of high-end offerings, bolstered the general argument by telling attendees that “prestige” coffee is the goal, the trigger for an economic tide that raises all boats.

This logic is so simple, so graspable and so commonly cited by advocates of sustainable agriculture, that it’s become sort of an article of faith. It’s also makes for compelling narrative, offering American coffee junkies the guilt-assuaging option of buying coffee that’s “fair” in both senses of the term — it’s equitable, and a beautiful thing to drink. However, advocates often use terms like “allow” — as in, “Charging more only allows us at the Organic Coffee Cartel to give back more.” And yet, how many will do this?

The approach doesn’t sit well with Wodon, whose job it is to study ways of lifting coffee farmers from extreme poverty in a country that produces no specialty product to speak of. The excitement generated by high-end direct trade can be good, he told Howell, but it has no impact on stricken Burundians whose livelihoods can be lifted through the smart development of less-than-stellar coffee.

Howell responded that the Burundian farmers are “burdens” that need to be made “contributors” — a classic argument of trickle-down economists and proponents of regulated capitalism. Wodon was incredulous. There were scowls all around.

Lower prices vs. higher prices
Perhaps the most devastating critique of the specialty coffee model came from Manoel Correa do Lago, a Rio de Janeiro exporter and economist whose droning, heavily accented argument and yellowed overhead transparencies must have passed right by many conference attendees who dozed off or left the room in the thick of the afternoon. The economists, in general, seemed to provoke little interest.

The crux of farmers’ well-being, Correa do Lago says, is consumer demand. Coffee farmers in Brazil can — and have — made extraordinary gains in productivity, he said, but if consumer demand doesn’t increase along with more efficient production, then farmers don’t see any benefit. Instead, wealth is transferred to consumers by way of oversupply and lower prices.

The way to benefit broad swaths of coffee farmers — and thus make the market as a whole more sustainable — is to increase consumer demand. This, of course, isn’t done by raising the price of a cappuccino; it’s done by lowering it. To that end, Correa do Lago also criticizes coffee industry groups that worry more about how to divide the coffee cake — specialty versus commodity, robusta versus arabica — instead of devoting their muscle to making the entire cake bigger.

I asked Correa do Lago if this is an argument for artificially lowering retail prices. He insists that it isn’t. Instead, he suggests that the open market for coffee be made more transparent. If green coffee prices were widely published the way Americans keep track of their other biggest import — the barrel price of crude oil — then consumers would come to expect a cheaper cup of coffee when those commodity prices tracked lower, and retailers would have to offer those savings the same way public pressure helps push down gasoline prices at the pump.

As it is, commodity coffee giants such as Nestle have the clout and market share to buy huge amounts of green coffee at the going price, then hold steady or increase what it charges consumers even while green prices plummet. This, of course, fattens company profits and could actually be abetted by a specialty coffee sector that’s helping to create the expectation for higher retail prices.

This vast inequality of wealth continues unfettered while direct-trade coffee relationships create the illusion that the industry has “arrived” at fair farmer compensation, Correa do Lago told me. What’s more, he believes that most direct-trade contracts actually provide only minimal gains for individual farmers, year-to-year.

One point he didn’t mention was that if retail prices trend higher, then consumers may be quicker to cut coffee spending when the economy gets tight. Such is our current climate of plummeting consumer spending, which could create even more volatility in demand for vulnerable farmers.

Knowledge first
No one in Miami offered a rebuttal to Correa do Lago’s central claim that these “inefficiencies” could be eliminated if consumers were made smarter and retail prices reflected the cost of green coffee. There was almost universal agreement, however, on part of this key point: Knowledge is power.

Watts, of Intelligentsia, outlined the extraordinary gains in coffee quality when farmers learn for the first time how to taste and discern their own product — an unheard-of development in many producing countries.

Robert Rice, of the Smithsonian Bird Project, explained how coffee studies in Mexico and Jamaica prove that shade-grown coffee reduces the major farming cost of insecticide, since shade trees harbor migratory birds and migratory birds feast on one coffee’s biggest threats, the borer beetle. An Ecuador study, however, showed that too much shade significantly reduces crop production.

Armed with the knowledge that a 40 to 45 percent shade cover marks the “sweet spot,” Rice says, farmers can cut costs and boost production.

It would be hard to find a more powerful example of knowledge-spreading than Rwanda, where a massive effort to rebuild coffee production as an economic catalyst in the wake of genocide focused on degree training for coffee scientists and outreach to farmers. They learn to pay exacting attention to coffee picking, hand sorting, washing, fermentation and tasting in a strategic effort to snag higher market prices, said Abdoul Murekezi, a PhD candidate at Michigan State University who is involved in Rwanda’s PEARL Project.

Certifications, Internet access, trade shows and buyer tours help spread the knowledge and eliminate barriers to open trade, said Anne Ottaway, also of PEARL, who adds that the approach has a proven trickle-down effect on the rest of the industry. Without a doubt, this effort has been transformative to coffee farmers and the Rwandan economy. PEARL, however, is heavily subsidized by USAID. And Murekezi is studying household impact on the working poor during the 2001 to 2007 transition from commodity coffee to a more specialty crop. The jury is still out, he said, on whether cooperative coffee production or sales to the traditional market have more of an impact. His conclusions, at least, will further empower Rwandan farmers.

Even Saenz, with his small-time roasting and selling operation, is educating Guatemalan consumers on how their national crop really tastes. Bizarrely, this is a vast frontier in coffee-producing countries and a relic of the coffee trade’s oppressive, colonial roots. Saenz is creating a new market for himself, and though it’s far from clear if this strategy will work for him it raises the prospect that perhaps someday American consumers will have to vie for premium coffee with Guatemalan, Kenyan and Brazilian consumers. This, more than anything, could be what makes coffee prices more “fair.”

Debunking coffee
If anything, the take-away lesson seems to be that the seductive arc of coffee’s legend — the Dark Ages melting into a glorious “good” future — has the potential to blind. Historians tell us there is no endless positive arc of improvement. Economists tell us that the romance of specialty coffee may not only exaggerate its present value but also overstate its future impact.

This intense romanticism is nothing new to coffee and may be why the economists were largely ignored last weekend.

Commenting as an outsider, Robbins, the Columbia literature professor, remarked to conference-goers on what he saw as the uneasy negotiation over what is “good” in a coffee beverage. Goodness, it turns out, is informed by a whole host of deceptive or simply untrue stories about coffee itself.

* America’s first coffee boom, for example, wasn’t sparked by the Boston Tea Party, as many history books have it, but instead was the byproduct of the slave trade, in which empty ships coming from South American had to carry something. In this way, it was actually the rapid expansion of coffee farms in Brazil that pushed down coffee prices and prompted its widespread use even among cowboys and on westward-bound covered wagons, said Steven Topik, a history professor at the University of California-Irvine.

This story is almost never told in the U.S., and it completely reframes coffee’s romantic underpinnings. It makes the “American” coffee story entirely different, and more sordid. It also happens to perfectly support Correa do Lago’s argument, in which lower coffee prices dramatically increase demand for a farmer’s product. This is, truly, a rising tide that lifts all boats.

* Or take espresso bars, the explosive popular edge of the quality movement. Jonathan Morris, a historian at the University of Hertfordshire in England, argues that Italian-invented cappuccinos first arrived in the U.S. as a way to help make Italian-style espresso — i.e. “good” coffee — more accessible to the masses, with all the shiny levers and knobs of the espresso machine and the exotic theater of those handcrafted, milky-sweet beverages. Alas, those cappuccinos never knew when to leave the party, and have became an end consumer product on a mass scale.

The Italians have taken notice, Morris said, and have proposed a bill currently pending in Parliament that would send agents around the world to check and certify if your cappuccinos deserve the Italian seal of approval. Even the government, it would seem, wishes to define “good” coffee, then overly romanticize it.

* One final example comes from Robert Thurston, a history professor at Miami, who strikingly compares the roughly parallel trends in U.S. advertising for soap and coffee from 1880 to 1935.

The contrast is revealing of the weakness for faulty coffee narratives Americans have always had. Soaps ads, it seems, carried an offensive air of whiteness during this era, suggesting the imperial west could export cleansing to more savage countries. Soap was a status symbol of the elite. It was evangelistic, prosaic and sometimes simply racist.

Coffee ads of the same period offered the philosophical opposite: It brought poetic, foreign pleasures into civilization. Coffee didn’t scrub away odors, but rather filled the nostrils with romantic scents. It was loose, and daring to consume. Coffee, in other words, was an exotic import, while soap represented a moralistic export.

Could our weakness for idyllic pseudo-narratives be any clearer?

Juan Valdez speaks
Fittingly, it was Davids, the author and taster, who offered the most incisive take on the foibles of specialty coffee by caricaturing the industry’s win-win optimism as the province of snobs and wannabes who, in search of excellence, get importers to play the game and force coffee farmers to either get rich or get out of the business.

It was a joke, and like all good jokes it hit a nerve. In one of his final slides, Davids flashed one of the hugely successful ads for Colombian coffee featuring the symbolic coffee stud, Juan Valdez. Juan is grinning, next to his donkey, and both are wearing faux-hip shades. The tagline could be modified by one word to fit the specialty coffee industry:

“Will the popularity of Colombian Specialty coffee go to their heads?” It’s possible that it already has.

this blog is now coldly eyeballing the real estate in san francisco, which of course is where that zombie chris owens and his ladye m’lissa have landed for the moment. almost as startling as the notion that the blogfamily could soon plop down there is the thought that they were once here.

why?

and suddenly it’s semi-wondrous that two people with trucks of taste — plus! — boxcars of verve actually loafed about atlanta for a year spreading their sort of humble coffee gospel … the same general region as this blog’s hinterlands and the ignoble section of the country that opened a recent b-mag piece on mr. sexy foam like this: “coffee in the south doesn’t … seem like a natural fit.”

and so it occurs to us that the dynamic duo proffer a very rare sort of coffee gospel, in which they are first able to blend seamlessly into a subculture, then patiently, quietly, demand that it do better. we once asked the world champeen what there is to do when a youngish barista person has reached a career apex and looks for a next act. well, these two sort of found one: raising the ante where you think the ante may not go up.

not enough that octane was THE place for coffee-conscious atlantans, already the best the city had to offer. it needed to be faithfully great. and we suspect — this is just a hunch — that they’re probably not just pulling shifts at ritual, already home of barista finalists and latte artists of some renown. instead, the standards are probably levitating.

coffee, of course, magnanimously allows us to perpetually pursue, to always improve. but the great, white risk of the third wave movement is that it’s just so fun, so doggone awesome, this specialty coffee thing, that hey, why don’t we just stop here and enjoy it? have a club, party endlessly? relish our notoriety and make like snobs? gild ourselves an echo chamber?

which always left us sort of intrigued by those two. chris had patience and knowledge tattooed on his arm (this is just a safe guess) but continued to learn via unconventional routes. m’lissa charmed converts in batches, then made them pass a standardized barista exam. streamline yourself wholly into a crowd, then subtly worked to change the focus, learning all the while. reformers, i think they call those types.

and now they’re gone. so ah, this isn’t really a burbling paean, or a sodden farewell, as much as it’s an overdue rumination on the way coffee collides with real people, and gets better because of what we learn there.

dropping by their last throwdown, this blog thought it a bit risky to try a bit of obscure french poetry as a going away gift, and opted to play it safe: a volume of the ever-layered t.s. eliot and a bottle of chimay. the zombie took one look, it turned out, then quoted some choice eliot lines and mentioned casually that he’d visited the belgian monastery where chimay is brewed.

shoulda known.

p.s. it would be hard to illustrate this reflection, visually, better than tonx does.

UPDATE: the 2005 southeast regional began sept. 9. the 2006 regional started sept. 22. although, yes, last year didn’t get rolling until oct. 19. but that’s only because of how long it takes to drive to florida!
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alas, the coffee juggernaut in this case is showing a creepy propensity to buy your favor with cheap status tricks! the times’ ron lieber cheerfully shows us coffee-drinker status-seeking at its most egregious:

“…the goal is to keep buyers from straying, by offering, say, an elite status with special perks that they must qualify for each year.”

because, you know, it’s just so hard to compete with taste.

“It’s amazing this stuff works so well,” Mr. Lipp said. “What we’ve found is that people can be bought for a cookie.”

including, apparently, the author of this piece:

“Rewards are nice, but recognition is better. So if I’m one of Starbucks’s best customers, I want to have elite status, as I do on American Airlines. I want shorter lines, better freebies, special seating (Aeron chairs, preferably) and electrical outlets reserved just for me and my laptop.”

points for brutal self-effacement! alas, cue the painfully familiar CI screed about why a taste revolution IS granular — slow and painstaking, not easily turned into a mass movement.

these status-inflators create waves, but sort of, you know, obscure the point, eh? true taste trickles in your mouth a little bit like a droplet of coffee surprise. or something.

which is not what this blog wants to be when it grows up. shucks, this — bloggy navel-gazing — is not really what should be. in the end, it’s the self-sopping that drags down all of those formerly enlightened places.

so, frankly, it’s not just the presidential visits and mindless brouhahas that bog us down. it’s schizophrenia, in its purest sense.

help this blog.

that’s pretty much how our hack front-porch interview sounds, thanks to the blogson, who kept slamming that thar suthin’ screen door, and a nearby airport, and our blogcam’s ultra-sensitive “windy-mic.” it’s almost too audacious to call this a public service — but that never stopped us before!

herewith, hoffmann’s answers to such zingers as, “is there a crisis of career options for talented baristi?” because, you know, there’s not really a place online where he can consistently share his opinions …

this home machine was supposed to completely eclipse the endless line of finicky steel boxes that required you to plead and flip switches and guess. there was the near-weepy initial bench review that stoked fever dreams, the raffles and prototype models wowing fanboys at trade shows, calls for input, an early europe rollout … and then governmental delays and increasingly plaintive forum threads: “is it born yet?”

as a topper gift to you, the price went up by 67 blimey percent to a galling $7,500, and you could hear patient waiting listers (like the bioluminescent cypriot) heave large sighs and turn back to their water hiss flushes.

as marketing strategies go, this kind of product rollout is like asking drooling newborns to help design the perfect nuk, then making them wait until they’re 4 to get one — forfeiting their allowance before the final, long-awaited suck.

well, almost. the analogy worked in our bloghead until last week’s feckless spro-tripping ended in cincy, and the madman’s gs3 emerged from its cardboard womb and winked blue for the first time. minutes later, this blog was a tight, tight barista.

we’d struggled in vain to nail the quintimicrocrux espresso on la pavoni levers. the leaky elektra didn’t seem worthy. then, on our second gs3 pull, that nectar sweetness dribbled out the spout in a way that makes those hanging casually about pause a moment and gaze — and we didn’t do anything. it just happened.

taste-wise, it was vintage microcosm. the barista-poet said so, and we nursed it jealously. resta the afternoon, hacks became lords on this machine, and photos took themselves. we think it also helped the snow to melt.

still, we simply pine from afar. this blog won’t be buying one, and neither will the other die-hards we know. the price tag, on some level, just hurts too much, like when you’re a sprawl-hating, bike-loving urbanite who can nonetheless not afford the downtown townhome with doggie yard. in any way, shape or form.

we’ve heard all the reasons la marzocco and its u.s. counterparts are not to blame, and we don’t disagree. in the end, though, the flame fired again. but the souffle, it was just too soused.

(a) people are accustomed to buying coffee by the pound. (b) as such, they have coffee habits built around this unit of measure. most standard drinkers i know can easily make a pound last a week. 12 measly ounces, not so much. (c) packaging and, presumably, shipping costs go up with the smaller bags — for both the seller and the buyer. which (d) leaves you with less of what the earth produces and more of what we will soon plow into the, you know, earth.

we can think of a few triple-waveists doing the 12-oz bag thing. the coworker’s polemic made us realize: we’ve always hated it, in a vague, that-crema-doesn’t-look-natural sort of way. now we have reasons!

p.s. in a display of his profound preference for one-pound bags, the same coworker now frequents retail users of the coffee he wants, and asks to buy a pound. they’re happy to break out a generic 16-oz. baggie in order to make a sale …

what solis jake then drank at the corning museum of glass (hint: his e-mail subject line said “WME”):

“worst mocha evar!” pondering, then, this $12,000 architectural tragedy (roughly), this blog ends up fascinated all over again at the levels of indignity people will endure when it’s connected to an attractive aesthetic.

put differently, how much bad quality can a single good quality foist on a consumer? presumably, latte art sells more coffee. but how much more? and what if the coffee itself tastes especially bad?

we’ve asked these questions before. which makes this blog a hack rehashing navel gazer.

and yet, giving coffee can be actually sacrificial. because we’ve rarely really roasted enough for them and us. because we’re always insecure, rarely believing we’ve really roasted it right to begin with. (massive tangent for nate the finger to tackle: what’s “right”?) and because we never end up getting my favorite clear valve coffee bags back. which cost, you know, like 50 cents each. also, it forces us to ration. for like. an afternoon.

ahhh.

our carping cratchit conscience having now been assuaged, we will begin appending a note card with each gift that directs the ingrate in question to this very URL. that should do it.

or not. insofar as this blog should have never blundered into an esoteric, echo-chambery discussion on who/what is the least important factor in the seed-to-cup coffee process (ahem: it’s the barista), we humbly apologize and offer an abbreviated, time-saving digest of the key meta-arguments thus far (the rumination continues, believe it or not, here):

* shorter hoffmann: “everyone is special! in fact, come see my petting zoo of identically special coffee laborers!”
* shorter true: “chef, sommelier, music critic, filmmaker — i’ve done it all. also, these things are just like being a barista!”
* shorter tonx: “dust and ashes, dust and ashes. we are all nothing. except for peter g!”
* shorter CI: “i strenuously agree with all of you — because you’re all famous and you read my blog.”