Monday, September 16, 2019

Go Get Em Tiger - Serious Fun in LA



Charles Babinski & Kyle Glanville, GGET co-founders

A few years ago I got an email from one Charles Babinski, asking me about roast styles and my work at Starbucks and Allegro. This was a guy who clearly cared about coffee history, and who knew that lasting innovations tend to come from those who have already mastered their craft. I didn't know much else about him and his business partner Kyle Glanville, but that just reflects my ancient curmudgeon status, as both of them have been key movers and shakers in West Coast specialty coffee for a long time now. 

I encourage anyone who wants to be inspired by state-of-the-art coffee retail to read this recent article which captures the unique combination of passionate excellence, care for the customer's experience and joie de vivre so perfectly embodied in the company's fun-loving name. 

While both founders got their start at leading Third Wave roasters (Victrola and Intelligentsia) they're certainly not members of the rebel-against-Starbucks/how light can we roast this? sect whose undrinkable coffees are so depressingly easy to find. The roasts I've seen from them have all been extraordinarily balanced, reminding me of the best California craft roasters from way back (San Francisco's legendary Freed, Teller & Freed and Pannikin in San Diego in particular). And yet the best of Third Wave practices is also front and center, with exemplary sourcing from small producers and far more credit to (and information on) farms and farmers than was ever the case a decade or two ago. 

It occurs to me that one of the really good things about Third Wave coffee is its multifaceted impetus towards transparency. At its best this means transparency in trade practices and pricing, giving the farmer credit by sharing his or her story, emphasizing the taste of place that only single origin coffees moderately roasted can provide, and so on. On the other hand, most newer Third Wave places I've been in offset such admirable clarity with great insularity in the way they relate to their customers. At its most extreme one finds places that don't offer milk or sweeteners at their condiment bars, brew "fresh-squeezed" coffee that isn't roasted dark enough to even cup test through their espresso machines, and in general seem to view their customers as merely an unfortunate but necessary inconvenience to be endured as long as their money can be used to fund the next "direct trade" origin trip. 

Go Get Em Tiger is so much the opposite of that approach, even though the two principals know exponentially more about coffee than 90%+ of their competitors and could easily justify a bit of arrogance if they so chose. Instead the model here seems to be two-way transparency, with Charles and Kyle infectiously sharing the joys of the cupping room and origin travel while eagerly engaging with and listening to their customers. It's a mandala in which every stakeholder in the complex journey of coffee is honored - and no one forgets that at the end of the day it's the customer who makes the whole thing possible, meaning that value matters as much as excellence and consistency in the cup and kindness from the staff are far more important than coffee quality.

Here are a couple of especially delicious new crop coffees I recently tasted. These are just phone photos but I hope the beauty of the classic full-city roast and the care they take with their descriptions shines through. The Ethiopian is indeed a "fruit bomb,"  while the Guatemalan is the epitome of elegant balance - simply as good as it gets. 




Check out the innovative coffee visuals on GGET's web site and then get lost in their educational videos and online store. Charles Babinski writes and talks about coffee with a fun-loving eloquence and unpretentious passion that is as rare as it is refreshing. 

Go Get Em Tiger has quickly grown to 7 stores, with more on the way, and interestingly is 100% focused on sales through its stores and online - no wholesale. That is truly the road less traveled in building a brand, but it is the right one if you care about quality and want to be in charge of your own destiny. 

I look forward to visiting these folks next time I'm out in LA, and have put them at the top of my list of recommended mail order sources. 




Monday, August 12, 2019

Sublime Artistry in Albuquerque : Cutbow Coffee

Cutbow Coffee owner Paul Gallegos amidst the tools of the trade
A summer house sit in Albuquerque has afforded me the opportunity to finally pay a visit to Cutbow Coffee, run by the humble, affable and vastly knowledgeable Paul Gallegos, who roasted for Peet's for decades. Cutbow was in fact recommended to me by Starbucks co-founder and long-time Peet's owner Jerry Baldwin. There's no one whose recommendations I trust more than Jerry's, but I must say my high expectations were greatly exceeded by the reality of what Paul and his team have wrought in less than two years in business. 


Understated packaging and don't miss the humorous "pairings"
Cutbow is clearly first and foremost a neighborhood hangout, with carefully made espresso drinks, great drip and French Press coffee, pastries and the usual wi-fi addicted habitués, but the beautiful 50 kilo roaster and heavenly smell of just-roasted coffee lets you know this is a serious place to buy beans. And from the caliber of the customer service to the cups the coffee's served in, it's clear that the standard Jerry Baldwin always said needed to be applied to everything ("is it as good as the coffee?") is taken very seriously at Cutbow. 

You might expect a guy who roasted 70 million pounds of coffee during his 28 years at Peet's to roast everything the way they do, but instead Mr. Gallegos sources, blends and roasts with the intuitive freedom of what wine writer Matt Kramer calls "signatureless" winemaking (in this case, coffee-making), in which the degree of roast is a product of engaging with each green coffee with all 5 senses. Instead of a formula, the Peetsian ideal of achieving as much luscious body as possible without sacrificing acidity, aroma and varietal nuance is achieved through a "beginner's mind" approach of letting each new coffee speak for itself. 

I had fleeting exposure to (and training from) roasters with such skills during the early days at Starbucks, but Paul's three decades of deep practice of his craft under the tutelage of Mr. Peet, Jim Reynolds, Jerry Baldwin and others gives him a depth of sensitivity and appreciation far beyond anything a person like myself, who bounced between Starbucks and Allegro rather than staying put learning from the best, could ever hope to fully appreciate. 

Photos of roasted coffee are notoriously hard to get right, but here are three I took with my phone that give a sense of some of the range at Cutbow. The Ethiopian is roasted exactly as we used to at Starbucks in the early 80's (and thus much lighter than the nuance-less Scolari torching they apply to everything today), and the Sumatra is likewise deep but not dark. The seasonal Stone Lake blend is one significant notch lighter, reminding me not of Peet's, but in both its flavor and roast degree of the reference-standard Mocha Java from Freed, Teller and Freed's, San Francisco's original specialty coffee roaster (founded in 1898) where a certain one-time employee named Alfred Peet perhaps learned as much about coffee as he had in Europe. Stone Lake is truly a rara avis in today's coffee landscape: not only is it a true full city roast, but it's also a masterful blend that really does offer more complexity, nuance and balance than any single origin coffee. 



Ethiopia, Sumatra, Stone Lake Summer Blend (left to right)

Part of the Peet's tradition is taking equal pride in single origin coffees and blends, and Mr. Gallegos has learned this lesson so well that one of his innovations is offering single origins that in at least two cases are themselves blends! The current Ethiopian offering is a combination of two spectacular naturals, while the Sumatra, which is simply the best Indonesian coffee I've ever tasted, is an artful post-roast blend of an excellent "regular" Mandheling with a classic Aged Sumatra. 

Given the thorough transformation of Starbucks stores into a moron's version of Baskin Robbins and the even more undrinkable $30 a pound lemon juice on offer (with a free side of attitude) at hipster Third Wave outlets everywhere I mostly avoid even visiting retail coffee shops anymore and content myself with home-roasted beans from Sweet Maria's. You can imagine then that walking into Cutbow was for me a form of time travel, taking me back very specifically to my first visit to Starbucks Pike Place in 1977, where I was overcome with a desire to buy a half-pound of every coffee and take it straight home. The sense of total commitment to excellence and the confidence that aroma and taste will correspond exactly and be an authentic expression of place is something I haven't experienced anywhere else since that time, with the one treasured and noteworthy exception of George Howell's The Coffee Connection back in its early 90's heyday. 

It would be hard for anyone who didn't know Starbucks in its early, pre-espresso bar, pure roaster-retailer days to fathom, but it was once such an intensely and obviously product-driven place that an article in the Seattle Weekly quoted a customer as saying "one of the things I love about this place is they're so passionate about coffee that I sometimes wonder as I walk through the door if I'm qualified to shop here." It was nice for an old dog like me to feel that kind of gratitude and goosebumps again.