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. 

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. 

What it means to love and serve coffee

I don't have much reason to post on this blog anymore, and blogs themselves have arguably become the eight track cassettes of the internet in our age of Twitter-attenuated attention spans, but I didn't want this remarkable (for being 30 years overdue!) tribute to an old friend and mentor to go unacknowledged. If it ends up being the last post on this rancorous blog I'll be very happy.

This article in today's Washington Post captures a little of the visionary approach to coffee of my old friend and mentor Kent Bakke, but it honestly only scratches the surface. What I love about the piece is that it does capture in its own modest way the pure bhakti (to use the Hindu yoga term) energy of Kent's relationship with coffee. That he has had success in the business almost seems like a happy accident given the palpably obvious fact that for him coffee is a devotional practice, a form of service and a source of joy.

When I rejoined Starbucks in 1987, having previously worked there in the pre-Howard Schultz era (1984-1985),  one of my responsibilities as the company's Coffee Specialist was to choose commercial brewing equipment for our impending rapid growth. I'd seen Mr. Bakke here and there at the old wooden aircraft hangars of the original Starbucks roastery at 2010 Airport Way South where I myself roasted coffee but never had the pleasure of spending extended time with him.

All of that changed in 1989 when Kent was my guide during my first trip to Italy, during which I visited not just the La Marzocco factory but the far larger one of arch-rival Rancilio as I did a deep dive into espresso technology, culture and lore. These were the heady early days of espresso being offered in the 12 extant Starbucks stores, and I vividly remember taking a prototype 16 oz, paper cup with me to reluctantly show to La Marzocco founder Pierro Bambi in order to explain to him that we needed not only unprecedented (by Italian standards) milk-steaming capability but also to be able to fit one of these obscenely gigantic paper cups under the espresso machine's portafilter. To my amazement instead of having me thrown into an Italian jail Mr. Bambi only asked me to promise that we would use at least 5 shots of espresso in that gigantic cup so that customers could still taste the coffee.

Far more important than the education in coffee Kent and Mr. Bambi provided was the education in its cultural context, and here the memorable lessons are beyond counting. Among those that come to mind: a "typical" two hour business lunch in the hills of Tuscany at a restaurant that used to be Leonardo da Vinci's grandmother's house. Tasting homemade prosciutto, olive oil made within sight of us and Brunello de Montalcino made with zero regard for the tastes of international critics - a crash course in terroir that would inform everything I did in coffee.  Visiting the craft roaster Piansa in Florence, hearing how they buy and blend and realizing we Seattle upstarts still had everything to learn about Italian coffee. I could write a book about this, but Kent is the one who ought to. 

During those heady early days of the Starbucks expansion Kent and La Marzocco not only moved heaven and earth in order to accommodate our growth but also served, increasingly, as a reality check for and sorely-needed reminder of the prototypically Italian values and passions that had made most of us fall in love with coffee in the first place. 

I knew several people at Starbucks in the late 80's and early 90's who went literally years without a day off in order to get stores built. 90 hour weeks were not uncommon. "We exist to provide a retail experience for our customers which is the exact opposite of the lives we ourselves lead in order to make it possible" became an in-house middle-management ironic lament. 

My frequent visits to see Kent, John Blackwell, Brenna Worthen, Pat Loraas and other members of La Marzocco's astonishingly talented crew provided me with healing (and indeed probably life-saving) reconnection with the values I had learned from Kent on our first trip to Italy together. What became clear then was that greatness in coffee comes from taking the time to relish it with one's senses fully engaged - that the world of the coffee roaster and barista are not far removed at all from those of the great chefs, painters and sculptors whose creativity is so emblematic of Italy. A great espresso, like one's first taste of real Genovese pesto in its native context in Genoa, or first spoonful of hazelnut gelato at Vivoli in Florence, should simply stop discursive mind in its tracks and leave one awash in gratitude for just that moment of being alive. Kent Bakke has provided me (and so many others) with more such moments than I ever believed possible. 

The Chemex Slayer

I try to keep up with the coffee and coffee maker selection at mainstream retailers now that we're back in the U.S. and while in Wal Mart today I picked up this Bodum 1 liter pour-over for $20. I'd seen the smaller pint size version at a Starbucks display but wouldn't have touched it since [the bane of all attempts at single cup/small batch drip brewing]  the contact time between grounds and water would've fallen far short of the required 4-6 minute range. 

This brewer comes with a stoutly-made, ultra fine-mesh permanent nylon filter. The pot I just brewed using a liter of water and 61 grams of coffee took exactly 5:30 to brew using standard drip grind. 

Here's a photo of the unit with the included Bodum 7 gram scoop (which I recommend replacing with a CBC 2 Tablespoon scoop, or better yet a gram scale) and a nifty top to keep in warmth and aroma and help with pouring. 

Personally I think the Bodum looks much nicer than the clunky unit below with its Depends-size paper filter. Note that the Bodum uses a cork (or in some models neoprene) collar to avoid contact with hot coffee, whereas Chemex, knowing full well there's no chance your coffee will be anything more than tepid after the mega-filter strips out most of its flavor,  goes with wood (which has the added "benefit" of ensuring a retail price with serious snob appeal). 

I'm not really wild about brewing into glass given its fragility and so-so heat retention, but at $20 this Bodum brewer costs less than half of my preferred manual setup (see photo). Plus no paper filters to buy with the Bodum, vs. ten cents a pop for the obscure #6 size the Nissan thermos brewer requires. 

Throw in a $25 best-in-class Bodum blade grinder (also at Wal Mart) and a $5.88 Bosch-valved can of the rather excellent coffee below and you've got a world-class home brewing set-up - including the coffee - for less than the price of one 8 oz. bag of cinnamon-roasted Panama Gesha at your local third wave roastery. Pretty darn cool. 

As a p.s. I also noted with delight that at the opposite end of the price spectrum Bodum has finally introduced an electric vacuum pot that gets the grounds and water contact time right, with a full four minutes once grounds and water have mixed before the vacuuming begins. Looks like a pretty good value at $200, though the Behmor Brazen (see last photo) has come down in price to $169 now and is certainly far more practical on a day-to-day basis. Still, that's the price of 10 Bodum pour-overs, so I'd probably ultimately rather keep it simple and spend the other $180 on coffee. 

EPEBO VACUUM BREWER

Batdorf & Bronson Part 2: A Walk on the Wild Side

Today's morning cup couldn't be more different from yesterday's Costa Rica La Minita del Sol Tarrazu, yet both coffees are outstanding exemplars of their particular styles. One of my heroes, wine importer Kermit Lynch, would probably say they both "reek with typicité," while most professional cuppers would say the Ethiopian just reeks - period - of exactly the kind of funky, fruity ferment they go to such lengths to avoid in their buying.

During my nearly three decades in the coffee trade I took advantage of every opportunity that came my way to taste coffee with consumers and whenever I included a choice lot of either Ethiopian Harrar or Yemen Mocha it was the overwhelming favorite of most tasters - even alongside top Kenya auction lots, the best Guatemalans and clean but perfumed Ethiopia Yirgacheffes. The winy complexity and room-filling aroma of these coffees really is incomparable.

To be clear, there is a decisive difference between "fruity" and "rank ferment" and this lot of Ethiopia Gedeb is stunningly fruity but not fermented. That said, a fastidious fan of washed coffees (of whom there are many in the coffee trade) would say that due to the nature of dry-processed coffees one is playing with fire here, as it only takes one bad bean for a pot (or ground pound) of coffee to be thoroughly ruined.

Among my many mentors who abhorred natural-processed coffees two in particular come to mind: George Howell and Bill McAlpin. Just about the first thing George did when he got a large sample of Erna Knutsen's beloved Yemen Mocha Mattari was to roast it up, sort all of the quakers (unripe, light-colored beans) out and brew the sound beans and the quakers separately, pronouncing the former uninteresting and the latter undrinkable. As for Mr. McAlpin, I'd wager there wouldn't be a printable word in his description of a dry-processed Ethiopian like the one I'm drinking this morning, considering his answer to New York Times writer Florence Fabricant many years ago when she asked him about the then new-to-market dry-processed specialty coffees from Brazil. The exchange (all via phone) went like this:

"Mr. McAlpin, what do you think of the unwashed Brazilians?"

"I think they're great - as long as you're not talking about coffee."

Twisted humor aside, this particular Ethiopian, which (like yesterday's La Minita) I'd rate in the mid-90's on a cupping form, is an outstanding example of a truly dramatic improvement in coffee quality from that country for which leading specialty coffee importers and passionate buyers at leading Third Wave roasters deserve tbe credit. The use of Grain Pro bags, improved sorting of cherry, use of Kenya-style raised drying beds and expedited shipping from origin have pretty much done away with the all-too-common situation from years past where a pre-shipment sample FedExed from origin tasted fantastic while the same coffee on arrival at its U.S. port was a baggy, woody shadow of its former self. For at least the past 5-7 years, thanks to roasters like Batdorf & Bronson and home roasting supplier Sweet Maria's I've been consistently able to drink dry-processed Ethiopian coffees that are far better than anything from Ethiopia or Yemen in past decades. That's not true, by the way, of washed coffees from either Ethiopia or Kenya, which despite being beautifully processed and full of citric acidity are almost invariably lacking in the particular kind of fruit (lemony Apricot and jasmine in the case of Yirgacheffe, blackcurrant for Kenya) that used to be their signature.

Ethiopia Gedeb, Full City+ roast

It's not every coffee company who had the "bandwidth" to source a washed coffee as refined and subtle as the La Minita while also offering a natural coffee as funky and outrageous as Ethiopia Gedeb, which surely is a direct link to the taste of coffee as Kaldi the goatherder and his peers first experienced it thousands of years ago in coffee's motherland.

La Minita del Sol at Batdorf & Bronson: Old School at its Finest

This morning I'm drinking a cup of Costa Rica La Minita del Sol Tarrazu from Batdorf & Bronson. The first word out of my mouth after the first sip was "magnificent," and my wife Erin remarked "I haven't heard you use that word to describe coffee in a long time. Come to think of it, I've never heard you describe a coffee using that word."

As usual with La Minita, the greatness comes from perfect balance and ripeness, not show-stopping weirdness or intensity. The cup is the very definition of sweetness - as professional tasters use the word mind you (a perfect symmetry of acidity, flavor and body) rather than the popular meaning of simple sugariness.

If memory serves La Minita was first introduced to the market in 1987, meaning that this year marks three decades of consistent excellence. This is something that really deserves to be celebrated and appreciated in the specialty coffee trade. Perhaps it has been (at least among La Minita's many loyal customers) but I haven't seen any fanfare in the coffee press.

I was working at Starbucks when this coffee made its debut, and I think it was Tim Castle who sent us samples of it to cup. At the time our gold standard for Costa Rican coffee was Finca Bella Vista, and we bought a considerable amount of their production (Starbucks later went on to tie up the whole crop, much to the annoyance of Jim Reynolds at Peet's and many others), along with several other screamingly acidic Costa Ricans offered by our Hamburg-based green coffee brokers.

It fell on Mr. Castle and Bill McAlpin, the brilliant and often delightfully cantankerous owner of La Minita, to re-educate my palate to the virtues of fully ripe coffee cherries, as it turned out that in most cases the blazing, unbalanced acidity so doted upon in the Starbucks and Peet's world was due to picking cherry that was slightly unripe. No surprise that green coffee with acidity to burn would be doted upon when that's what you're going to do to the coffee in the roaster, but letting fully ripe coffee express itself through gentle, precise roasting was a lesson I had to learn from Mssrs. McAlpin and Castle, aided and abetted in no small measure by George Howell.

Enough time has elapsed that I'm quite sure I don't remember more than a small number of the ways that La Minita blazed the trail for what was to come, but here are a few:

1. The coffee was offered at an outright price (if memory serves it was $3.00 a pound - and remember this was 30 years ago!)  reflecting the work that went into it. What a novelty this was in a world where most top coffees sold for a differential (premium) of 20-50 cents over "C."

2. It was the original specialty coffee because its asking price and position in the marketplace was based on  doing everything required to achieve perfect cup quality, rather than on extraneous factors like rarity, exclusivity or country of origin (think Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain: rare, expensive and utterly forgettable in the cup). Mr. McAlpin's sales pitch, whether at the farm or when offering you a sample of La Minita espresso at a trade show (no milk or sugar in sight) was invariably the same: "here, taste this."

3. Like Bill McAlpin himself, La Minita was fanatical about quality while also being about as un-PC and iconoclastic as is humanly possible. From the outset the farm was a showcase for the obvious fact that quality and quantity aren't mutually exclusive, producing considerable quantities of flawless coffee through attention to detail and clear standards. No "heirloom" varietals here but rather the caturra and catuai types that had already proven to be ideal for La Minita's Tarrazu terroir. Sustainably produced to be sure, with worker welfare and state-of-the-art agricultural practices, but without the slightest interest in certifications like organic or fair-trade which are as unsustainable as they are irrelevant (not to mention being a distraction from the pursuit of quality) in a Costa Rican context.

In today's specialty coffee market novelty and weirdness - think $100 a pound microlots made from oddball cultivars like Gesha whose flavor characteristics are more reminiscent of flavored tea than coffee - the only thing you're less likely to find than a coffee like La Minita that slays with subtlety and balance is the classic full city roast. As you can see from the photo of La Minita above that, too, is alive and well at Batdorf & Bronson, who've had a particularly close and fruitful relationship with this coffee for nearly thirty years.

A friend currently working there who like me has spent perhaps too long in the business reminded me that back when I was at Starbucks Batdorf was made fun of for roasting too light, while today many of their Third Wave competitors say they roast far too dark - when the reality is the default roast there - classic chestnut brown with no second pop and no oil (i.e. Full City) has remained the same for decades. For this particular coffee - at least for drip or Aeropress preparation - I'd describe full city as being truly "signature-less" roasting, using that term in exactly the way it's used in the wine trade: a degree of process that simply tries to let the terroir and the grower's work speak for itself without adding any style notes from the roaster-cum-winemaker.

Mocha Memory Lane

Mocha Harazi coffee, Yemen

This lovely post by my old green coffee importer friend and mentor Bob Fullmer of Royal Coffee was great fun to read over my morning cup of dry-processed Yirgacheffe (thank-you Sweet Maria's). Bob, among his many talents, is the original coffee origin travel blogger - dating back to when such missives had to be handwritten on legal pads or typed and mimeographed.

Bob does a great job of talking about the realities of importing coffee from a place as difficult as Yemen. On the consumer end, I will certainly never forget walking into Starbucks Pike Place in 1977 - years before you could buy a brewed cup of anything in their stores - and being captivated by an aroma that seemed to be a combination of blueberry, wild strawberry, chocolate and wine, then seeing the employees behind the counter furtively sipping coffee from a plunger pot.   It was newly-arrived Arabian Mocha Sanani, and the sip they offered me changed my life and started me on the path to working in coffee.

Fast-forward to the early 80's and Starbucks, thanks to the marketing genius of co-founder Gordon Bowker, was offering educational marketing to its wholesale customers in the form of pieces like these:

As Mr. Fullmer points out, the availability of Yemen Mocha, due to trade embargoes, political strife and demand from Saudi Arabia, has always been iffy, forcing American fans to often do without for years at a time. Starbucks, as you can see from the pieces posted above, did its utmost to offer Mocha when available, and when it wasn't there was the inimitably-named Revolutionary Mocca-Java (RevMo in roaster speak), which combined carefully-chosen lots of Ethiopia Harrar (most often the Horse Harrar from another legendary Royal Coffee supplier, the late and much-missed Mohammed Ogsaday) with Estate Java.

The name for this blend might seem to be some sort of celebration of socialism to those unfamiliar with the nefarious ways of the coffee trade, but as Jerry Baldwin pointedly said "what's revolutionary is that [unlike just about any other roaster at the time] we tell you what's in it." Contrast that kind of painstaking authenticity with what my old boss at Allegro Coffee, Roger Cohn (whose grandfather founded Superior Coffee in Chicago) told me about their Mocha Java blend: "we did buy some Yemen Mocha once in awhile and I think we put 5 pounds in a 500 pound batch just so we could show Accounting there was some usage." Things weren't much better at Allegro itself at that time, which supplied an ersatz Mocha Java blend to supermarkets that was comprised of some particularly bad lots of Ethiopia Djimma and non-Estate Java that tasted like petroleum. All we roasters could do was write our own truth-in-advertising name for the blend on the roast log to piss off the boss: Mucho Jiva. Sadly there is still a lot of that blend available in many a supermarket.

While I stand by my characterization of much if not most of what leading Third Wave roasters have done as regressive rather than innovative, one area where they and the network of wonderful green coffee importers all of them - especially those who crow loudest about "direct trade"- depend upon have made huge leaps forward over the past 20 years is in the packaging and shipment of green coffee, and nowhere has this made a more pronounced difference than in deliveries from Ethiopia and Yemen. Gone are the days when buyers like myself, heartbroken at tasting dazzling preshipment samples of coffees that became baggy, musty shadows of their former selves on arrival, refused to buy coffees from these countries until they'd arrived in the U.S.

GrainPro bags and faster shipment with better temperature control are one aspect of this improvement in quality, but the other is certainly much better processing of dry-processed coffees in particular in Ethiopia. Yemen, meanwhile, is as troubled as ever and its coffees just as rustic and inconsistent as they were 35 years ago - meaning that for the better part of the past decade or more anyone who wanted to buy a really stellar stand-alone coffee in this style, or to assemble the best possible Mocha Java blend, would have been better-advised 9 times out of 10 to go with a choice dry-processed Ethiopia Yirgacheffe or (less frequently) Harrar.

The superiority of these coffees has not gone entirely unnoticed at Peet's, which has offered choice lots of Queen City Harrar and/or dry-processed Yirgacheffes under the Ethiopia Super Natural moniker in recent years, but while they've seen fit to use that coffee to turbocharge their recently introduced Big Bang Blend, their Arabian Mocha Java reflects some sort of fall-on-your-sword dedication to authenticity, combining baggy Yemen Mocha (also on offer straight) with Estate Java when far better (and cheaper) options for both the African and Indonesian components are available. Starbucks, meanwhile, recently offered a 21st century version of the old RevMo blend briefly in stores in 3 states, but otherwise the only chance to connect with that company's roast style and green coffee sourcing standards as they were "back in the day" is to pay double or triple Third Wave prices for the occasional choice lot at the Reserve roastery in Seattle or online.

In Praise of Plushness

We recently moved to Tucson, Arizona after contemplating doing so for several years. It's great to be back in a real city after too much time spent in small towns both here and in Mexico.

I'm hoping to do something with coffee retail here and have been looking into the local scene in more depth than has been possible on previous reconnaissance visits, and while Tucson would never be confused with Portland or San Francisco when it comes to coffee sophistication the bandwidth of what's available at retail isn't all that different.

Starbucks of course is everywhere and very successful. There's an old-line roaster who roasts about the same as they do but enjoys a strong following mostly because Tucson, much to its credit, is fanatically strong (even more so, I'd say, than the aforementioned West coast cities) about supporting local businesses. And then there are the Third Wave places, immediately identifiable by hipster airs, stale light roasts sitting on the shelves at high prices, and (above all) by roasts sitting in their espresso grinder doser-hoppers that are too light for the cupping table, let alone pressurized brewing.

Nowhere to be found, it would appear (except chez nous) are coffees in what not long ago was considered mainstream specialty coffee territory: full city to full city+ roasts. From Pannikin to Kobos, The Coffee Connection to Schapira's, these are the kind of fully ripe, balanced roast expressions that gave rise to appreciation of great coffee in America in the first place, and they've now become rarer than hen's teeth as what's available at retail is either Folger's-sour or Charbucks burnt. As with our politics, the middle seems to have disappeared almost entirely.

This is particularly unfortunate because over the past few years brewing methods that showcase coffee that has its flavor and body as fully developed as possible without sacrificing acidity and aroma (that's the definition of Full City) have done nothing but improve. First was the Aeropress, which I've praised extensively elsewhere, and more recently the Espro Press has thoroughly redeemed and revitalized the much-maligned (in Third Wave circles anyway) French Press, offering all of the body of plunger pot coffee with none of the grit.

For those unfamiliar, here are a couple of photos of the Espro (both 1 liter and 10 oz. travel mug size):

1 liter double-wall stainless Espro

As for coffees, photos of roasted beans are notoriously difficult to pull off even with a good camera and I have only the one on my phone to rely on, but here are three home roasts of great green coffees from Sweet Maria's. The very imperfect photography gives them a somewhat darker cast than they should have. None of these coffees entered second pop.

Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Dry Process

Kenya Auction Lot

Sumatra Lintong

Many years ago at Starbucks a few of us in the roasting department (who were wisely prohibited from getting anywhere near the marketing folks) cut-and-pasted a parody of an ad by our arch-rival Stewart Brothers (aka Seattle's Best Coffee and now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Green Menace Herself) showing one of their roasts but with the caption "There's No Such Thing As A Healthy Tan." Looks like it's time to bring the slogan back.

Consolidation: Peet's Buys Stumptown

While the illustration above pretty well sums up what many in the trade think Stumptown has done, the only thing that surprises me about this news (you can read more here) is that it's taken this long. 

Dare we hope that Portland and environs finally gets some coffee that's actually seen the inside of a drum roaster past first pop? Probably not, but joking aside Peet's scale and tremendous sourcing expertise, access to capital and infrastructure will be huge plusses for Stumptown. 

Of course cold brew is the main reason given for the buy, but what one wishes Peet's would get out of this, in carefully reviewing Stumptown's marketing of its coffee, is a reminder of the focused, product-driven and passionate company it itself once was and could be again. Unfortunately the legendary Berkeley-based firm has utterly and totally lost its way, going from a product-driven purist of the highest order to a faltering, unfocused marketing-driven machine with said marketing reflecting no discernible strategy or position. In selling their souls they didn't even get a good price and went out with a whimper not a bang. 

The procession of boneheaded moves in recent years at Peet's is beyond counting, but includes acknowledging third wave farm-to-cup positioning by disclosing the name of exactly one farm (San Sebastian in Antigua) on its menu board; halfheartedly offering a couple of medium roasts and exactly one light one after three decades of "deep" roasting; utterly abandoning even the pretense of having the quality of the non-coffee items sold match that of the coffee;  and most recently trashing one of the best whole leaf tea brands in American retail history in favor of flavored crap under the Mighty Leaf label. 

Here's hoping they do indeed leave Stumptown alone as they've said they'd do (of course Starbucks said the same thing about The Coffee Connection and we all know how that turned out). 

Stay tuned for further mergers and acquisitions. 

Caffè Terzi, Bologna

One of the producers of the video below sent it along to me and I thought it was worth posting for several reasons - not the least being that if your only exposure to espresso in the U.S. is either the mega-chains or Third Wave places you'd have no idea of the sensibility that underlies espresso in its native land. 

The gentleman featured in this clip unquestionably knows his coffee and his art, and how refreshing to see beans in the doser-grinder hoppers that are neither oily and incinerated or (a la Stumptown, Water Street and the sorry rest) a Folgers shade of sickly tan, but instead optimally developed for the brewing method in use. 

The next thing you'll notice if you pay close attention is that the ~7 gram dose for a single shot going into the portafilter looks like nothing compared to the overfilled triple baskets in use stateside, and after you're done being shocked (or in my case delighted) by that you can see the master barista brewing shots into demitasses already containing the proper amount of sugar, which is actually required (as Dr. Illy taught us long ago) to bring the coffee into balance and reveal all of the flavors present. 

Most of the trade in the U.S. looks down on Italian espresso as something it has long since transcended, when the reality is the most knowledgeable practitioners of blending, roasting and brewing there have forgotten more about excellence in coffee and cuisine altogether than the self-styled leading lights in the U.S. will ever know. 

Caffè Terzi

A Tale of Two Coffee Makers

Fresh off the presses from Sprudge, the coffee hipster's National Enquirer, come two posts in succession about coffee makers. Far be it from these guys to notice any irony about the juxtaposition, so allow me...

The first is an interview with the creator of the Ratio, an admittedly beautiful appliance that for a mere $580 (or $640 equipped as shown with its de rigeur Able filter) brews almost as good a cup of coffee as you can with a hot water kettle and a Chemex.

The second is a lovely Vimeo profile of Alan Adler, inventor of the Aeropress, which costs $29.95 on Amazon. It brews a much better cup of coffee than any drip brewer, electric or manual, makes extra-strength coffee that while it's not espresso is certainly delicious in a cappuccino or caffe latte, and is the ideal travel coffee maker. Plus you can buy twenty of them and still have enough money left over to buy a bag of obscenely overpriced Third Wave beans to brew in it. 

I highly recommend checking out the Ratio coffee site and its videos, reading the interview with the inventor if you're a glutton for punishment, and then contrasting the lifetime supply of precious pretentiousness you just ingested with the humble warmth of Mr. Adler. Derivative drip dreck for $600 or versatile originality for $30....geez, I just can't decide. 

If the Ratio videos and website style seem eerily familiar, it's because they're clearly using the same PR firm as The Timmy Brothers, whose priceless video can be seen at the link. 

Is it The Onion or is it Sprudge? Who knows? Who can tell the difference?

It's truly impossible to discern reporting from humor when your entire website is self-parodying, but the hipsters at Sprudge have certainly offered us coffee gold with this gem of a post. 

Pan-roasted coffee in Alaska on a bus makes at least as much sense as what's on offer from the site's better-known sponsors, but what I especially loved was the photo above. If my eyes don't deceive me that's gotta be Allegro Kenya Grand Cru (or is it Water Avenue whatever?) blended half-and-half with Peet's French Roast. 

Ebony and Ivory? 2nd wave-3rd wave coffee peace treaty? Surely this is what's next. I'll await the IPO and infusion of venture capital money (not to mention the "Black & Tan Nitro Cold Brew") with bated breath. 

Full City Roasts: An Endangered Species?

I just returned from a trip to Northern California and Western Washington to see friends and family. We were in our old hometown of Boulder, Colorado on both ends of the trip where I had occasion to try to find coffee worth drinking at the local Whole Foods (with no success despite - or rather because of? - it being the home of Allegro Coffee). 

Everywhere I traveled this trip the coffee choices seemed to be either screamingly acidic, underdeveloped cinnamon-city roasts from Third Wavers or carbonized stuff from Peet's. Thankfully there was finally an exception when we got to Seattle: Cafe Carmelita from Tony's in Bellingham, which is not only advertised as a medium roast but comes complete with an Agtron number (67) to prove it. It's a lovely blend. 

Sweet Maria's has an excellent roast color chart (I'll post the photo below, but the detailed description is well worth reading. 

What I'm seeing in the hipster places are mostly roasts in the #8-10 range, and of course Peet's and Charbucks, with the exception of their token (and silly) new medium and light roast efforts are all in the #14-16 range. That leaves the entire world of balanced, nuanced, fully-but-not-overly developed coffees pretty much unrepresented at retail, unless you're lucky enough to stumble on just the right, rare Blue Bottle, Counter Culture or Tony's offering or, on the darker end of the spectrum, an old-school Northern Italian espresso blend (~#'s13-14) from the likes of Mr. Espresso or Illycaffe. Of course there are other regional roasters (Broadway Café and Roasting in Kansas City comes to mind immediately) still offering balanced coffees, but based on the Agtron numbers I'm seeing in Coffee Review for every such roast that's out there there's either a new player doting on the "tea like" flavors of their cinnamon-roasted direct-trade Yirgacheffe or an old-line roaster like the aforementioned Allegro abandoning balance in favor of trendiness. 

I noted with interest that Tom at Sweet Maria's (as reliable and unbiased a guide to roasting and to coffee in general as I've ever read) lists the bean temperature correlates to Full City (#11) and FC+ (12) as 444 and 454 degrees F. respectively, and it reminded me of a roasting seminar taught by Agtron's Carl Staub I attended many years ago, during which he referred to 450 degrees as "the death of fruit." 

I think that's accurate for coffees intended for drip or vacuum pot brewing, but espresso extraction reawakens and emphasizes acidity so strongly that optimal roasts - at least if the blend contains a fair amount of dense, high-acid coffees - can go slightly darker. What goes unsaid though is that cinnamon-to-city roasts are underdeveloped and just as imbalanced as the murky Starbucks stuff everyone is so determined to rebel against. 

It seems like much of what's going on these days is that a roast that's only fit for evaluation purposes (#9) is not only being offered for sale and brewed in pour over bars but also routinely finds itself into espresso machine doser-grinder hoppers. This is something truly unprecedented, and it's unprecedented for good reason: drinking such coffee is an exercise in masochism. We've arrived at a retail landscape that, in fruit terms, offers nothing but green bananas or black ones useful only for banana bread: fully ripe has disappeared. 

With bland and burnt now thoroughly explored, it will be interesting to see if the next (Fourth?) wave brings an interest in nuance and balance...the very things the best second wave companies, from Schapira's to Kobos to Freed Teller to Illy - tried to teach us about so deliciously decades ago. Here's hoping there's more to progress than applying a Folger's roast to good green coffee. 

Retail Coffee Prices and Value

This new post in Roast Magazine's Daily Coffee News caught my eye, and I thought the link within it to a group calling themselves Transparent Coffee Trade was of perhaps even greater interest.

The first article lists a composite average retail coffee price among so-called Blue Chip Roasters of $21.94 per pound, while the Transparent Coffee site shows that the (very) few roasters in their roster, most of whom charge retail prices well above the $21.94 per pound average, are remitting about 18-25% of their selling price to their growers.

Meanwhile, the current New York C market spot price is $1.25, Fairtrade (F.O.B.) is $1.60, top-quality green in tiny (home roaster sized) quantities from Sweet Maria's is around $5-8 per pound,  and the small roasters featured at Transparent are reporting paying green prices in the $3.20-4.40 range. (Interestingly - at least to me - the company in their listings paying by far the highest percentage to farmers, a group called Farmers to 40, is paying 40% of their selling price to growers but selling at around $14 a pound - albeit for coffee of obviously uninspiring quality).

Clearly there aren't enough data points in any of these articles to draw any conclusions, but they do make me want to raise a few issues that I don't see getting discussed very much.

One of the most obvious things is that consumers are certainly being asked to pay the price for inefficient buying on the part of small roasters. Setting aside true exotics like Geshas (which are excluded from these surveys anyway) or top-quality Kenya auction lots where there is a direct relationship between cup quality and the green price paid,  any specialty roaster buying full containers and committed to paying farmers well above their cost of production ought to be doing just fine with average F.O.B. prices in the $2-3 range for the bulk of their volume, heading well north of that for small quantities of exotics such as East Africans.

Add in ocean freight, customs, exporter/importer profit, 25% for shrink during roasting and a generous dollar per pound for state-of-the art vacuum packaging in Fresco bags (uncommon except among the larger players) and most roasters should be making double their roasted-and-packaged cost at $10 per pound, or triple that at $15 - which happens to be the average selling price from, for example, Peet's mail order, which certainly buys excellent coffee, has a shrink rate to end all shrink rates, roasts to order and packages superbly.

As a home roaster buying mostly expensive Kenyas and Yirgacheffes and a smattering of top Centrals and Indonesians from Sweet Maria's - and paying UPS freight rates - I still have a roasted cost of well under $10 per pound for coffees that are at least as good as the top Third Wave folks are selling for triple the price or more.

Going from the still-abstract level of price per pound to actual beverage coffee, my wife and I most often brew a 1 liter pot of coffee and share it over the course of a morning. That means I get seven pots (at 65 grams per liter) out of a roasted pound - meaning that if I were paying the "Blue Chip Roaster" average price of $21.94 per pound our coffee habit would cost us $3.13 per day, or $94 a month.

That's nothing compared to a couple with a daily cappuccino-and-pastry coffeehouse habit but it certainly isn't cheap - and it goes a long way towards explaining the immense popularity of good-not-great whole bean coffee (in this case from Lake Atitlán in Guatemala) for $6.65 per pound as found at Costco. Now of course the mega-growth area in Costco and other big box stores is single serve, but  Peet's K Cups are selling for 54 cents each there at the moment and Starbucks Via Instant can be had for about the same price - meaning a consumer could enjoy a full quart of brewed coffee made by these very expensive, packaging-intensive methods for less than $2.50. That doesn't even buy you a single mug of cinnamon-roasted pourover swill at your local Piercings-'n-Beans outlet.

Studies like these two are focused on what percentage of coffee's selling price ought to go to the grower rather than looking at price pie charts that include all of the stakeholders in the transaction - including the consumer. Rewarding farmers is obviously important, but so is delivering value to the consumer. Costco and its key suppliers, from JBR to Starbucks, Nestlé and Green Mountain certainly understand this but there's not much evidence of such sanity on the boutique roaster side of things - which goes a long way towards explaining why the Blue Bottles and Stumptowns get all the fawning press coverage in the world while selling such small volumes of coffee that, at the end of the day, they're just microlot noise in a container-load universe. That's also why most of the PR is about canned or bottled cold brew, insanely expensive microlots of interest only to staff and the press, the latest in ridiculous latte "art" competitions and the rest. Talking about the actual taste and value of coffee is bad business - or at least not the business many folks want to be in.

The death of a genius and the strange fate of tea in coffee chains

I just learned of the death of the wonderful Steve Smith, the product wizard at Stash Teas, inventor of the Tazo brand and more recently the co-founder (with his lovely wife) of Steven Smith Teamaker, yet another amazing venture that pushed the quality envelope for teabag tea into uncharted territory. 

Here's the link to a lovely profile of Steve and his work in The Oregonian, and here's a photo of Steve:

I've written a couple of previous posts here detailing the sad history of tea at Starbucks and my own lengthy involvement.  Because I was the last tea buyer during the "whole leaf" era I had the pleasure of hosting Steve in the cupping room on numerous occasions. We were such kindred spirits that the old phrase "brothers from another mother" comes to mind: off-the-charts creative types with boundless product passion who idealistically believed that product-driven, product-informed marketing would (or at least should) win the day, even in the corporate world. 

If it hasn't happened already, the history of tea at Starbucks ought to make for a classic case study at Harvard Business School or the like. You have a product-driven company that offered the very best coffee, tea and spices at a time when fresh examples of any of these products were otherwise unavailable. Then trade with the People's Republic of China opens up and your city is the first to benefit, opening the door to offering such legendary teas as Hao Ya Keemun and Yin Hao Jasmine for the first time. 

Fast forward to 1987 and your company is acquire by your director of marketing, whose sentiments about tea are summed up by his advice to customers at his newly-minted ersatz Italian coffee bars: "if you want tea, you can go to China." The loyal tea customer base is sent off to Upton Tea or driven back to Peet's, since (again quoting Mr. Schultz) "if they want the connoisseurs, they can have themem." 

Still, the tea category and those pesky customers who insist on drinking both coffee and tea wouldn't go away, and rather than leveraging its long history in tea the powers-that-be at Starbucks begin to court other brands, starting with Republic of Tea and then buying Tazo, which brought Steve Smith - who was to tea what Gordon Bowker, the marketing genius co-founder of Starbucks - was to coffee - into the fold. 

There was nothing particularly high-end about Tazo but the teas were and are excellent for their price points and the blends, given that they were Steve's, were original and often spectacular. The combination of Steve's capabilities with Starbucks' limitless access to capital ought to have meant that Tazo could become whatever it needed to be to redefine the tea category, but Steve ended up leaving Starbucks, spending a year in France letting his non-compete run out in fine style and then creating yet another new world in tea with his Steven Smith Teamaker brand. 

Starbucks meanwhile seems to think that the Tazo brand has run its course, and has moved on to squandering money on the "Gloria Jean's Coffee Beans" (think Redneck alliteration accompanied by the stench of flavored coffee) of tea, the silly Teavana brand, with Howard now as star-struck by Oprah as he once was by Kenny G. 

Perhaps the "evolution" in logos says it all:

Here you have the Siren motif that inspired the the warm brown of the 1971 original logo. Brown is of course the color of coffee, but green is the color of money and disparaging "the brown look" of the Starbucks stores and packaging began with a vengeance in 1987 as the Il Giornale (the name of the Mr. Schultz's pseudo-Itallian espresso bar chain) logo was merged with an increasingly de-sexed Mermaid over time. As you can see, tea and spices were excommunicated quite early on, but it took until 2011 to remove coffee from the company's identity altogether (though any passion for said product had of course died many years earlier). 

Given the millions of dollars squandered on tea companies and brands here Peet's really does offer an amazing and laudable contrast. Tea has always received equal billing and emphasis in their stores, as a matter of conviction and passion going back to Mr. Peet himself. The whole leaf selection at Peet's is better than ever and both their regular blends and limited edition offerings are exceptional, reflecting the great talent and impeccable palate of buyer Eliot Jordan. 

Other than Peet's, the epitome of a "second wave" roaster-retailer, I'm not aware of any coffee store chains with national ambitions that are doing a serious job with tea (unless you count Intelligentsia, whose Kilogram tea line seems to exist solely to show that it's possible to charge even more usurious prices for poorly selected tea than one can for under-roasted coffee). 

I'd be sorely tempted to say that we need more Steve Smiths, but he was one of a kind and an impossible act to follow, except perhaps by this poem by one of the ancients:

Having picked some tea, he drank it,
Then he sprouted wings,
And flew to a fairy mansion,
To escape the emptiness of the world....


~Chiao Jen

Guest post in Royal Coffee News

From the beginning of my time working in the coffee business in 1980 Royal Coffee in Emeryville, California was one of the most important green coffee suppliers, but as usual in this trade the business relationship was just the tip of the iceberg of the value of the connections made. 

Bob Fullmer and Helen Nicholas, along with the late, great (and I do mean great!) Pete McLaughlin provided, in retrospect, not just  coffee but a great education, for a fanatically product-driven person like me, in the necessity and urgency of expanding the definition of "quality" to really include the farms and farmers who make it possible. 

Early on Royal was well-known, thanks in part to Bob's father, for its strength in Indonesian coffees, but in short order they grew to be the most complete "candy store" around, with a bevy of spot and forward offers from all parts of the world. Among the many highlights: Bob Fullmer's travel diaries (Hunter S. Thompson, eat your heart out); the phenomenal Harrars of Mohammed Ogsaday; the incomparable Fino Rojas coffee and its legendary grower; learning to love Mexico and Panama through Helen Nicholas's infectious enthusiasm for their people and culture (with coffee as almost an adornment, rather than the sole focus). 

Fast forward to the present and an email conversation with Bob and Helen's son Max (prompted in part by posts on this blog) led to an invitation to contribute to their newsletter, and a great post in the previous edition of it about sample roasting provided the perfect opportunity. The link is here. 

There's a nice piece by Max Nicholas-Fullmer on the Ethiopian crop situation, my missive below it, and - for me the highlight of the issue - Kevin Stark taking my suggestions on progressive roast tastings and putting them to innovative good use. Obviously these are challenging times for coffee and for our planet, but at Royal anyway it's clear the future is in good hands.