Some thoughts on degrees of roast

Today I received this comment from a reader on one of my earlier posts:

I'm enjoying your post Kevin. I don't mean to move the topic away from drip brew but since you were talking about roasting profiles I thought I would chime in.

I started out at Starbucks and then moved into the "third wave" coffee movement as a roaster. I have found it extremely challenging to grow my knowledge when most of the "respected" roasters are roasting just into first crack and I still insist on taking the roast to the brink of, (or right into), second crack. That means to the rest of the coffee world I roast "dark" and that this style of roasting is completely disregarded as a way of presenting coffee. Just wanted to say thanks for providing some wisdom and giving roasters like me a different influence to turn to.

Thank you!
Landon 

I appreciate Landon's comments and it prompts me to share a few thoughts. 

One of the basic tasting exercises I've found useful over the past 30 years is what I call tasting a progressive roast of almost every coffee you have. This means roasting on either a sample or production roaster and pulling out samples of a coffee at every degree of roast from City to French. In a production roasting context (I'm assuming a drum roaster with a tryer) you can pull several tryer's worth of City, Full City, Vienna, Italian and French - enough not just to cup, but to brew, laying them out in the the cooling tray or on a cookie sheet. Obviously it's not a useful (or safe!) exercise with soft, low-grown coffees like Brazils or Hawaiians, but otherwise it's something very worthwhile to experience with as many coffee origins as possible. 

It should be fairly obvious that the degree of roast chosen for a coffee ought ideally to be correlated to the potential of the particular green coffee, where that coffee is in its life span, and the brewing method to be used, but equally important and less obvious is what the local water supply is like. Some specifics on all of these, in order:

1. Green coffee: hard, dense, high-altitude coffees of the highest quality are delicious at a wide range of roasts. Classic examples would include top Guatemalans from Huehuetenango or Antigua, Kenya auction lots, and on the natural side of things Yemen Mochas and excellent dry-processed Ethiopians. These coffees are way too acid to be palatable below a classic City roast, come into their own at Full City (chestnut brown, no second pop, no oils on the bean surface) and have a Port-like richness and depth without taking on a burnt character well into the Vienna roast range and all the way up to what in Starbucks or Peet's terms we'd call an espresso roast (Agtron in the 30's, still well shy of Italian or West Coast French). These kinds of coffees are becoming harder and harder to find, and what's happened at Starbucks over the years is the heavy roast lives on while the quality of the coffees it is being applied to has declined dramatically, resulting in an ocean of flat, carbonized coffee fit only for burying in syrups and milk froth. Peet's has done a far better job of buying green coffee that can handle deep roasting with a lot of varietal character expression, but I suspect that global warming will force some lightening of roast intonation even there, as coffees grown at 5500 feet are starting to cup like they were grown at 4000. 

2. Seasonality: by this I emphatically do not mean the bogus "seasonality" of many third wave roasters who use the term to justify offering a ridiculously small selection of washed single origin coffees. Instead what I'm referring to is that from a roasting perspective there should be a range of roast intonations applied to a coffee over its useful lifespan.

Taking a top new crop Guatemalan as an example, it'll arrive and clear customs in, say, May or June, and the coffee will never be better than it is at that point (assuming proper harvesting, drying and reposo). Acidity and aroma are at their peak, and its optimum use (assuming the roaster has a range of roast profiles and end users) would be moderately (City to Full City) roasted, ideally unblended or otherwise combined with coffees of the same caliber, in a blend intended for drip or (better still, however unlikely) vacuum-pot brewing. 

Assuming one is tasting one's production roasts on a daily basis, by October or so (depending on warehouse conditions) this coffee will have faded enough to have acquired a slight woody note, which can and should be "roasted out" by taking the coffee a few degrees darker. Depending on the broader coffee lineup, maybe it's relegated to blends and replaced by fresher single-origins, or perhaps used judiciously to add chocolate notes and some acid snap to a Northern Italian espresso blend that's otherwise composed of softer coffees such as dry-processed Brazils and the like. 

By January or thereabouts this coffee is tasting seriously past crop, and finds its best use in seriously dark Italian or French Roasts, while one eagerly awaits new crop. 

Semi-washed and dry-processed coffees are another animal entirely. Softer ones like Brazils are generally best suited to espresso brewing at roasts in a fairly narrow range that starts at Full City and goes not much past Vienna. Sumatras and other classic Indonesians are tricky to roast and have a tan or blond cast even when objectively quite far along in roast, but they need Full City+ to begin to blossom and earthier examples can go quite far into second pop. Dry-processed Harrars and Yirgacheffees and the rare great lot of Yemen Mocha are among the most forgiving of coffees, needing at least Full City to begin to show their best but also making for remarkable espresso late into second pop. 

3. Brewing method: the paper filters used in drip brewing mute the perceived acidity of a coffee, so the ideal roast for this method will taste a bit shrill in a cupping cup but just right when brewed in a commercial drip brewer. I should also point out that regardless of whether you rinse your paper filters or not the ratio of paper to coffee matters, which is why you'll never get the kind of stellar flavor of a just-brewed batch in a 1-3 gallon commercial brewer from a single-cup pour-over unit, no matter how much weighing of water, pouring through tiny spouts or other such geekery is involved. 

The vacuum pot remains, as Corby Kummer once put it, "the CD player of coffee makers - because all you taste is the coffee," offering a transparent experience of aroma and flavor that's a clear notch better than even the best drip units. Sadly there's been no rival of the sturdy, stainless-steel vacuum pots fit for commercial use from many decades ago and Bodum killed off their promising electric vacuum pots just when they were starting to get the hang of making them, so it's a fragile and arcane relic of a brewing method at this point. 

In general the best roasts for drip for washed coffees are in the City to Full City range, but there are certainly some exquisite exceptions for those who prefer body and lushness to varietal nuance. Some of the most memorable cups of drip coffee I've ever had have been out of 3 gallon urns at Peet's, Starbucks (back in the day) and Spinellli's (R.I.P.), with oceanic body, surprisingly high supporting (rather than leading) acidity and great aroma. 

Pressurized brewing methods increase the perceived acidity of coffee. The obvious case is espresso, where any coffee used needs to be custom-roasted for the purpose. Clearly there are a wide range of palatable roasts, but they begin with the coffee well established in second pop (Vienna roast territory) and end well before Italian roast no matter how hard and acid the bean. 

The French Press and the Aeropress are also pressurized brewing methods, albeit at trivial levels of pressurization relative to espresso. Nonetheless, there's enough pressure here to call for full city roasts at a minimum, and to make these methods particularly good showcases for coffees such as semi-washed Indonesians (Sumatra, Sulawesi) or full city+ dry-processed African coffees for whom body and depth are more significant calling cards than refined acidity. 

During my years at Starbucks the only brewing method used at the roasting plant besides espresso was the plunger pot. Meanwhile a senior executive at Peet's who was deeply involved with their coffee once told me he'd spent an entire year drinking their coffee only as straight shots of espresso - in consequence of which he might have been the only person in Peet's history to complain that the coffees were a bit too acidic!

 A steady diet of nothing but pressurized brewing methods trains the palate to value body over other aspects of a coffee, while the increase in perceived acidity afforded by the pressure makes a coffee that would taste flat brewed drip taste fairly lively. I argued unsuccessfully for years at Starbucks that our roasts ought to be lightened up to suit the drip brewing method that they were being used for in our stores and in most customer's homes - or, alternatively, that if we believed in the plunger pot so much we owed it to our customers to only brew coffee in-store using that method. "Roastmasters" (whatever that means) and buyers in newer shops today who taste nothing but cupping room roasts and then inflict them on their customers are living in the same kind of coffee bubble, and in either case the coffee and the customer (and ultimately the farmer) pays the price. 

4. Water: I don't think it's any accident that the places where the classic Full City roast flourished in the early days of good coffee in the U.S. were locales with naturally-soft [low mineral content] water that was generally free from off tastes and odors. On the East Coast Manhattan was (and still is) legendary for its soft water, while in Chicago or Milwaukee the high mineral content dictated much lighter roasts that would still show some life after being blunted by the water. On the West coast Peet's had good soft water in Berkeley, and the same held true in Seattle and Portland.

When we at Starbucks started expanding beyond these favored areas it was either change our roast or change the water, and I ended up specifying water filtration and treatment systems for places like L.A. and San Diego that cost a small fortune, taking rock-hard water with sulfur and salt water intrusion and running it through softeners, reverse osmosis and remineralization treatments to effectively duplicate the neutral ~3 grain hardness water needed for the coffee to taste the way it should. 

Cupping room roasts at retail and other modern phenomena

Getting back to the note from Landon that provoked this post, what I would call a cupping room roast - light City, first pop just ending - is indeed on offer for both retail consumption and, unbelievably enough, in more than a few espresso doser-grinders, in some of today's Third Wave cafés. Considering that most of these establishments are run by people with no actual coffee training perhaps it's not surprising that the range of pejorative terms that apply to such roasts (underdeveloped, cereal-like, green, bland and so on) are unknown to them, but such roasts represent an extreme over-reaction to Starbucks and its many imitators. 

What would be nice to see in coffee is the kind of stylistic diversity one sees in craft beers, with one roaster specializing in the coffee equivalent of Belgian lambics (which I guess would be nothing but edgy, wildly-aromatic Ethiopian naturals!) and another into Porters and Stouts (the Peet's universe) and many other options in between, but a lot of what I see at retail, at least in the Pacific Northwest, are roast-alike and taste-alike clones of Intelligentsia and Stumptown with the same half-dozen origin countries all represented at a very narrow range of roasts from light City to light Full City. 30 years ago we had Peet's and Starbucks pushing the limits on the dark side while Pannikin in San Diego, Kobos in Portland, Schapira's in upstate New York, Freed, Teller & Freed in San Francisco and (best of all, IMHO) The Coffee Connection in Boston offered superb true Full City roasts. Many of us hoped that that level of choice was a harbinger of a greater range of good choices to come, but it looks like we were overly optimistic. 

"Is anyone in line waiting for just drip coffee?"

Within months of the merger of Howard Schultz's Italian-inspired Il Giornale espresso bars and the retail stores of Starbucks, the question I've used to title this post was frequently asked by harried cashiers trying to move the espresso bar queue along. 

Among the many unintended consequences of opening the espresso Pandora's box in the midst of what was formerly a retail coffee store was the immediate demotion of coffee not made fresh, to order, and expressly for you (the best definition of espresso I know of) to a much lower status. 

The drip coffee in question, at that time (from the mid 80's to the early 90's) was pretty awesome stuff, too - think Guatemala Antigua San Sebastian, top Kenya auction lots, Sigri Estate Papua New Guinea - brewed strong and fresh on the best commercial equipment and sold within minutes of brewing. 

It was immediately obvious to me that the worst part of the perceived higher value of "espresso" - which of course really means "espresso-flavored milk drinks" was that it was the lowly drip coffee that was the real connoisseur's choice, as it was the only option for those interested in the actual taste of coffee rather than coffee as an ingredient. Denigration of drip coffee and its customer base might have seemed savvy given the higher profit margins for espresso drinks, but catering to the caffe latte trade also meant kissing the whole bean coffee business goodbye, and with it any consumer base capable of appreciating the farmer and roaster's hard work. 

The question even back then was how to upgrade the perceived value of coffee-by-the-cup to that of the milk drinks, and the obvious answer was and still is that said coffee needs to also be brewed fresh to order each time. Even back then the technology to deliver excellent coffee by the cup quickly existed (WMF, Wittenborg and other hi-tech brewers, as well as lowly but functional units like the FilterFresh machine that were clear precursors to today's K-Cups and the like), but it was held captive to awful brands of roasted coffee or franchise operations. 

The Bunn Trifecta

Today's single-cup market

From what I can tell the commercial marketplace, at least in the U.S., is very limited. There are machines that require you to purchase coffee from exclusive suppliers (Nespresso, Keurig, Filterfresh and the like), but the only "open source" machines that I know of are Curtis's Gold Cup brewer, which I haven't had any experience with and the Bunn Trifecta. The Trifecta is an excellent brewer, and I love the fact that it's available in both a $3000 commercial version and a $550 home brewer that makes all the sense in the world for those who can afford it. 

On the consumer side it's a fragmented market, with Keurig the clear volume leader. Ken Davids at Coffee Review has an excellent review of current options for the Keurig:

http://www.coffeereview.com/article.cfm?ID=206

He's only testing the standard K-Cup machine here, and Keurig's new Vue unit seems to have addressed the major drawbacks of the older unit, increasing brew temperature to up to 197 degrees F and coffee dosage and consequent cup size to 12-18 ounces from the standard Keurig's 6, as well as offering recyclable plastic capsules. All that seems to be missing at this point is a craft roaster (or consortium of craft roasters) willing to put some truly great origin coffees into this format in order to have push-button coffee that rivals the best conventionally-brewed cups.

On the other hand, as Davids points out in his article, for less than the cost of a typical Keurig or Nespresso brewer you can own an Aeropress (my first choice) or Clever Dripper, decent burr grinder and a scale and brew great locally-roasted (better still, home-roasted) coffee with complete control of the variables and total freedom of choice with regard to coffee, degree of roast and freshness.

The daily cup: ritual or convenience?

Taking the long view, the rapid penetration of espresso into the mass market over the past 25 years has been a total game-changer in terms of consumer expectations of freshness, speed of preparation and ability to customize what one drinks. There's no going back.

The ideal cup of coffee would be ultra-fresh, ground and brewed to order in seconds, perfectly balanced in flavor and aroma, with plenty of variety of choices, consistent in quality - and affordable to drink and enjoy on a daily basis. At this point I think it behooves any medium-sized or larger roaster-retailer to have in their cupping room a Keurig, a Nespresso machine and both home and commercial models of the Trifecta and to regulary test their preferred in-store drip-strength options against these brewers not only for flavor but for speed and ease of preparation, consistency, throughput, user-friendliness and - last not least - suitability for consumer use to replicate the in-store coffee at home easily and affordably.

The Aeropress - the best single-cup home brewer - being used commercially

P.S. a nice late entrant to the home single-cup brewer world is what is essentially a porcelain Clever Dripper from Bonavita:

It'll be heavy and brekable compared to the Clever, but by preheating the porcelain extraction and finished cup temperature ought to be much better. These kind of work-arounds are necessary standard operating procedure anytime one attempts to downsize drip brewing, which really needs at least a quart-sized batch (but a gallon or two is so much better) for best results. This is pretty darn impressive for what it is, but I think most two-or-more person households would be better served by a Bonavita or Brazen electric brewer, or a Bodum Santos for the truly fanatical.

Captivating photos of the Motherland

Thanks go to Peter Giuliano for sharing the link to this gorgeous set of photos of coffee growing, roasting, processing and brewing in Ethiopia:

http://www.amivitale.com/2013/03/coffeeland-images-from-ethiopia-in-afar-magazine/

I was only able to visit Ethiopia once during my coffee buying days and have wanted to return there more than to any other country ever since. The people, coffee, cuisine, music, sights, sounds, smells, culture and history are just mind-blowing.

Really there's no excuse in 2013 for any conscientious roaster-retailer to not be offering well-chosen examples of the two classic Ethiopian flavor profiles (bright, clean washed and wild, berry/chocolate infused naturals) at all times. Not only do these two together represent the original taste of coffee, but the great natural coffees in particular - the Harrars, dry-processed Sidamos, Mochas from nearby Yemen - are invariably the first overall choice of consumer groups I've sampled on them over the years. How interesting the "disconnect" is here between professional cuppers, who usually abhor them due to being well-trained in avoiding the slightest trace of the defect called "ferment" in washed coffees, and food-and-wine savvy consumers, who relish naturally-occuring fruit flavors (and are delighted to find them in something other than a $160 a pound Gesha grown by white folks).

I think if I had the money to open a retail store today I might well choose to feature only African and Indonesian coffees, as a gustatory and cultural necessary corrective to the Latin American focus of today's retail scene, and I'd make coffees from Ethiopia the centerpiece.

A short trip down retail coffee memory lane

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

                                                                   - George Santayana

Pure Retail

Starbucks Coffee, Tea & Spice opened its doors in 1971, and the first espresso machine wasn't installed in a store (4th & Spring, Seattle) until 1985. Those first fourteen years were hardly unproductive, and indeed from the perspective of both coffee/life quality and that of creating a customer culture of coffee appreciation those were arguably the golden years (or should we say the coffee years preceding the days of milk & syrup?).

The three founders of Starbucks: Zev Siegl, Jerry Baldwin & Gordon Bowker (newbies please note - Howard Schultz is nowhere to be seen)

I first moved to Seattle and became a Starbucks customer in 1977, though I wasn't able to land a job there until the early 80's, when I started off packaging coffee and sweeping floors despite already having a fairly extensive coffee background before becoming the 14th person to roast coffee there. 

Back then Starbucks was a pure - and purist - roaster/retailer operation, delivering just-roasted beans to its 9 (eventually 12) stores three days a week. A few stores offered drip coffee (reluctantly and occasionally), but otherwise you bought your beans and took them home to enjoy. A handful of restaurants were reluctantly allowed to serve our coffee but often had to deal with coffee and equipment being yanked when they failed to follow instructions (what did they expect in doing business with a company whose CEO referred to restauranteurs who used less than 4 ounces per half-gallon pot as "counter-revolutionary goons?"). Starbucks back then was, as Gordon Bowker gleefully put it, "a real have it our way" kind of place, and I was in hog heaven despite only earning enough money to live cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of roommates and bicycling to work year-round since even a beater car was out of reach. 

Prominent on the employment application (mostly essay questions!) was "describe the best meal you ever ate, in detail." It was routine back then for customers to ask whether the new-crop Kenya was a better choice than the Ethiopian, or to bemoan the substitution of Ethiopian Harrar for Yemen Mocha in our Mocha Java Blend (Jerry Baldwin called the fill-in "Revolutionary Mocca Java" - "what's "revolutionary is we actually tell you what's in it!"). Legendary stores like Pike Place and University Village maintained boxes of index cards full of customer's custom blends. Within perhaps five years of the introduction of the espreso bar into these stores that culture that knew and cared about the actual taste of coffee had pretty well been obliterated, both behind the counter and among consumers. 

Besides coffee, there were exquisite teas (Seattle was the first U.S. port to open to imports from the People's Republic of China, and Hao Ya A Keemun vied for shelf space with Yin Hao Jasmine and exquisite second flush Darjeelings bought at auction). And there were the spices: Tellicherry peppercorns, Spanish saffron, the infamous catnip ("thrills for your kitty") - in an era when fresh spices were as non-existent in supermarkets as fresh coffee.

Fast-forward to 1987, when former Starbucks director of marketing Howard Schultz had become the company's largest wholesale restaurant account, buying coffee for his homegrown cluster of Italian-style espresso bars called Il Giornale. By then Starbucks had grown to include a substantial wholesale business, the Caravali wholesale brand and, last not least, ownership of Peet's. Howard wanted to grow the espresso drink business, Jerry Baldwin was (and is) a product purist and wanted nothing to do with slinging caffe lattes and so decided to keep Peet's, Caravali was spun off and Howard and a group of investors bought Starbucks and began the process of merging its stores with Il Giornale and the fast-food culture of U.S. espresso they had created. I was there from the outset as the Coffee Specialist, in charge of everything that happened to the coffee from the time it left the roasting plant until the time someone drank it.

I really can't do justice to just how heady and inspiring the atmosphere was back then, but I can say that thanks to the momentum of the Starbucks culture, skilled leadership from Howard and the rest of the management team, far-sighted investors, and an utterly devoted, unbelievably talented team of employees, we had carte blanche to pursue coffee quality as an end in itself. Those of us honored with custody of the product basically had two questions: how good can it be? and how can it be better next time? It's hard from a 2013 vantage point to ever imagine that Starbucks was once as purely product-driven as it is now marketing-driven, but it's true. Then again, the same could be said of Folger's, which a few decades earlier was run by a small group of coffee tasters who bought the entire Guatemalan Antigua crop from Bella Carmona and really meant it when they said "mountain grown."

The inspiration for the original logo and Starbucks logos through their early history. Needless to say, what Howard Schultz derided as "the brown look" was in fact the high water mark of both aesthetic and gustatory good taste.

Culture Clash

The old Starbucks retail culture included a cast of brilliant characters that often made me think there couldn't be any starving artists or liberal arts graduates in Seattle left to hire. Wages were okay but the compelling reason to work there was the absolute integrity about and passion for excellence in coffee. Jerry Baldwin's mantric query still echoes in my mind decades later: "is it as good as the coffee?" Whether evaluating a new coffee maker, looking at an architect's design for a new store or looking at employee benefits, that question was raised and had to be answered.

Meanwhile, the Il Giornale stores were doing things with espresso that while inspired by Italy involved a level of employee skill and equipment use and abuse that was truly unprecedented. Espresso in Italy is all for-here, in either demitasses or 5-6 ounce porcelain cups and the steam wand is wiped dry by 10:30 a.m. and sees no further use during the day unless some ignorant tourist walks in and upsets the apple cart by ordering a cappuccino after appropriate hours.

In contrast, we had a handful of stores in downtown Seattle that served thousands of customers in a morning rush. A great barista (and we had many) would single-handedly operate a four-group semi-automatic La Marzocco espresso machine, making shots, remembering up to 25 drink orders at a time and keeping two 2 liter steaming pitchers of milk going at all times for several uninterrupted hours.

Questions on the Il Giornale employee questionnaire were rather different from the old Starbucks version, having to do with things like "do you drive a car/are you comfortable operating machinery?" and, essentially, are you a morning person possessing a great deal of fast-twitch muscle fiber?

It was perfectly obvious to me that what was being promoted as a merger of the retail coffee culture of Starbucks with the nascent fast-food cum espresso bar culture of Il Giornale was in reality going to be a steamrolling and obliteration of the coffee culture unless steps were taken.

Preventing that from happening was not purely a matter of romantic nostalgia for the way things had been.  The high-volume whole bean stores in Seattle even after the introduction of espresso bars still did over half of their sales in whole beans, and that business was and is far more labor efficient and ultimately more profitable than the beverage business, particularly when you allow for employee turnover and the beating that equipment and fixtures take in a busy bar. 

The Business You Work At vs. the One That Comes to You

Here are some of the early initiatives I tried in order to help keep coffee sales and some semblance of retail culture alive in the face of the milk drink assault:

Focused Coffee of the Day program: most stores had enough volume during prime time to support brewing two drip coffees plus a decaf. Rather than let the choices be dictated by staff preference or what was about to go past-date, we had a program in both Seattle and Vancouver stores that paired a Mild coffee of the day with an Intense one: Guatemala paired with French Roast; Ethiopian Yergacheffe vs. Sumatra, Colombia and Kenya.

This program resulted in considerable excitement and significant increases in whole bean sales, especially when accompanied by two supports:

1. Pre-packing half-pounds of each day's featured coffees and putting them next to the cash register.

2. While things were still busy but after the epic morning slam (so say around 9:30 or 10 a.m.) having an employee brew up French Press pots of the same coffees being brewed drip and taking them around and actively sampling customers on them ("would you like to taste our Yemen Mocha brewed another way?"). Needless to say, a lot of coffee and plunger pots walked out the door.

All we sell is perfect cups of coffee: This ideal is something I borrowed from the Nordic Coffee Association, who in turn took it from the U.S. Pan American Coffee Bureau. The idea is that a roaster-retailer should take responsibility for every variable that goes into a perfect cup of coffee, since it is only as a beverage that coffee can actually be appreciated and enjoyed. 

As a practical matter, this means selling the customer not beans and a brewer but an integrated system for making a perfect cup that is as simple, foolproof, aesthetically pleasing, pleasurable to use and inexpensive as possible. 

We were brewing some truly spectacular drip coffee back then using 3 gallon urns with massive doses of urn-ground coffee ground on old Hobart grinders with ideal particle size distribution, and already I was starting to hear "oh I'll just drink coffee here because I can never make coffee this good at home." 

I had a plan in place to completely rid the stores of Krups, Braun and other crappy brewers that sabotaged coffee quality along with fall-apart $100 "espresso" makers that couldn't even make stovetop quality coffee. Starbucks was going to be the only coffee retailer that could say "we only sell stuff that works." but alas it was not to be, even though I was successful in at least putting pressure on our vendors to provide coffeemakers that got the water to 200 degrees and finished their brew cycles in less than 6 minutes (most famously by replacing all of the Krups and Braun brewers with ugly-but-functional Bunns for a time). 

Retail Resurrection?

Thirty plus years later that opportunity is still there, and I dream of seeing a roaster-retailer savvy enough to sell primarily brewing "kits." The simplest would of course be the best: a Bodum blade grinder with an Aeropress or Clever dripper and complete brewing instructions, and  then an entry-level conical burr grinder and a Bonavita or one-liter Nissan Thermos and #6 filtercone for by-the-pot brewing. Retail walls of such a store, instead of only containing farm photos, would be organized more like a petting zoo for coffee: Wall 1: our farms, with samples of green coffee and pergamino. Wall 2: the water wall, with info on water for coffee and water filtration equipment for sale. Next, the grinding wall: why to grind at home, how to store, why a blade grinder's better than nothing and a burr one worth the investment. Finally the brewing equipment, a few choice items that work perfectly or your money back, and that, as much as humanly possible, are either being used to brew coffee in the store or demo'd relentlessly during non-peak times. 

I see bits and pieces of this happening in some newer retailers, but nowhere near as comprehensively as at, say, a Sharper Image store or, to use a food model (the food model, actually), Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor. At Zingerman's you can walk past a wall of painstakingly-selected olive oils organized by country and region and there are trays hanging off the shelf with bits of great bread and little dishes of each of the oils (continually monitored and replenished by the exceedingly knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff). In 5 minutes you can taste the greatest olive oils the planet produces, sampling from close to $1000 worth of bottles, and you're sure to leave the store with one or more bottles, a loaf of that bread, and maybe more. Moreover, there are signs up everywhere in the store saying "ask for a taste of anything," and they aren't kidding (I thought I'd call their bluff my first visit by asking to taste the $200 hundred-milliliter 50 year old balsamic vinegar and not only tasted it but ended up spending that much and more before I got out the door). 

Creating a Customer Base that can taste the difference and is happy to pay for it

Anyway, the retail opportunity is still there but one has to realize that it's the customer buying drip coffee or the rare bird drinking straight espresso who's the potential whole bean coffee and/or brewing equipment customer. The espresso bar customer who pays the bills is perfectly happy with their concoction, which as we all know is produced by a highly skilled operator operating specialized brewing equipment that costs as much as a car. The point isn't that commercial espresso isn't readily downsized for home use; the point is that espresso-based milk drinks are antithetic to creating an appreciation for the flavor of actual coffee and the efforts of those who grow it. 

In order to reach a customer who does have some level of interest in coffee, it's vitally important to create and then reinforce at every opportunity their sense that they can taste the difference in flavor and that the differences are worth paying attention to (and thus paying for). You don't want subtle distinctions that a professional coffee taster would have trouble making (e.g. a light-roasted Costa Rican one day, a light-roasted Guatemalan the next). Rather, you want screamingly obvious, even polarizing differences in flavor to be offered on a regular basis, so that customers can learn the building blocks of country-of-origin flavor and begin to make intelligent, informed choices. 

One of  my favorite tastings to do for store managers and marketing folks alike at both Starbucks and Allegro was to cull through a couple of days of production roast out-turns and lay out about 25 trays of coffees with their identifying tags turned over. My instruction was this: "the difference between drinking coffee and tasting coffee is that tasting is about being able to say "this is good - but I don't like it" and using that knowledge to assess and meet customer preference. So taste all of these coffees. Some may be duplicates. Your mission, on pain of [imaginary] death, is to put a check mark only by those coffees that taste most vividly distinctive to you - that taste nothing like any of the others."

Invariably such tastings led to this selection: Kenya, Ethiopian Yergacheffe, Ethiopian Harrar or Yemen Mocha (we usually had only one of these two available at any given time), Sumatra, Sulawesi, Aged Sumatra (if on offer), Guatemala and occasionally Colombian or Costa Rican. Oh, and French Roast of course - unmistakable, though in one of the lasting ironies of the business I never met an employee at Starbucks or Peets who could stand the stuff. Anyway, that's more or less what a retail coffee lineup for someone interested in creating a consumer coffee culture rather than imposing their own preferences on consumers looks like. 

As for espresso, I'm a firm believer in using that venue for subversive purposes as much as possible, as long as one's realistic about the limitations. What I mean by "subversive" is going ahead and doing nothing but single-origin espressos, and if you have baristas with the chops to pull it off changing out said single-origin on a daily basis - all accompanied by a shelf talker by the machine and at the register that lets the few who will read it know what you're doing and why. 

That isn't to say I think putting just any coffee through the machine is a good idea. Screamingly-acid lightly-roasted coffees belong in a vacuum pot, or a drip brewer if you must, but Kenya or a washed Ethiopian in an espresso machine is a disaster unless you know how to roast it to corral its acidity (something Peets and Starbucks know quite a bit about). Still, I love the idea of featuring farm-designated flavor and thumbing one's nose at the mystique of blending (still promoted rather relentlessly by those like Peet's and Starbucks) in the very context where blends are said to be de rigeur. That said, the best single-origin espresso shots I ever had have been from coffees like Yemen Mocha and particularly perfumey Yergacheffe lots taken well into second pop - the kind of coffees one is even less likely to find than a balanced blend at most of today's third-wave outlets. 

On a broader scale, we're dealing with a consumer base with smartphone and computer driven attention spans and expectations for machine performance based on interaction with those same intuitively-designed devices. We're used to swiping a screen, pushing a button or speaking a few words into a microphone and getting things done. Coffee brewing technology, even at the most rarefied levels of commercial brewing, is laughably primitive by comparison. That's why I think that a very few choices (basically the Aeropress, Clever Dripper, 1 quart stainless thermos with filter cone and one great home auto drip brewer from among the 3 extant viable choices [Bonavita, Technivorm or Brazen], fully supported with accompanying grinder, grind sample and brewing instructions, are currently the best alternatives we have in the face of ultra-convenient mediocrity in the form of Keurig K Cups, Nespresso capsules, Via instant and the like. 

"Fine Dining" & Coffee

New York Times coffee columnist Oliver Strand just posted this interesting article about coffee in high-end restaurants:

http://sprudge.com/oliver.html

I don't think Strand has ever worked in the coffee business, and I have no idea whether he's ever worked in a restaurant, but having spent extensive time working in both worlds I'd like to share a few thoughts. 

The first and most obvious point, that doesn't seem to get made nearly often enough, is that coffee is for the most part (and probably from a health point of view should only be) a morning beverage. Breakfast places, be they the neighborhood coffeehouse or a greasy spoon, are the restaurants that do the volume in coffee and have the opportunity to offer high quality while also taking full advantage of commercial brewing equipment such as the urn and satellite brewers that yield coffee of superior quality in meaningful quantities. 

From a business perspective, any wholesale roaster knows that one high-volume coffeehouse or diner is worth a couple of dozen high-end dinner places, not only for the volume they do but for the huge pleasure of not having to deal with a dozen pain-in-the-ass egomanical chefs who think they know something about coffee, must have a custom blend or single-farm coffee chosen and roasted just for them, etc. while almost invariably not being willing to invest in the equipment and dedicated staff required to deliver exquisite coffee in what is, at the end of the day, a setting so ill-suited to coffee that home brewing methods are really the best solution to the non-existent "need" for caffeine at 10 or 11 p.m., after a complex meal accompanied by lavish quantities of wines and spirits. 

For those customers who do want coffee after an epic meal, what's appropriate? It's going to take a lot of depth and intensity of flavor to register, given what's come before, so the last thing you'd want is a thin, acid, under-extracted and tepid cup of coffee like the light-roasted Kenya in a Hario that Noma takes pride in serving. 

Strand says:

It seems the ones who are going to get the most out of Noma’s coffee are Noma’s waiters and cooks. The customers might be the immediate beneficiaries of the new program, but the legacy will be the culinary professionals who will go on to start their own restaurants, and carry this expertise with them.

But I think the reality is more like this: Noma's staff are pretty much the only ones who are going to get anything out of learning how to prepare and serve coffee so utterly at odds with both the time of day and cuisine on offer, and what they'll take with them is not expertise but a narcissistic focus on what pleases them rather than what delivers pleasure and is appropriate. Those are ideal qualifications for a barista job at any number of today's 3rd wave coffeehouses, but they're lousy qualities for a chef or other food professional. 

That kind of boneheaded choice only comes about when chefs or staff are choosing what pleases them, rather than thinking about what would please the customer or work with the sequence of courses and time of day. 

One would think given the time of day that a savvy chef's first thought (or that of his or her coffee supplier) would be about how to provide as deep and rich a cup of decaffeinated coffee as possible, yet this is hardly mentioned, despite the fact that custom decaffeination of small lots by methods that retain nearly all of a coffee's flavors has long been possible. 

Regarding coffee varieties and brewing methods, the obvious need is for rich, complex coffees with fruity, herbal and/or earthy flavors and a great deal of body. Examples: Yemen Mocha Ismaili or Mattari; a choice lot of Vienna-roasted (or darker) dry-processed Ethiopian redolent with blueberry fruit and bittersweet chocolate; an Aged Sumatra taken well into the full city roast range. Brewing methods of choice: the Aeropress for individual servings, a French Press for the table. 

What about espresso? Well, quoting one famous coffee expert who probably should remain nameless, "there's only one problem with an espresso machine [from a coffee appreciation perspective]: espresso comes out of it." By design it's a brewing method that trades power and concentration for finesse and nuance - it's 100 proof spirits vs. the fine wine of an ideal drip-strength cup. 

Now there's no denying that late in the evening after a large meal such power in the cup is not only welcome, but arguably may be the only coffee that really registers with some diners. That fact and the consistent quality and ease of service are the exact reasons why it makes all of the sense in the world that such a high percentage of Michelin-starred restaurants are using the Nespresso system. And it's not just a question of convenience or consistency: Nestlés top blends are elegant and subtle, and the ratio of grounds to water and final yield are classically Northern Italian - a welcome respite from the undrinkable bitterness and blazing acidity of the under-roasted, massively-dosed über-ristretto espressos found at most of today's supposedly cutting-edge boutique coffeehouse chains. 

This should be even less surprising given that Nestlé, like Illy and unlike the typical local microroaster, understands the occasion and realities of high end dining. Meanwhile, the kinds of coffees, appropriate degrees of roasts for them and the brewing methods that showcase their qualities that I listed above are not even on the radar screen of today's leading boutique roasters, who with few exceptions offer a monochromatic menu of lightly-roasted, manicured washed-processed coffees that leave the consumer and restaurants alike with a range of choices that if we were talking wine would amount to all whites, no reds and forget the fortified wines for after dinner. No wonder Nespresso and Keurig are kicking ass.