Chemically Imbalanced (espresso-jogged screeds)

speaking of pure taste experiences that have nothing at all, in any way to do with rank status-mongering …

when it comes to those “ellusive” and “exhilirating” coffee experiences, this blog can hardly think of anything more joyous than a good cologne and coffee pairing involving, possibly, a “coffee taster’s helmet.”

what will these studly taste geniuses think of next — that is, when they get back from trotting around colombia hulla for their rare, cold-cupped beans? espresso massage? supraspro? milan-grown “terrace” varietals?

key quote: “yes, it truly can.”

(hat tip, reader X)

p.s. reminds this blog of a whiskey-drenched coffee profile we read once …

p.p.s. question is, is rod lazar ripping off barack obama, or is obama ripping off lazar?

UPDATE: strange. this blog’s rss reader tells us that the world barista champion wrote about this very taste guru with his customary restraint (”My new favourite site ever“) sometime yesterday. but, ah, the post would appear to have been “moved.” not a fan of “killer so-spro,” james?

UPDATE: one thing that gnaws at this blog, late at night: that one day soon we might become a coffee snob … driving people away with our insufferable inscrutability. but that’s why rod lazar gives us hope. the true snobs, they’re all offended!

UPDATE: that thompson owen, of sweet maria’s — you know, the one with the “driest sense of humor on the planet” — is either strangely obsessed or intimately acquainted with that ista-bar czar, rod lazar.

Posted in shameless robusta filler, happening elsewhere | 18 Comments »

what we need is a platinum cupper’s card

CI conspiracy theorizes so you don’t have to: is there some clued-in coffee person on the new york times staff — someone, say, with very close third-wave relations — behind the paper’s curious recent tandem of quality coffee coverage with snarky, skeptical starbucks riffs? or is it just deeply american to root for the indie coffee shops and resent the indie-turned-juggernaut?

alas, the coffee juggernaut in this case is showing a creepy propensity to buy your favor with cheap status tricks! the times’ ron lieber cheerfully shows us coffee-drinker status-seeking at its most egregious:

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

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

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

including, apparently, the author of this piece:

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

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

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

Posted in happening elsewhere, screeds | No Comments »

CI models what it hates!

truth is, this blog stumbles erratically and self-loathingly toward the well-worn narrative arc of most junkie coffee sites. broad, anything-goes enjoyment gives way to self-conscious issues blogging, which segues to Matters Only of Very Great Import posted on the internets. the more we experience, the less we share.

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

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

help this blog.

Posted in screeds | 2 Comments »

coffee, spread out

the jebena boil: “at the still point, there the dance is.” … pic by jake

it shook all the wobbly, week-long sickies right out of us. just clunked ‘em right out, and ended too the related seven-day spro fast with a sock to the jowls …

here we were, sitting in a rough semicircle at the fine coffee establishment that by now you all know sits by the perfume counter at belk’s department store, and we’re getting a live ethiopian coffee ceremony. with an OPEN FIRE on a sunday afternoon. in the middle. of. the mall.

hudgens, it seems, has a new-ish employee, a gliding, gracious ethiopian, named tigest, who did the honors — nearly two hours of swirling and smiling in regal native garb for one batch of coffee grounds. this blog (which has never been to ethiopia, but assumes, like all americans, that what little it knows about a single african country surely applies to all african countries regardless of their placement on the continent) believed the process to be Profoundly Indicative of the Cultural Pace and Attitudes. it was peaceful, firstly. also, a very obvious emblem of daily life.

the roasting process, being the phase most likely to attract security or set off electronic shopping mall detection systems, took place swiftly and with a symbolic measure of green coffee tigest had picked up somewhere in north carolina. using a traditional long-handled roasting pan, she tossed and swished over a propane burner for what seemed like mere seconds, when the chaffing and cracking and heavy smoking commenced in short order and the batch showed up hissing under our noses for a whiff, gaudy n’ shiny, a mixed roast ranging from still-brown to a hearty french. a blend.

sometime near this point, we agreed this indoor inundation of roasting aroma made fine, fine payback for the constant olfactory affliction shannon has long suffered at the hands of the belk perfume counter. they couldn’t compete with this waft, and NO ONE would be asking for any acqua di gio today. stetson, maybe.

raw incense curled away from a dish. the traditional companion snack — popcorn, in this case — was fire-popped and passed around. the coffee grounds went into the bulbous clay “jebena,” and began to bubble. of interest to this blog: tigest’s practice of pouring off a bit of the liquid in a cup, then waiting for the coffee to begin to boil, at which point she’d reintroduce the poured-off stuff as a coolant to keep the brew in the right range, and also from getting too bubbly. pour, replace, swish about. adjust flame. glance over shoulder to see if anyone in belk has called, “fire!”

each demitasse was warmed with a small slosh of initial coffee, then each fully filled and passed around. as you might imagine, it was one-note strong. nothing overly bitter, or rank. just a clean, constant streak of BLAM, right in the middle of your tongue. hot straw and other earthy materials, maybe. wake-up coffee. black, somewhat crisp and loooong in the finish. being fresh from the throes of a coffee-hating, weeklong illness, we drank all of ours.

they reuse the grounds. ah yes, only three times here in our modern era, although the older ethiopians still do a four-rounder with the same soggy mound. so, then. settle in for round two (”huletegna”), which was more like cloudy drip coffee. then round three (”bereka,” or good luck), which came in like a very earthy tea. as a sort of ceremonial dessert, she did a new set of grounds — the mall-roasted ones from minutes earlier — with a bit of powdered ginger.

potent, almost chewable, and probably the best drink of the day.

what you got, though, was the grace of the thing. the low-key, slice-of-life realness of sacramentalizing through every one of your senses the bread of a culture’s existence. with friends, in the evening, a ceremony can take three hours, tigest said. a day can hold four of them. shannon, doing the math, asked if there aren’t other activities that they might sometimes enjoy.

in truth, the approach seems just woven into life’s fabric, which made it particularly relevant to solis jake, he being about to adopt from the country. whole new meaning to the term, “trip to origin,” eh? even on the mall tile, the ritual was enough to stop plenty of mallers for a gander. a clothing store owner inquired about the mystical circle of sippers. tigest never stopped gazing around and grinning. and security, they never showed.

covert-mall-fire-pan roasting

ritual

one coffee, but a blend.

one theory for the brew’s smoothness: the ‘cense had saturated our nasal cavities.

tigest, at her craft and lifestyle
all pics by jake.

Posted in subjective swilling, playing with (roaster) fire | 10 Comments »

breaking: this blog is sometimes snarky

burbling up from has-bean steve’s riveting photographic coverage of a trip to coffee origin is this nagging concern: that guatemalan water apparently shrinks your pants. what must it do to the coffee?!

UPDATE: sigh. we actually like euro pants. it was a floppy joke, aimed at a very cool guy. and an excuse to link to his sweet action trip photos.

Posted in shameless robusta filler | 8 Comments »

USbc: just like the pros

the usbc live feed — in double-take mall stereo — with free accompanying shots from c-n-c’s hudgens.

as long as we were jaw-hanging in front of the u.s. barista championship live feed, this blog figured we might as well jam something in that jaw — signature beverages, for example. thus, our own private USbc, with gory ripoffs of real live sigs! or, perhaps, the most surreal sigs to shake the stage and judges’ composure in minneapolis this weekend.

* you might be under the impression that perennial barista contender billy wilson failed to make the finals because he accidentally grabbed the unhomogenized milk for his cappuccinos. might we submit that the, ah, BLUE CHEESE beverage had something to do with it? ahem:

sure, it looks all decadent and affogato-ey. we even wondered if the overwhelming stench might make the spro taste all the better — by contrast. alas, we let this beverage sit so long in the photographing that by the time we got around to swilling that shot of PNG red mountain it was thoroughly infused with putrifying fromage. or was the putrifying fromage thoroughly infused with spro?

in any case, this blog immediately went streaking off, its hand over its mouth, in search of a brookstone store where we could deposit our dry heaves. then came one of those damp, post-traumatic periods where the whole body tenses and trembles, acutely aware that the slightest stimulus could push you over the edge of the Humiliating Cliff of Public Puking. a slight southerly pollen breeze? RALPH! a tiny glance at the offending spro cup? PBBFFFTTSSNXXXGG.

shannon, for his part, had some trouble serving the next customer with a professional visage.

we should note that billy didn’t actually use blue cheese in his signature beverage. he only conjured it, verbally and with bay leaves and such. but, frankly, the mere act of conjuring is now more than enough to make us … you know.

* if the taste judges appeared to hold poker faces when competitor patrick adam pierce talked up “the world’s hottest pepper” in his signature beverage, they were weeping inside. so did we:

frankly, we either got a bum pepper, or all the mean tongue spikes leaked out and got neutered in our spro. it wasn’t so much hot as it was a taste of summer road burn and overheated inner tube.

* the big beverage trend this year, of course, was sea salt, and we can sort of understand the multi-competitor phenomenon. we partook of our salty chunklets in the upper-class boho method: pour salt on public counter top. moisten pinky and daub in the granules. lick. chase it with the red mountain and you get … nothing. nothing high, nothing low, and barely any of the peanut middle. virtually all the flavors of our png were completely neutralized, rendered moot, void and slightly saline by the offsetting brine.

this makes a certain measure of sense, especially if your routine follows habanero boy. the poor judges, they’re likely to mightily mistrust themselves and err on the side of charity, no? a six for balance!

there is, of course, the other consumption method:

(photo blurred to obscure any suggestion of illegal activity.)

by this point, alas, we’d coughed and heaved enough for one afternoon.

Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »

coffee domination? domination?!

the most startling southeast coffee tourist this blog has ever seen …

sparky. there is now a southeastern coffee tourist. he and his ma blew through shannon’s c-n-c while we were jaw-hanging in front of the usbc live feed. so startling, really, we didn’t have much of a reaction. hoffmann did the coastal tour, sure, and daynjah dan before him. but they had professional reasons.

apparently, this guy is hitting only the toppest notch places. octane. volta. etc. so odd, it sounds like something this blog might do.

on the downside, he’s a follower of whynatte.

Posted in mad coffee jaunts | No Comments »

usbc: crickets

disbelief: that when this blog, in its work tie, stumbled into the vicinity of a computer at 5:20 p.m. looking for the name of this country’s new national barista champeen, there was no one to tell us — nary a typewritten word within reach! that for all the live, gooey goodness burbling everywhere on the innernecks there was nothing written, put in stone or pixels, about the slicked-over l.a. personage to have taken the wreath. the intelly one-two clobbering act. the reduction of favorites and previous scepter-holders to the secondary rungs of the elite. the latest triumph of zesty single-origin spro.

so we covertly jammed in the left ear bud, scrolled around for the archived awards video — taking care to not erroneously click the great florida healing revival — and pretended to consume the drama live and loud. it was 5:38 p.m. and we were coughing loud, unnatural cubicle coughs that sounded a lot like the guttural utterance, “schanikes! it’s kyle!”

we hate to imagine the lack of caring you may have for this perspective. you had live video, you might snarl. what more could you demand from your rocking sloth’s chair?! alas, you’re right. we deserve nothing, we far-flung fanboys — and yet we finally got specialty coffee convention coverage to swim in. not independent-minded commentary, or quite public-oriented reportage, but indeed a giant leap in the direction of outreach. openness. community.

we guess there’s hope for this club. now someone just write the words somewhere online: “kyle glanville, u.s barista champion.” so we can find them.

a minute later … it was written, in the bowels of this place, at the moment we finished this post. don’t tell this blog it doesn’t have eerie mind-bending powers …

Posted in happening elsewhere | 10 Comments »

usbc: bleary blogging

it’s hard to discern the bigger trend: the sea salt in the competition signature beverages, the simultaneous spro, the widespread use of gravy boats or the sheer staggering volume of online barista hair jokes aimed in the general direction of those coffee persons most follicularly endowed. to say this blog was in tears is to say that brett walker has a bit o’ facial scruff.

* and on the third day, the official blog of the national coffee smackdown got some soul. some lumpy, globally conscious, quasi-relevant meta-soul. we now agreeably recommend it and wait for twitchy to snottily up the ante. (UPDATE: more meta here.)

* if you’re a creepily juggernaut-ish chicago espresso powerhouse, and you own six of 24 semifinalists, does putting two of them in the finals count as a win, a loss or a draw? do you huzzah because your odds have improved? do you weep over the .333 batting average? or do the sweets and the bitters complement, like an optimally balanced espresso score sheet?

* you knew this already: watching a barista competition tells you nothing. gauging the live online patter all day, you’d think the smoothest operators were, in this order, albina’s billy wilson, intelligentsia’s mike phillips, aldo’s belle battista and octane’s danielle glasky — none of whom made the finals. as in politics, you might think this defeats the purpose of punditry. but you’d be wrong! uncertainty breeds punditry, friend. like gators in a swamp.

* so ben helfen is cokers for finland, yes. so much so that he gratuitously weaves it into conservation. but look, when you find a way to wear the finnish flag during competition, you can’t lose! it’s like a global job advertisement! HIRE ME PLEASE!!! a wild guess: ben will arrive in ideal european coffee climes long before the rest of us dreamers.

*watch for ‘em in the finals: gravy boats. bouillabase basins. saucy skiffs! when it comes to barista gear, they’re the new anfims.

Posted in happening elsewhere | 4 Comments »

usbc: gawking

when it comes to respectful, dignified usbc spectatorship, this blog realizes that it falls miserably short — somewhere between “spooky voyeur” and “slobbering fanboy.”

Posted in happening elsewhere | 4 Comments »

usbc: chip shots

breathless, knee-jerk reaction after a day-trip to the coast leaves this blog doing wee-hours competition catch-up: that’s it?!

actually, no. th’ feeds, we’re swimmin’ in ‘em.

* noted: that blogging spasmodic girl is playing all five scaa bloggers to a draw, when it comes to value-added hilarity. “solid and woody” indeed. also, “pudding-like body.” the blogette’s secret sauce: hotel pool?

* those semi-finalists: eight of them — fully one-third of the next round — come from within a two-hour stretch along lake michigan (UPDATE: well, ok. they’re affiliated with establishments in that nexus). the only solace: someone else wins.

* we know one thing about octane’s danielle, who leaped into the round of 25: her spro is somewhat microcosm-esque. (yes! another gratuitous homage to the barista-poet in absentia!) a smidge of the stuff left at our place last month wowed this blog with light, malty sweetness, like a frothy shake with toasty sugar spikes and scents of the berry of rasp.

* tomorrow, this blog and c-n-c’s shannon hudgens finally join in the USbc — as in, just us! at a coffee bar! trying to one-up live streaming competitors on teevee with impromptu sigs and heaping doses of solemn pretension!

sssnggxxttxxssszzzz.

Posted in happening elsewhere | No Comments »

usbc: armchair afar-blogging

that’s the thing about blogging — it’s better if you’re ignorant!

maxims for life from the u.s. barista championship, day one:

* live, streaming video of barista glitterati in action — even hiccuping video with warpy sound — is flabbergastingly more compelling than youtubed competition videos. clips: eh. everybody does it and nobody endures them all. but the stream — tha stream is happening right now. it’s irresistible.

* that messy, snarky, meandering fanboy commentary that unraveled today alongside the moving pictures — it’s a taste of community. an extension of the convention ruckus for snivelling homebodies like this blog. simple, haphazard — and vital!

* do not, however, make slighting remarks about competitor 27 while his father is watching the feed. don’t. baaad.

* all this glorious electronic carnivality — lost in the bowels of these interwebs. why no archives? this blog looked into ustream a year ago for this very use, and happens to know that archiving the video is entirely possible. relive the ignominy! re-chew the cud! seems like competitors might want to obsess at some point over the world’s reaction to their routines …

* the house blog is of interest, if a bit promotional. more narrative! more dot-connecting! or, you know, at least some humor — with writers’ names connected to the blog posts. how else will we know if hoffmann is working, or merely practicing what we call in the profession “celebrity journalism.” sordid. inexcusable. (UPDATE: names now attached! is it just us, or if hoffmann getting all the sweet assignments?)

* for pure words, those writerly types just can’t be beat. twitchy wins this blog’s eyeballs for cogent, relevant convention narrative.

* is there weed going around the competitors quarters? or does octane’s ben have another explanation for this brief spate of giddiness?

Posted in happening elsewhere | 3 Comments »

usbc: moving pictures

this blog and the barista-poet are trying desperately not to dominate the live conversation over here, where in a few meager minutes the u.s. barista competition will be unfolding on these useful internets before your very eyes …

but it’s … so … hard.

Posted in happening elsewhere | 7 Comments »

at last: spectatorship

if this blog were going to embark on long-awaited, long called-for total live-blogging blanket coverage of the biggest u.s. coffee event of the year, it might go ahead and start, you know, posting stuff. so that real people — forum surfers, casual blog readers, non-insiders — might get some notice! otherwise the effort skews toward the groupies …

specialty coffee is six years late using the interwebs for meaningful convention outreach — no need to wait any longer!

p.s. ah, live streaming video of the national barista competition — a fabulous idea. we had hoped to break similar ground at this year’s southeast regionals … until the event turned out to be not so conducive. here’s hoping it comes with live chat functionality! p.p.s. also, something resembling an independent voice. (who is this erin meister team member? our only hope for a non-insider coverage provider, that’s who!)

UPDATE: is it just this blog, or is the competitor list somewhat staggeringly stacked with talent? three previous national champs in the mix and, say, 12 who could easily take the cake, no? join this blog in heartily blurting, “sparky.”

Posted in happening elsewhere | 2 Comments »

Map it

charleston 2day: the orangest cafe ever. And sweet nutty shots of zoka’s paladino. S.C.’s 3rd worthy joint: metto.

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Posted in mad coffee jaunts | 2 Comments »

“entertaining” at the bloghouse

it’s a facile, fool-proof way to tell you’re having a really swell time with fabulous barista persons:

you’ve forgotten the pizza crust. this blog gravely apologizes to the traveling atlanta threesome, all of whom were forced to return home with carcinogens in the barista hair.

Posted in playing with (roaster) fire | 4 Comments »

CI comes clean

hoffmann forces our hand with his blasted gentillesse…

until those anfim grinders went all messianic, we’d been so proud of our mazzer major. it’s a big as the spro box! the same burly grinder the big boys use! thwacks like a pro!

truth is, it was supposed to have had slicey new grinding burrs when we picked it up on ebay lo these three years ago, and we’d only just begun to think about replacing the knives again. they’ll go 800 pounds of beanage, right? we weren’t even close.

then the world barista champion came around with all his insufferable knowledge and taste and stuff, and told us gently on an atlanta bar stool that maybe his trouble on our home bar the day before was the fault of our grinder burrs. hmpf. the poor, straw-grasping excuse-monger.

herm, yes. we removed the suckers anyway and found ourselves TOTALLY STUMPED at what this strange string of numbers might mean:

but it seems sort of humiliating! which is why we haven’t been blogging much. nightmares and such. in which this blog is publicly shamed by moaning taste judges whose gnashing teeth are covered with our espresso grit and who buff their nails with our benign, impotent burr surfaces. they force us to pull shots shirtless. with whips.

*shudder*

it’s amazing what a new grinder burr set will do for you. old mazzer: chew, chew, chew, spit. new mazzer: ptui. it’s 17 grams of coffee so fast, there’s no time to gasp. “aaauuugggh! thwack thwack! wait, no! thwack, thwack, thwack thwackthwack! no more coffee! thwack! stop! thwack!” suddenly, 15 grams looks like a fluffy 17 in the espresso basket. our ability to eyeball the dose is now bunk. was there that much space before? from clumping? seriously?

so we come clean, having inexcusably forced the world champeen to eat from our dog bowl of a home bar and play nice about it on his blog. we also take this opportunity to note the limits of home-junkie-ism — our experience on other people’s mazzers is unavoidably thin. turns out our own grinder struggles were, in the end, astoundingly needless. nothing like having a brain surgeon diagnose your sniffles.

/end public self-flagellation. which is, alas, probably the most important public service this blog performs. dust and ashes. zut alors.

UPDATE: james says the soothing, huggy words this blog is unlikely to ever hear again from a barista of repute: “You were pulling much better shots than me.”

it could be true!

Posted in subjective swilling | 3 Comments »

taste, taste revolution

they laughed when CI said lem butler’s competition espresso tasted like “new leather dress shoes in a malt custard dip” — but only because they’d never wrapped the bouche around a pair of johnston and murphys! now comes the new yorker’s john lanchester to tell us that “your palate and your vocabulary expand simultaneously.” you ability to discern tastes, in other words, has a lot to do with whether you have the right words. (a lengthier treatise on how language can govern your ability to think — even preventing normal “human” cognition in some remote tribes — here.)

lanchester:

A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don’t have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded. One day, you catch the smell of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or bubble gum from a Gamay, or horse manure from a Shiraz, and from that point on you know exactly what people mean when they say they detect these things.

he forgot “new leather shoes from an espresso blend.” but no matter … the “over-the-top” descriptors, he says, tend to appeal to an untrained audience, while the more precise, scientific terms for taste risk alienating all but an elite group of readers. which begs the question: isn’t this a problem the quality coffee movement should worry about? shouldn’t the more free-wheeling, evocative descriptors have their place alongside the austere, numeric ones? if not, we may be limiting our audience — or, worse, robbing them of the pleasures of taste!

i say we can balance things a bit. lanchester, referring to wine, calls it a taste “impasse:”

On the one hand, we have the Romantic route, in which you are free to compare a taste to the last unicorn or the sensation you had when you were told that you failed your driving test—and others are free to have no idea what you are talking about. On the other, we have the scientific route, which comes down to numbers, and risks missing the fundamental truth of all smells and tastes, which is that they are, by definition, experiences.

which brings us to smell — probably the most powerful evocative force in the taste experience — and, by extension, the very coffee-instructive art of describing perfume. consider some of luca turin’s criticisms in “perfume: the guide,” mentioned by lanchester:

Consider 212, from Carolina Herrera: “Like getting lemon juice in a paper cut.” Amarige, from Givenchy? “If you are reading this because it is your darling fragrance, please wear it at home exclusively, and tape the windows shut.” Heiress? “Hilariously vile 50/50 mix of cheap shampoo and canned peaches.” … Hugo, the men’s cologne from Hugo Boss? “Dull but competent lavender-oakmoss thing, suggestive of a day filled with strategy meetings.” Love in White? “A chemical white floral so disastrously vile words nearly desert me. If this were a shampoo offered with your first shower after sleeping rough for two months in Nouakchott, you’d opt to keep the lice.”

it’s funny! it’s experiential! and, most importantly, it still tells you important stuff!

this can devolve into self-parody, of course (see also: burr, chandler), which is how this blog usually intends its most absurd descriptors. we frequently arrive on the doorstep of “stale trombone case” out of sheer frustration, inebriation or … a concentration of community.

ah, yes. isn’t that it, really? these sorts of descriptors are the things you say at a party, to cronies with whom you’re really comfortable and have, perhaps, shared dozens or hundreds of cupping spoons. the outlandish term means something more in this context and, by the same token, strengthens the communal aspect of taste. but why not broaden the circle?

words don’t just govern your ability to taste. they govern the vibrance of your community, creating narratives that bundle people together. question is, who are we excluding?

(note: read the whole, excellent lanchester piece.)

Posted in subjective swilling | No Comments »

stuffy brit stud stuffs south carolina!

it’s not hard to tell which part of hoffmann’s roaring east coast victory tour he enjoyed least. hint: it’s the two-town leg he has yet to blog about — more than three weeks after it happened. conspicuous!

p.s. you could argue, of course, that this blog’s involvement in greenville and atlanta made things less than memorable — scarring, even. in which case things might be overly memorable, no? but apparently not bloggable …

UPDATE: hoffmann, it seems, has “been rather unwell.” not too ill to read blogs, mind you. only to write them. hmpf! also, he seems kinda popular.

UPDATE UPDATE: then again, even counter culture’s glossy trip report has been out for more than a week. turns out hoffmann blogs about as rapidly as he pours latte art.

Posted in shameless robusta filler | 8 Comments »

hoffmann, loosed

it’s a common, vexing concern: how would the world barista champeen answer the burning coffee questions of the day? — with hurricane winds, swooping fighter jets and small mortar fire distracting him, no less?

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

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

Posted in video, screeds | 8 Comments »

arbitrage

— “why don’t you blog about the clover?” they said. “everybody’s doing it!”

this blog has been mostly surprised — and mostly in agreement — with the various coffee thinkers we’ve encountered in recent weeks who, in the end, find the ballyhooed clover single-cup brewer overrated as a taste machine. it’s a great device, the thinking goes, but not $11,000 great. it can make an excellent cup of coffee, but not consistently mind-blowing enough to convert the average, brick-tongued consumer and justify its price. (tonx argues that it’s not that expensive, relatively, but then a comparably priced espresso machine does create a radically different coffee experience that attracts even typically non-drinkers.)

now comes slate’s paul adams to make a different case for the luxury beverage box:

“The immediate consequence of the Clover and its precision isn’t necessarily better coffee, but more attention to coffee. By creating this rigorous laboratorylike brewing environment, it encourages cafes to explore the nuances of different beans, where and how they’re grown and dried and sorted and roasted. And the attention to nuance gets passed along to the customers … “

which makes clover’s primary value NOT flavor. taste, it would appear, isn’t everything.

even some triple-waveist forum-haunters have been saying essentially this for a long time … that taste alone may not revolutionize a culture that also prizes — fetishizes? — speed, convenience, image, consumerism for its own sake, etc. you can see where this leads. the strategy becomes not just creating a taste experience but creating a snobbery for taste. it’s too hard building a movement based only on quality — there has to be a quality club, with a platinum membership card and accompanying social status!

this is taste gone corporate. individual coffee evangelists may well be able to convert urban boroughs one drink at a time. to build a mass movement, though, there has to be some irresistable cachet for the image-mongers. you have to buy their loyalty with the grubbier things that humans want — affirmation, attention, allure.

or so the wisdom goes. and that’s how we got starbucks, which discovered that good coffee and communal “third places” HAD to be married to lower common denominators for the brand to balloon. it’s leveraged taste. and that’s how starbucks bought clover, which came with irresistible cachet and even came “to overshadow the beans that go into it.”

if adams is right about this — that clover is an attention-generating machine more than a taste-generating machine — then the deal makes perfect sense.

p.s. but wait … isn’t “more attention to coffee” good? of course! — if the increased attention makes better coffee and better coffee people. is it a remotely safe bet that’ll happen at starbucks?

what we strongly suspect of even some third-wave notables is that the humanitarian, seed-to-cup approach is being leveraged more because it’s cool than because it’s the right thing to do. are the two motives mutually exclusive? nope. but what’s the pudding like?

ah, so it does come back to taste. taste, we say, that changes people.

UPDATE: in fairness, some of the emerging clover cynicism from the gurus may be partly the fault of the gurus at the controls. adams again:

Latourell enumerates six variables that contribute to the taste of brewed coffee—choice of bean, grind, “dose” of coffee, brewing time, temperature, and amount of water. The first three, for better or worse, are in the hands of the barista (”Call me when you get a better grinder!” Latourell half-teases the Grumpy staff)—but the Clover can precisely regulate the last three.

UPDATE UPDATE: as usual, give starbucks’ howie some points for bluntness:

“We somehow evolved from a culture of entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation to a culture of, in a way, mediocrity and bureaucracy,” Mr. Schultz said.

somehow? we think we have an idea how! but don’t listen to this blog. we can’t even keep our grinder burrs sharp.

Posted in happening elsewhere | 7 Comments »

CI looks a gift horse in the mouth

you might think the generous opportunity to crash with the blogwife at a certain east coast coffee juggernaut’s atlanta training center for a night would lull us into complacent, insidery back-slapping mode. you’d be wrong!

in another periodic bursts of bloggy public service journalism, this blog’s secret cameras bring you these shocking images from the high-powered coffee locality, where espresso and brewing standards, one hopes, would be at their highest. alas, it was difficult to fall asleep once these scenes were seared on our brain.

a forgotten espresso puck — left in the portafilter all! night! long!

five-pound bags of the good stuff — standing! open! for literally hours!

in related investigative work, this blog’s home espresso machine strangely stopped operating almost immediately after the champeen came through. the heating element, it seems, is suddenly kaput. obvious initial theory: hoffmann pilfered it! so lessee, that’s a total of one spoon, one heating element and a lot of sleep lifted — that we know about so far.

indeed, keeping our eyes glued to the fellow in atlanta, we managed to come up with the following photographic evidence:

well, ok, it’s hard to see. but there’s flatware in them gargantuan british bum pockets.

Posted in shameless robusta filler | 5 Comments »

communal excess

nothing like a wee latte art throwdown — including some first-timers — and a surprise winner over heavyweight zombie pourer chris owens. not excruciatingly long. mostly comradic. and suthin’ style.

some snivelling apologies to octane’s competition-tested danielle and ben. scant footage of them both, because danielle poured at the opposite end of the counter, while i simply missed ben. probably in the middle of some lung-shaking guffaw. the art on the scoring screen at the end is his.

Posted in mad coffee jaunts | 3 Comments »

pure torture

“It’s been one of my favorite things in coffee — to feel stupid. I like it.”
— James Hoffmann, on the necessity of reduction as a barista

grave words from a champion, who also had this to say about the recently conquered world competition circuit: “if you think you’re going to win, you’re an idiot.” is is just this blog, or does the man with the crown mix a wee bit of masochism with his kleptomania? let’s call it masomania! no wonder he submitted to the feral torture of our home bar …

more to the point, though, these quotes sort of nailed what, for us, is the essence of that intangible trait of an irresistible champion. not just humility, really, but a willingness — an appreciation for — the necessity of being broken down and rebuilt. he was speaking of bar skills, of course … we’ll leave the broader life applications to you!

little surprise given the personal history of a chap who one year flipped three of his four competition cappuccinos in front of the judges, whose forays into food science brought him a mouthful of coffee mayonnaise, whose job rarely allowed him to build a rapport with any single coffee for more than a day at a time, and whose fabulous girlfriend makes you wonder just where he hides the british can of mondo charm. such were the humanizing bits that surfaced during a three-hour atlanta lecture that featured a preponderance of foodie jargon, like a discourse on ice gelatin filtration: it changes the color of coffee, but tastes the same! useful, that. also, a process involving “cold fingers,” which was always something we thought came from grasping the orange julius a bit too long.

on the industry hang-ups of brewing single estate coffees with an espresso machine: “is it that flawed as a brewer, that it just can’t brew some coffees properly?”

on his somewhat defiant decision to use unusual single estate coffees for his winning barista performance: “it opens espresso back up to me again.”

scintillating single origins were cupped and pulled as shots — a classic wild blueberry ethiopian biloya, a simple and shimmering el salvador finca mauritania and the fruity high-flying kenya gaturiri. of course, espresso was eventually melded with pipe tobacco, toasted hazelnuts, almonds, rosemary, cream, gelatin, foaming agents and sugar before the mesmerized gaze of all. and of course, we videotaped the entire, ponderous, hoffmann-esque narrative.

in two parts … crank the sound. watch the lanky wonder.

Posted in subjective swilling, mad coffee jaunts | No Comments »

linky stall

true’s got the weekend pics, into which this blog’s camcorder hand intruded a regrettable number of times. we’re still wrassling with our video encoders, and are about to resort to the rude, crude, youtube. meanwhile, some girl with lip is mega-blogging the great lakes regional barista competition.

told you those trophies would be jaw-droppers.

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Clang

Something about this blog and historic storms. In atlanta to hear hoffmann, marble sized hail falling. Ow.

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Posted in mad coffee jaunts | 5 Comments »

hoffmann gets lost, stumbles into CI’s living room

the world champion endures this blog’s home espresso bar.

when this blog snorks that much spro it takes about 30 minutes, and then it’s like having hot-air balloons in the midriff and sandbags on the shoulders. we don’t know whether to start flapping around in the air or dig a hole and die. but then, none other than hoffmann was manning our home bar — an act of blog-inflicted torture so merciless that it came replete with tiny psychological annoyances for the poor fellow: the junkie-like closeness of all the apparatus, the lack of “professional” swaths of counter space, an unfamiliar blend that tasted not unlike british yeast spread, the very retro clunkiness of the mazzer major grinder, etc.

welcome to amateur junkie-ism, james. some rest day for the world barista champion. still, he got free baguette sandwiches and a bit of fermented booch out of the deal. and this blog … well, this blog was deeply moved to converse meaningfully with an espresso dignitary and a regular person. his pants tend to sag just like ours! his mouth is not immune from espresso brown-ness! he wears ironic t-shirts! he stole our favorite espresso spoon!

yes, well. it’s not the biggest scandal to envelop a Person of Great Public Repute, but we might as well just come out and say it: james hoffmann is a kleptomaniac. our espresso spoon has, at this very moment, crossed state lines in the man’s possession, due supposedly to a “completely routine” habit of stirring the spro, then depositing the soiled utensil in his blazer pocket. which bodes badly for the string of east coast hotels he’s just left in his wake, as well as anyone serving coffee beverages in vessels smaller than a melon. frankly, we feel fortunate to have hung onto the blogchildren.

the alterra organic espresso gave us fits, and the champeen did not share our fascination with the metropolis redline. that left a counter culture stash of single origin espresso options, valiantly imported from the van by East Coast Hoffmann Talent Manager cindy chang. it may be just this blog, but … isn’t cindy chang, like, the savior of everything? sure seems that way to us.

so, the ethiopia biloya it was. dark berries. a wee bit of rosemary. enjoyable. almost as much as watching an emissary patiently do his work — offering tips, gamely debating old topics, listening to us rant and agreeably answering an assortment of both burning and absurd blogquestions … on video tape. these people at the top of the heap, it seems, must find the fewest things at which to be wowed, and the most things by which to be annoyed. or at least bored. honestly, we can’t think of a more genial champeen to handle the rigors of the job.

so mad props to the casino-man-come-coffee-legend. interview video to be posted shortly.

Posted in subjective swilling | 6 Comments »

in praise of the kitchen sink

forbidden yirgacheffe, on nate the finger’s home bar.

when a week of spro tripping morphs largely into a survey of home bars, it’s either a sign of this blog’s emerging homebody clinginess or a commentary on the quiet consistency spreading among the junkies — not genius, typically, but more and more very good spro.

at nate the finger’s indiana place, it was a not-for-espresso yirgacheffe that was slammed in a portafilter anyway and kicked around for its carbonated currant traits. on the blogbrother’s gleaming basement place, it was all redline all the time … dosed way down and gradually sweeter in a fruity cake batter sort of way. and you already know all about the rabid liquid flowing in the madman’s ohio hideaway.

the commonalities: fun-n-games. bad shots and good shots. headway. eurekas. narrative.

and now comes hoffmann, not in the grand, star-studded sense in which he has traversed the east coast painting pictures for crowds as world champion, but in the casual, almost clueless way in which such a fellow of stature might stroll into some hack blogger’s living room in order to humiliate him. what ARE we going to do? and why?

this blog has its private hopes. hoffmann has his day of rest. betwixt the two, we might just find something worth stewing on. at the very least, it’s high time the lanky brit had him some deep south hinterlands brew — he once asked us to make him something terrible, the masochist. we aim to do our best.

if all falls flat, then at least we can shove a steam wand in our inner ear canal and give a mighty twist …

gulp

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like an iphone for your stomach

this blog’s enthusiasm for the pocket wonder of espresso machines, la marzoccco’s gs3, did NOT collapse like a hot souffle. it collapsed like a stale, forgotten, marbleized souffle left outdoors for three winters and sucked slowly to a shrivelled crisp by fume-loving mites devoid of options. because, you know, they gave us that much time to fall out of love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in screeds | 2 Comments »

i saw coffee breathe

there’s an intersection somewhere in the urban entrails of cincinnati that urgently needs a french bakery — some crusty baguettes, st. andre cheese and general store items. pipe tobacco. lozenges. opposite, a hulking stone basilica now dominates one corner of this intersection, its blithe amber dome windows confronting a rare Neighborhood Cafe on corner no. 2, and then almost completely overshadowing a turreted three-story brick building on corner no. 3 that will soon be a hotbed of books, coffee and human thoughts, thought aloud and in front of people. it’s corner no. 4, the boarded-up one, that needs staple food. preferably an adaptable selection of proven delights, like beer but for the daytime. then you’d have a place, an urban sanctum.

this junction is where the week o’ feckless spro tripping became very serious, and where i found a posse of people loosely connected to the barista-poet himself on corner no. 3, using coffee like some kind of glorious jumper cable. with it, dormant, isolated people were getting wired together, the bitters and the sweets, the positives and the negatives all put to productive use, the random human dots connected with these stunning, sparking, social arcs.

coffee does this. it casts a glow on human interaction, of course, and sometimes it also makes people boil-brained vassals. the madman, in this case, was a merry, bearded genius named larry bourgeois (!) whose most extraordinary talent seemed to be an ability to tell people what a great time they were having. his secondary qualities included a head-spinning collection of philosophy and theology books, an uncanny sense of just when the children needed plying with large bags of pure chocolate wafers and ownership rights to an espresso machine chorus — a three-group la pavoni lever, a rock-solid elektra deliziosa brownhandle, a la marzocco gs3 fresh out of the box, the ethereal chrome deco elektra micro casa semiautomatica, innumerable prosumer chrome-box models like the andreja premium, the silvia and expobar brewtus and a french press or two that were good for holding stuff.

in such a setting we drank the day away, with a historic blizzard deadening things outside and making us feel like kids crawling around with our toys under a blanket. mr. lewis, of the fresh-minted mountain regional barista title and last week’s pennsylvania keynote address, of course produced his microcosm of delights from the spouts available. shrimp arrived. blends were tested. books pulled you into chairs, and laughing people pried you back up again.

here was a group with an eye for drinking coffee to profound effect, and a ripe city outside their door. more spro flowed — so much of it, actually, that shots became gorgeous, never-drunk beverages that idled on the countertops. our home-brewed kombucha was shotgunned, for our collective cleansing. art appeared on the walls. the snow stopped. nate the finger took his turn, and i seized up my camera. a ridiculously cheery fellow scraped the walks at the church across the way, and the speckled bird cafe opened up, with lighted fish tanks and a thrifty decor.

will i become the complementary fourth corner? i don’t intend to. but then, the net result would be a coffee tour worth taking — for its tangibly mystical qualities. a sacramental experience, not a sanctioned event. we could host a barista jam in the middle of the four-way, for the public, with machines in the road and armchairs on the sidewalks and hard alpine cheese on wide trays and the world watching on the interwebs and big, welcoming lights strung from store to cafe to chapel to flat with a beefy, endless, sparking jumper cable.

…

liquid running

art appeared …

gs3, carrot juice in press pot, stale cappuccino

grace, collected

someday soon, an upright chair, a patio, a garden, some music …

the madman

the madman’s bus

the dishwater, it suffered

across the street, a thaw

Posted in mad coffee jaunts | 13 Comments »