t o n x . o r g

Like a bright bat-signal cast across the twitterverse into the clouds of my highly distractible and overcaffeinated brain, I am called to the blog-cave today by a piece of purported journalism - the cover story of this week’s NY Press slamming the good people of Stumptown Coffee. Many wise and appropriate things have been said in the comments section of the online article already, but I’ll cast my 2 cents into the fountain of this mini-rant…

Much like Twilight fans, coffeegeeks are notoriously easy to troll, and I guess I’m not immune. Take an ill-informed premise, add in some vague anti-hip faux-populism, air-headed economic theorizing, and a weird need to establish grudges against people you’ve not met… well, you’ve got yourself the makings of a runny turd of not-quite-journalism suitable for stirring up a fun pile of emails to your editor (who clearly ought to have better things to do, like fact-checking a cover story, but I digress).

In my last post I asked why coffeebars are so often singled out for special pseudo-scrutiny about their motivations, margins, and business practices. I’ll again resist a full accounting of the answer to that difficult question but one big element worth touching on is the discomfort many of our fellow citizens have with human authenticity in their retail transactions.

We are comfortable with the customer-is-always-right servile status quo of corporate retail. We are comfortable when the person at the cash register is on a lower rung of the unspoken but ubiquitous class divides which define our public behavior. We are often much less comfortable when the person on the other side of a transaction is a real person, a peer, or (heaven forbid) someone younger or more attractive or of otherwise enviable lifestyle. In America we are instructed that by nestling safely into our well-rehearsed role as “consumers” we can expect others to assume their complimentary facilitating and enabling roles, shielding us from having to engage with strangers as anything more than non-player-characters in the game of capitalism.

I would argue this customer / service-provider divide or lack thereof is the nut of what distinguishes good “indy” shops or owner-operated retail businesses from chains and corporate monoliths. It is the element that most reflects on that elusive and hard to approach notion of authenticity, which many folks, infantilized by consumer culture, aren’t always comfortable navigating.

I wont excuse bad service but I also don’t have much truck with the notion that our mere willingness to throw money around by itself entitles us to special treatment.

All of which is to say that the guy who wrote this article clearly has an issue with some people who work at Stumptown, or cool people generally, or people he perceives as trying to be cool, or people who are considered cool by other people who he has determined are themselves uncool. Insert obligatory mentions of bicycles, mustaches, and skinny jeans (I kid you not, read the article!). Maybe he tried unsuccessfully to date a Stumptown barista (editors note: never date baristas).

If I were a better wannabe culture critic myself I might go on further about the origins of consumer privilege, strategies for subverting retail expectations, or the ideal of service in a theoretical gift economy, but I put down the bong years ago and skipped the academic disciplines of college completely so y’all are on your own there.

And coming back briefly to the original article (which is amply refuted in the better comments), I would like to say that Duane and the crew at Stumptown march on the side of angels in this coffee game and deserve commendations for the inspiring work they do. The landscape of coffee company marketing and hype is littered with buzzwords and bluster and confusion still reigns in the press about what truly separates the greats from the merely goods or the totally phonies (a state of affairs us coffee folk still struggle to address effectively). An emerging pantheon of names (familiar enough to readers of this blog to not merit repeating) is finally getting well earned praise in certain circles. Foodies, good journalists and some great restauranteurs are starting to figure out coffee (even as most prominent Food Critics continue to ignore it or get it wrong). Things are looking up.

Now that the economy has gone to shit and ex-bankers are lining up to become bread bakers and baristas, big box stores are shuttering and being reborn as churches and community centers and farmers markets are flourishing, maybe we are ready as a culture to dispense with some of our old mass-market hang-ups. Have you hugged your hipster barista today?

As a teenager Kyle Glanville used to hot rod cars. As an adult he hot-rods coffeebars.

There is a lot to be said about Intelligentsia’s genre-destroying upcoming Venice Beach coffeebar, but I’ll skip the geeky details to point out perhaps the most interesting facet of the project: everywhere I go in L.A., people are talking about it. The anticipation here for the opening of this shop, beyond the usual coffee cognoscente circles, is probably unprecedented. The sort of buzz you might hear around a new restaurant from celebrity chef. This is partially a result of the increasing confluence of social media and foodie enthusiasm but also a reflection of how well-received Intelligentsia and its Silverlake shop have been in a town that has lacked for an established coffee culture.

Kyle and the crew at intelli are making some bold design choices for the new shop, as detailed in this recent LA Times preview. Some of the classic limitations and bottlenecks of typical cafe service are being eliminated and the customer experience follows a model that we road-tested at Slow Food Nation of more personalized interaction at multiple stations with knowledgeable baristas acting as hosts. Another element of the design that I’m excited about is the preferences for ad-hoc bench style seating and the total elimination of the usual tables and chairs. It was an idea I fought hard for during the design of the Silverlake store, that Kyle and architect Ana Henton have succeeded in fully realizing with the new space.

Though I’m no longer on the intelli payroll (full disclosure: I still enjoy frequent free coffee), I feel compelled to continue to evangelize for the great work that they do, particularly as drinking good coffee remains under assault. The trope that Specialty Coffee is an overpriced indulgence is regaining some currency thanks to lazy journalists musing on the economic downturn, the fall from grace of Starbucks, and new big-dollar PR blitzes for McCafe.

To digress, yesterday on NPR, I listened to MarketPlace’s Kai Ryssdal open a piece on the new McDonalds campaign with the line:

“Among the most brilliant marketing moves ever was convincing us to spend $4 for a cup of coffee that it costs a company maybe, I don’t know, maybe 30 cents, half a buck to make.”

Does noted business journalist Kai Ryssdal also think it is “brilliant marketing moves” that fooled me into paying $5 for a pint of microbrew beer last night? Did Kai Ryssdal feel as victimized by capitalist sorcery when he was munching an In-N-Out burger in the next (much more interesting) segment?

For some screwed up reason, of all the myriad bills, businesses and retail transactions we encounter on a daily basis, we reserve a special place of skepticism and strange condemnation for coffeebars in our amateur economic speculations. Why is that? Why is there a widespread belief that coffeebars, with their long lines and beverages priced sometimes higher than two times the price of a cup of coca-cola (larceny!) are mercilessly raking in profits? Where does this misapprehension and borderline hostility come from?

I’ll leave those as rhetorical questions and spare you any more of my half-baked essaying. Bottom line is that the indy coffeebar business gets some poorly-reasoned criticisms hung on it and we should explore creative ways of refuting some of the dumber misconceptions.

Intelli’s Venice coffeebar will hopefully be opening middle of this month.

For the eleven folks who still peek at this dormant blog, wondering if I’ll return from my self-imposed blogging exile, the answer is (as always): “maybe”.

Last weekend I attempted with mixed success to liveblog the Western Regional Barista Competition in Los Angeles. I imagined a blog filled with some short, irreverent videos (like the fun videos on the now-vanished zacharyzachary.com), barista profiles, signature drink breakdowns, and a lot of interaction with the internet audience. What ended up happening was more of an IT wild goose chase of trying to set up and maintain a very fat, but very macguyver’d internet connection and the constant scrambling for the right cord or dongle or electrical outlet to keep the whole thing from collapsing. At some point I had to choose between trying to keep the live video stream on ustream functioning and tending to the blog. The stream won the day.

the nerve center of the wrbc2009.net huddled around our one powerstrip, photo by Ian Tobin.

Fortunately some really stellar folks had my back. The tireless Brent Fortune, Guatemalan Barista Champ Raul Rodas, Aussie by-way-of U.K. Tim Styles, and my flickr brother Ian Tobin got plugged in and kept things rolling. Foodblogger Joshua Lurie over at FoodGPS showed us how it is really done - competitor interviews and detailed play by play - picking up the ample slack.

In the end I’m filled with a sense of personal disappointment, but am pleased that the event overall was a smashing success, and impressed with the caliber of all the competitors (even the many first-timers) in attendance. We had over 200 folks watching on ustream and over 3200 visitors to the blog on our biggest day. With a little more effort and a little less duct tape, one wonders what the audience could become for these odd events in the future?

Hope everyone is having a lovely Solstmas. Here is a fun video I put together from Saturday night’s FourBarrel/SweetMarias canned chili and homebrew bash, proving once again that coffee people are good at having fun.

May all your Santa pinata be filled with super bounce balls.

Congrats to M’lissa and Chris at Ritual who are making it official and announcing their engagement.

love is awesome.

At 11:39am this morning I had the following strange SMS conversation with my favorite coffee-gear guru, Terry Z of espressoparts:

me: “have you ever put green coffee in the laser etcher?”

TerryZ: “no….. never. should we try it?”

me: “of course you should try it!!!”

TerryZ: “just a hole or do you want me to roast it?”

me: “”t o n x”"

12:32pm

TerryZ: “check my flickr…….”

TerryZ and his crew are awesome people.

My good buddy Kyle just contributed this nifty report to the folks at BBTV. A peek into Fazenda Ipanema in Brasil - a large, lavish and highly technified farm producing some outstanding coffee. Its a big contrast to the smaller scale coffee production that I’ve witnessed and a reminder that coffee farms come in some surprising shapes and sizes.

Look forward to seeing more stuff like this from Kyle down the road.

There is a lot to process and a lot to say about the experience at Slow Food Nation. For now I just want to say that it felt like it was a tremendous success and thank everyone deeply for their hard work and the love they poured into it.

The coffees were amazing, the sense of community was amazing, and the dialogues with attendees were awesome.

We had kids and little old ladies drinking challenging single origin espressos and absolutely loving it - the debates about single origin espresso are over.

More to say, much to absorb… but I’m taking a few days off. :)

In addition to the unprecedentedly massive Coffee Pavilion at Fort Mason this weekend (and sorry to say all Taste Hall tickets have now sold out!), there are some other coffee related activities going on during Slow Food Nation. Worth noting are the Blue Bottle cart at Slow on the Go in front of City Hall, a taste session with chocolates as part of the Taste Workshops, and one last-minute event that Peter Giuliano of Counter Culture and I have put together for Saturday with support from the folks at the Long Now Foundation:

Saturday, August 30th
3:30pm-4:30pm

Long Now Foundation Gallery at Fort Mason

Producer Perspectives: The Present and Future of Quality Coffee

Globetrotting coffee buyer Peter Giuliano leads a roundtable discussion with coffee producers, contemplating the dramatic changes in the coffee market from a producer’s perspective. What are the implications when a highly crafted food product is created in a developing country, but consumed in the developed world? What does craftsmanship, sustainability, and quality mean from the coffee producer’s perspective? Plan on an engaging, freewheeling, and global discussion of coffee, culture, and economics.

Coffee from some of the participating producers will be served. A short Q & A session will follow.

Space is limited to 40 people, please RSVP by Friday at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pZAMMDFBmsM-barEfN27SIQ

The Long Now Foundation gallery is in Building A at Fort Mason Center. Map available here
http://longnow.org/contact/

We’ll be recording the session and uploading video at some point following the event. If you’re in the Bay Area, please consider joining us.

Being in San Francisco for Slow Food Nation means I get to catch the inaugural week at Four Barrel, Jeremy Tooker’s stunningly beautiful coffeebar in the Mission. I made this timelapse of the scene yesterday.

Big congratulations to Jeremy and the crew.