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Yesterday marked for me 10 years of unbroken daily coffee consumption.

Some glimpses of my coffee pre-history:

Maxwell House, a percolator, a kitchen with yellow cabinets in an old farmhouse in rural Indiana. My mom would make a pot every morning before going out to feed the animals. I vaguely remember tasting it on a few occasions and thinking it was disgusting. It probably was.

East Village, 1992. I’d made a hangout of a place called Cafe Limbo. They served mochas in giant bowls. doesn’t really taste like coffee.

New York City. 1995-ish. Fashion week. I’m in a tent at Bryant Park backstage at a Calvin Klein show that I have no business being at. I’m standing next to Charlie Rose and Barbara Walters and attempting (probably unsuccessfully) to look nonchalant. There is an espresso bar, I think it was set up by Timothy’s Coffee. I take a cappuccino and am surprised to find I like the taste of it. I file away this dangerous tasty drug discovery, vowing to only use it when the need is extreme.

Midtown. Rat race. I’m working at a large healthcare nonprofit. I wear a tie to work. Starbucks is nearby and they have silly espresso based beverages that I indulge in only when I’m really in a crunch and need an energy boost. I regard coffee with suspicion, addiction to a stimulant seeming like a bad path.

Amsterdam. 2000. I’m in Holland for a couple weeks visiting family, smoking and bicycling and occasionally drinking coffee because ordering juice at these coffeeshops all the time starts to feel lame.

Burning Man festival. 2000. I’m there with my close friend and roommate from Brooklyn, camped among old and dear friends. I have an enormous crush on my roommate’s sister (let’s call her Joanna) who lives in Oregon and is also at Burning Man. I almost postponed my Holland trip earlier in the year to see a Bowie concert with her. I think knowing she’d be at this event was the thing that put me over the edge to attend.

I’m not sure I can encapsulate in any useful way what Burning Man is/was like if you’re unfamiliar. Transmundane. Intensity and profundity. Excess and exhaustion. Meltdowns and Epiphanies. And sometimes just a lot of dust in your lungs, general awkwardness and the all consuming desire for a shower.

A few days into the event I was having a meh Burning Man. Babysitting other people’s dramas, struggling with the construction of my elaborate personal geodesic dome which I designed in miniature to fit unassembled as checked baggage. Turns out making a dome the size of a tent (but 50x heavier) is as much effort as making a 20 foot tall dome. There is a lesson there.

But that girl Joanna. She was camped with Oregon people clear on the other side of the “city”. I kept seeing her but we rarely had a chance for more than a few words amid all the other people and chaos. I’ll leave out a full accounting of the pharmaceutical adventurings that occured, but suffice to say by the end of the week I was feeling spent. A night of general art tourism commenced and the girl and I were part of a large posse exploring the seemingly infinite expanse of theme camps and installations. For very brief moments we could break aside, hold hands, talk - before being swallowed back into the social chaos of our group. I felt like I would collapse from exhaustion before finding any game with this dame and that would be a shame.

My options for rescuing the evening seemed limited. Option number one would be to eat a tab of LSD, gambling that its stimulant effect would outweigh its consequences on my consciousness. Clearly that was a stupid idea, but it is a testament to my fatigue that I seriously considered it. The other option was to herd cats toward center camp where coffee could be obtained.

It was a 16oz cup and I was nearly in the fetal position as I was sipping it. I drank about a third of it and was feeling nothing, ready to write off the evening and head back toward my stupid metal tent. Then I felt it. A second wind.

A few hours later everyone in our posse was dropping like flies and Joanna and I were the last ones standing. We grabbed a blanket and headed out deep into the desert and kissed and watched the sun rise. I remember a lot about that sunrise.

Bookends. The center camp cafe at Burning Man where I had cup number one in my streak (L). 10 year mark, Day 3653: Finca Vista Hermosa peaberry, Huehuetenango, roasted by the producer, the incomperable Edwin Martinez (R).

I vowed I would drink coffee everyday for the rest of my life. Haven’t missed a day since. So there you have it.

My friend Mat and some coconspirators are launching an ambitious project to produce a magazine start-to-finish in one weekend, 48hr Magazine. My buddy Andrew Barnett at Ecco Caffe is sponsoring the team with some beans to help them power through the sleepless sprint. I created the following quick video to demonstrate to them a simple technique for the Hario V60 cone filters they’ll be using…

Hario V60 pourover how-to from tonx on Vimeo.

I’ve seen fussier approaches than this one and haven’t done very much experimenting or brew analysis myself, but I’ll say that this has been working pretty well for the crew at Intellivenice and I’ve really enjoyed the results.

Compelled to put the jumper cables to this blog engine to share a quick sip of some of what I experienced at this year’s Specialty Coffee Association of America gathering in Anaheim.

I was privileged to attend day 2 of the Symposium which preceded the show. I could say a lot about the cast of characters of coffee’s old guard and new school rubbing elbows, the visible familial camaraderie that spans from genuine love to old simmering grudges, the positive vibes and the visible posturings. But for now I’ll leave you with my major take away, which is that people in the industry are beginning to discuss and debate the right things with the right stakeholders increasingly given more of a place at the table.

I will share more about the announced Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative in a future post or two.

The US Barista Competition is a whole ‘nother compelling beast of awesome. A sort of ad-hoc coverage of the event emerged spanning streaming, twitter, flickr, and multiple blogs. (I did my part via the twitternets). The gist is that in spite of the lingering absurdities of the premise of these things, the caliber of the competitors has become truly astonishing and compelling to witness. More to say about the competition for sure, probably through flickr as I sort through my mass of images. I hope to don a judges apron myself when regionals kick up again.

All of this is prelude to the point of this post which is the people. Specialty Coffee is made of people! And there are many of them, more with each passing year, amplifying and refining each others enthusiasms, digging deeper into the mysteries of the bean and chipping away at the persistent challenges of the trade. A big thanks and shout out to the many friends and allies, old and new whom I feel deeply privileged to have connected with this past weekend.

I meet a lot of people working in coffee who express frustration with how far consumers lag behind coffee professionals in their understanding and appreciation of good coffee. It seems to be a common barista lament.

I don’t believe this frustration is well founded or fair, for a number of reasons. For starters, I suspect that even the most dedicated coffee lover has limited opportunities to experience as broad a range of samples as fans of other beverages. To explore this idea a bit further, I’ve put together a very quick, very informal survey I’d like as many folks as possible (coffee pros and novices alike) to take… Read the rest of this entry »

This tweet today from Jeremy Tooker of Four Barrel, who is currently traveling in Kenya, explains their no-free-refill policy quite nicely.

The pixels had barely dried on my previous post before I received word from someone involved in the unfolding SCAA negotiations with the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. The short of it is that there was solid reasoning behind keeping a low profile on the sensitive dialogue with the ECX, that significant progress was being made, and that the SCAA is striving to improve its public relations activities.

To that end, the SCAA blog shares some very positive news from Ethiopia about acceptance of a number of proposals that will advance the interests of quality coffee growers and buyers, including a proposed “2nd window” that will incorporate traceability and allow for premium prices paid directly to growers.

Direct Specialty Trade (DST) Platform: The ECX will also establish a 2nd window within its system, to allow for traceability and direct exchange. Within this system, any farmer or cooperative may submit their coffee to the ECX for quality evaluation and grading, and the coffee will be available for sampling to registered buyers. The ECX will then make available a venue for price discovery via an auction. ECX only facilitates the transaction, and is not a party to the transaction. A resulting FOB contract will be made directly between the overseas buyer and the farmer or farmer group, with the inclusion of a farmer-elected Services Provider, who may provide services to the farmer such as milling and exportation. The ECX will assist in the transaction by providing guidance on contracting and fee structure.

I encourage anyone interested in these complex issues to read the full report, detailing additional specialty level grading at the exchange using SCAA cupping protocols, proposed expansions of the ECX geographic indications, increases in the number of certified Q graders, and an overview of some of the underlying issues and remaining obstacles.

Today I got a rare communique in my inbox from the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America), the big trade group that promotes specialty coffee, sets standards, and holds our industry’s annual trade show. Currently a delegation from the SCAA is in Addis Ababa meeting with representatives of the controversial new government run Ethiopia Coffee Exchange which has disrupted and created an uncertain future for much of the quality focused, direct trade coffee partnerships that have cropped up in recent years. Everyone who has come to love Ethiopia’s coffees has an interest in how this plays out.

But that’s not what this morning’s press release was about:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Former SCAA Executive Sentenced to Prison for Embezzlement from Association

Long Beach, CA. U.S.A. (October 21, 2009) – The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) announced today that former Chief Operating Officer, Scott Welker, has been sentenced to federal prison for embezzling in excess of $465,000.00 from the association.
…

I get at most maybe 2 or 3 pieces of email per year from the SCAA, so it surprises me that this is appropriate subject matter for one of them. I can only assume that they’d like me to write about this “news” and share it with all 14 of my blog readers. But since I don’t feel qualified to explain their embezzlement scandal, how it happened, who was minding the store, or what measures have or have not been taken to assure it could never happen again, I’ll take a pass.

Why no press release about the important talks underway in Addis Ababa? Who is in the delegation? What are their stated objectives? What is the SCAA’s position on the ECX? The SCAA is involved in something important and (presumably) positive. Would it not benefit them to go in armed with a publicly stated position or goal, maybe with the eyes of the press and awareness from its own membership? Even sensitive closed-door diplomacy would seem to benefit from at least an open window or two.

I don’t want this to come off as inflammatory, it just strikes me that as an industry we don’t always make the best PR judgments. I’d much rather see press releases in my inbox from the SCAA about the serious work they’re apparently doing on behalf of quality coffee partnerships, not irrelevant news about old scandals they’ve yet to live down.

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?