Tender Mercy
Roasters and Retailers Come to Terms
by Richard Reynolds


On the online newsgroup alt.coffee, hardly a week goes by that doesn't include at least one tale of an encounter with a clueless "PBTC" (Person Behind the Counter, in cyberspeak). The espresso horror stories tell of cold portafilters left on the counter, five-second gushers, "double" shots made by running more water through spent grounds, scalded milk, dirty transfer pitchers, and other transgressions.
   But such complaints are hardly limited to the fanatics who congregate on alt.coffee. Talk to any roaster who takes his or her espresso blend seriously, and the topic is guaranteed to come up within minutes. After years and years of research and experimentation, the roaster has finally succeeded in creating an espresso blend that is smooth, rich, textured, and redolent with crema. The roaster spends hours and hours with a new café customer training the owner and baristas in the fine points of producing an espresso beverage. Three weeks later the roaster drops by the café, finds a new employee at the espresso machine, orders an espresso and is served a bitter, watery brew that resembles espresso the way wood-grain contact paper resembles a cherry-wood table top.

Trench Warfare
The roaster is totally at the mercy of the barista. One must always make allowances for gross incompetence in storage, but the winemaker who develops a superior Syrah can deliver it to the wine shop with a pretty high degree of certainty that the bottle the customer opens for that special occasion will be the wine he put in the bottle. The premium sorbet maker can go into a store across the country, buy a pint of his dark chocolate & orange mint sorbet, and experience the magical taste he created back home.
   But in the hands of a reckless barista, the finest espresso blend ever created can be reduced to swill in seconds. Barry Jarrett of Riley's Coffee & Fudge in Fairview Heights, Ill., roasts some terrific espresso blends, but ask him about putting his Decatur Street Blend in the hands of another café and he cringes. "I'll sell to anyone," quips Jarrett, "provided they take my company name off the packaging."
   Is this the new Western Front, where roasters and retailers stare mutely and incomprehendingly at one another across a trenches-and-barbed-wire no-man's-land? Fortunately not. A range of roasters are facing this problem head-on, imparting knowledge, passion and good technique to their own employees and to the cafés and restaurants to whom they entrust their beans.

Artistry Over Automation
One café owner who's making several West Coast roasters happy is Patsy Price, owner of Global Blends Coffee Company in Mountain View, Calif. An engineer by training, Price decided to open a café after Silicon Valley's high-tech boom went bust. She spent months researching espresso preparation and checking out West Coast roasters before opening the café in October 2003. Price offers a choice of three espresso blends each day: Barefoot Coffee's decaf and two others selected from Supreme Bean's Abruzzo and Del Norte blends, Equator's Tiger Walk and Jaguar blends, and Stumptown's Hair Bender.
   A trim woman with straight reddish brown hair and brown horn-rimmed glasses, Price has a focused and intelligent manner. "This is a wine list," she says of her espresso lineup. "I take this seriously. Every day, you can't not check the blend; you have to time the shots; you have to measure the temperature at the group head; you have to prep the group head. It's discipline, but it's also understanding why it makes a difference." Working with so many different blends is a challenge for her baristi, concedes Price, and some blends are harder to work with than others. "To be honest," she adds, "I think my baristi enjoy the challenge. It's harder to work here, but they also take a lot of pride in it."
   It's a Sunday morning, and Price's sons are working the bar. I ask 18-year-old Kelly for a ristretto. His mother starts to offer some coaching, but he gives her a look and she leaves it in his hands. Kelly pulls a beautiful, chocolaty brown ristretto, a spare ounce or so with lots of body, a smooth and rich taste, and a dense layer of crema (the espresso du jour is Equator's Jaguar blend). Global Blends is small, with five tables, a couple of easy chairs and a counter with three stools. The Starbucks just down the street is four times as big and has a long line. But there's a steady flow of customers at Global Blends, and Price says she's starting to build a good base of clientele, including several Europeans who come there because they can get a decent espresso. "I understand their pain," says Price. "That's one of the reasons I opened this cafe."
   Price, her husband and their younger son Jesse all trained at Portland's Stumptown Coffee Roasters, among other places. Janet Oppenheimer, Stumptown's wholesale director (though she prefers the title "coffee gal"), says she looks for customers like Price, who are passionate about coffee and want to learn. "We have expectations of our accounts," she says. "We will train and give as much coffee knowledge as they want, from cupping to French press classes, to constant trainings, [to] bringing in your staff." The training is especially important with their coffee, she says. "It's definitely not a traditional '14 grams is a double, seven is a single,'" says Oppenheimer. "Our double shots have 21 to 23 grams of espresso; it's a bigger amount of coffee and two 3/4-ounce pulls. There's more coffee, there's more passion, there's more artistry, there's no automation whatsoever. It's a very artisan approach." Due to its training expectations and care for the coffee they ship, Stumptown sometimes turns down business, she says, including anyone who's more than a three-day shipping time away.
   Restaurants, which don't generally serve a high volume of espresso drinks and can rarely afford to have a dedicated barista pulling shots, can spell real trouble for espresso extraction. But Oppenheimer says they do have a few restaurant customers who do a good job. One of these is Assaggio, an Italian restaurant in Portland, Ore. Assaggio owner Sarah Joannides switched to Stumptown last spring and is a very happy customer. "My servers had been doing espresso for years but hadn't been trained," says Joannides. "Stumptown got the servers excited about it. They came in and did a tasting and let them help pick out the different coffees we were going to serve. Then they put each server through four hours of training." The hosts and buspeople have also been trained so they can serve as backups, and Joananides says no one who hasn't been through the training makes espresso drinks in her restaurant.

Ambassadors And Stewards
Philip Hand of Los Angeles, Calif.-based Supreme Bean, another roaster who supplies Global Blends, says that a customer who doesn't care enough to produce a quality espresso is "one of the things that make me beat my head against the wall." Like Stumptown, he offers his customers extensive training, but he reports that the café culture in Southern California is still young, and that not many cafés are ready to "step up to the plate," buy first-rate equipment and give espresso preparation the care it needs. When Price approached him, he says, "She was just feeding me with music-to-my-ears stuff: Somebody who cares, somebody who has already seen everything, has a vision of what a retail business needs to be. When I get her phone call, it makes my day."
   San Rafael, Calif.-based Equator, another of the suppliers Price selected, is owned by Brooke McDonald and Helen Russell. Russell says they don't advertise, preferring to build a client base through working with people who are just getting into the business. She looks for customers who have a passion for coffee, as they tend to be "susceptible to learning how to do it properly. You build this relationship, they're educated by you." Equator focuses on cafés as opposed to restaurants, though Traci Des Jardins of San Francisco, Calif.'s celebrated Jardiniere does use Equator's Tiger Walk espresso blend. "Tracy is an espresso enthusiast," says Russell, "so she's the perfect chef-owner, pulls a shot every time she walks into the restaurant. We do trainings, and each time we deliver, my guy goes through the machine. She has someone dedicated to the coffee."
   In the end, says Russell, "The roaster has to be the ambassador and the customer has to take stewardship. You can deliver the best product in the world, do all the training, give them access to you on a daily basis, but it ultimately is up to that individual, and people like Traci and Patsy." She also cites Caffé Sapore on Lombard Street in San Francisco, Calif., Bodi's Java in Castro Valley, Calif., and The Coffee Station in Santa Rosa as exemplary customers, observing, "These people execute a beautiful product and they're successful."

Roasters Get Choosy
For roasters who also run their own cafés, the challenge of turning out quality espresso beverages begins at home, with the people you hire. David Schomer of Seattle, Wash.'s Espresso Vivace says the first thing he looks for in new employees is "intelligence and some artistry in their nature. Something that would convince me that they could get excited." The technical aspects of producing a quality espresso beverage are tangible but by no means easy, observes Schomer, but there's also the intangible: "When you aspire to excellence, you get a buzz going among the staff and they feel proud."
   When it comes to taking on new wholesale customers, says Schomer, "We're only taking gourmet clients now that let me build them with equipment, training and the blend." One of his more unusual customers is Macchinesti Coffee in Japan, which now roasts his green on site. When he first began working with them, says Schomer, they sent three women to Seattle to learn about espresso. The women, he says, apologized for having only read his book three times but quickly added that they had watched his video 50 times. "And then they proved it," he adds. "They're the absolute best students I ever had."
   An East Coast roaster/café that has developed a reputation for its espresso is Gimme! Coffee, which has three cafés in the Ithaca, N.Y. area and one in Brooklyn, N.Y. Roaster John Gant recites a set of steps (he refers to them as "links") that Gimme! Coffee has developed to ensure quality control in their cafés. Link one is pulling shots on a dedicated machine in the roastery "every day, every hour." Link two is training the roasting staff to the same level of technical expertise demanded of the front-line baristi, and rotating them through the bar for a least two hours each day. Link three is selection and training of his staff. "We train and train," says Gant. "We support bar training with written materials and updates, periodic refreshers on seasonal drinks, and then more on-site training." Link four is bringing the baristi into the roastery for sessions called "Coffee World," which entail training in coffee horticulture, green selection, sampling, blending, and roasting. The fifth link is obsessive attention to the technical aspects of the business, including several innovations of their own invention.
   Finally, we have Intelligentsia Coffee's Doug Zell, who has brought sophisticated espresso to the Chicago area. Zell has instituted a rigorous training and certification program at his two cafés and does not allow anyone who hasn't passed a challenging written and skills test to prepare espresso drinks. He says it generally takes six to eight months of employment before people pass the certification test.
   As for working with other retail outlets, Zell has adopted a counterintuitive strategy that he says has been quite successful. While Intelligentsia used to offer extensive free training as part of its package, it has now begun charging customers for training. "What we found," says Zell, "is that when we gave it away, people didn't take it seriously. Since we started charging, attendance has been 100 percent and the result has been fantastic."
   When asked about working with restaurants, Zell observes that they have historically done a poor job with espresso. But he sees the beginnings of a change. "This year is the first time we've seen people saying, 'Hey, I really want to do something better with espresso.'" One restaurant client that he's particularly happy with is the Chicago, Ill. restaurant Avec, which is using his Black Cat blend. The espresso he's had there, says Zell, "is better than 99.9 percent of what I've had in coffeehouses."

Keeping Up With Food
The quality of food served in this country has increased exponentially over the past 20 years, and if a sophistication in espresso beverages has lagged behind, there does seem to be reason for optimism. Starbucks has raised the bar for everyone, and dedicated roasters like those profiled here, café owners like Patsy Price, and restaurateurs like Traci Des Jardins and Sarah Joannides are pushing the envelope to expose a widening circle of Americans to quality espresso beverages.

   Richard Reynolds is a freelance writer who also works for Mother Jones Magazine and plays French Horn in the Berkeley Symphony. He can be reached at espressomn@earthlink.net.