Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room

It’s as impressive as you’d expect: full-blown Probat roaster right out in the open, a long line of Clovers at the main bar, 

As a tourist attraction it doesn’t disappoint: even in a city known for gourmet coffee shops, you won’t find a better example of showmanship and art. They obviously spent a great deal of time and money planning all the details. But it also means long lines (you’ll wait at least 20 minutes to get a coffee) and impossible parking. (Although I noticed they offer valet parking if you want to go that way).

 

I tried the Ethiopian Konga, which my understanding is another name for Yrgecheffe coffee, which became my favorite after trying it at Terroir in Boston a few years ago. Yes I asked for it Clover-brewed rather than a hand-pour. 

 

McCafe is not worth it

On my long and dangerous journey through snow to Seatac this morning, I swung into McDonalds to try those new coffee beverages they’ve been advertising.  They give out these free latte coupons that expire December 31st, so I had to try it soon.  Yuk.  It tasted like Folgers with hot milk.  On a cold snowy day it was definitely worth the free coupon, but not much more.

Free coffee at Starbucks

I dropped in on West Mercer Elementary school this morning:

and then I went downtown and got one of these for free:

Incidentally, I disagree with the idea that irresponsible or uninformed people should vote.  If you’re unsure about a candidate or an issue, please don’t guess – you’ll likely just make things worse.

If you want to know what I think about issues, read these posts.  If I’m wrong about something, please leave comments so I can change my mind.

Konga at Trabant Coffee

Mike at Trabant Coffee and Chai saw that I was looking for more Ethiopia Yergcheffe Konga coffee (it’s sooo good!), and let me know that a new batch is now available from 49th Parallel Roasters and it’s in stock now in Seattle.  So I rushed over to their Pioneer Square store and picked up a fresh 12-oz bag and this morning I enjoyed another, heavenly-wonderful, handmade raw milk latte with those excellent beans.

I even gave a cup to the piano teacher at our house this afternoon.  She’ll be back, I assure you.

Best home espresso machine

I'm still using my humble Starbucks Barrista, purchased almost ten years ago and still going strong, faithfully producing my raw milk latte every single morning.  A friend who is looking to purchase his own system asked my advice for which one I'd buy today.  I haven't been in the market for a while so I'm not sure what's out there, but now I see that my favorite coffee shop Espresso Vivace advises the GS/3, from Franke Coffee Systems:

The GS/3 dramatically resets the gold standard for performance among all espresso machines. Its performance meets and surpasses the finest high volume machines on the market today. In a tiny footprint, with water reservoir or plumb-in options, GS/3 suits high-end home use and has sufficient steam power and performance for many commercial applications including restaurants, catering, and professional offices.

 

 

 

Contact your Franke regional sales manager for purchasing details.  Oh wait, I see it listed on eBay for a mere $6300.  Hmmm.  Time to raid my children's college fund?   How can I get my wife to agree.  Let's see, if I drink $4 worth of Starbucks a day, it would pay for itself in only, what, four years! Please, honey!

Konga Co-op from Terroir Coffee

There is no point drinking bad coffee if you live in the Seattle area.  In fact, some would argue there's little point living here period, in all this rain, unless you take advantage of the extremely good coffee that's readily available.  But what to do when you're out of town, as I was earlier this month while vacationing on the East Coast?  Well, we had flown into Boston so naturally i made it a point to visit George Howell Coffee Company, in Acton.  It's a bit of a drive, but it was close to where my in-laws live, so we swung by anyway.  There is no retail store, so unfortunately I wasn't able to enjoy any of the coffees on the spot, but I did buy this extremely tasty espresso roast from Konga Co-op, in Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.  Boy is it tasty!  Definitely one of the best espressos I have ever had.  The roasting was absolutely perfect, as good as the best I've tasted in Seattle.

But now I've run out. So yesterday I swung by Trabant again to see if they had any Konga (they did a few months ago) but alas, none for a couple of months.  And Terroir distributes through Whole Foods in the Northeast, but not (yet) apparently here.   Somehow I must find more!

9/25: Update:  Michael from Trabant wrote me to say they now have some in stock!  I’ll be there this weekend to load up.

Grandma and Me

I spent last week with my 92-year-old grandmother.  A lifelong dairy farmer, she grew up in a cabin with a dirt floor, deep in the woods of rural Wisconsin, so it's not surprising that she's extremely tough.  Extremely opinionated too, as I learned 15 years ago when she visited me in Japan and heard her talking about WWII and her work in a bandage factory. On everything from politics to the economy to international relations and the environment, she has the fierce confidence of a woman who knows you need to chop wood to survive a sub-zero Wisconsin winter -- and thinks that what many of you talk about is a bunch of hooey.

She's cut back her coffee drinking in the last few years.  I remember when she used to drink a pot before bedtime to "help her sleep".  And what does she think about organic food?  "Hah!," she says. "That's crazy."  She remembers being glad that they could finally afford pesticides, and she would never go back.  "You ever seen how many bugs you get?"

What about raw milk?  She thinks pasteurization is fine for the city folk, but as someone who drank fresh milk straight from the bulk tank her whole life, she's never heard of anyone getting sick.   When she was a girl, the woods were so thick that the bigger worry was finding pasture land for the cows.  Be thankful for what you have.

Brown your teeth with Crest Pro-Health Rinse

About two months ago, I bought one of those special giant Costco boxes of a mouthwash from Crest.  I've been long convinced by the evidence that anti-bacterial rinses like Listerine decrease your chances of tooth problems, particularly gingivitis, so for many years I've been using as directed, at least once a day.  (No, it doesn't cause cancer -- I checked).

Coincidentally, I also noticed recently that my teeth have been turning color: ugly brown stains all over my mouth.  I assumed it was caused by my Espresso Vivace habit, though it's strange that it appeared suddenly and with such force. But whatever, I'd rather have ugly teeth than give up my morning latte, so I ignored it until today when my dentist asked me if by any chance I was using Crest Pro-Health rinse.  Bingo!

Now I was stunned to see that Crest actually admits that this rinse can brown your teeth!  I'm shocked because Crest's parent company, Procter & Gamble, is ultra-ultra conservative about these things--they test their products interminably, and their healthcare divisions in particular are obsessive about consumer safety.  The web site notes that staining is extremely rare--affecting fewer than 0.001% of people--so I guess I'm just one of those unlucky mouths.

Incidentally, although I won't be using Pro-Health again (anybody want my extra, unopened bottle?), I disagree with people who think the FDA should order a recall. No doubt the product does work for some people, and it's easy enough for me to be informed about it, so it should be up to me (or you, dear reader) to decide whether to use it or not.  Some people find the alcohol-based rinses like Listerine too harsh (I don't) and if you're one of them, you should have every right to buy Pro-Health.

And as their web site notes, if you do happen to get stains on your teeth, you can fix it with Crest Whitestrips!

Clover Coffee Sells to the Man

The good news is that soon we're likely to see Clover Coffee machines everywhere, now that Starbucks and the Clover Equipment Company have announced plans to merge.  Like I keep saying, once you've tasted coffee from a Clover you won't want to go back to ordinary drip ever again, and I can't wait till it's much easier to find.

The coffee business is like a big long line with Starbucks at the front followed waaaayy in the back by everybody else.  If you care about flavor, atmosphere, value -- you will always prefer a good local roaster over Starbucks, guaranteed.  But sometimes life doesn't present you with other options and frankly, Starbucks is pretty good too.  In fact, maybe this will help improve the ratio of Starbucks per capita in the underserved Wal-Mart parts of the country.

Still, I know people who are disappointed that now it looks like Clover won't be able to sell to these smaller, superior coffee shops, which is a shame since these independent guys were what made Clover possible in the first place.

But my reaction is that this is all well-deserved goodness for Zander Nosler and his team, who can now focus on building a much more efficient production line, and new products including (Please!) a consumer-priced version.

I hope it also serves as a kick in the pants to the local VCs, many of whom were too risk-averse to invest in Clover.  There are people out there right now thinking up similarly wonderful product ideas, just waiting for the money and support to make them happen.

Coffee shops and women

Caitlin Knowles Myers from the Middlebury College Economics Discussion Group reported last September on a study of about 300 transactions at Boston-area coffee shops concluding that female customers wait on average 20 seconds longer than males, even after controlling for all the obvious things like type/size of order (e.g. regular versus fancy soy-lowfat-decaf-whatever), cash/credit, age, appearance (well-dressed vs. sloppy) and more. I looked at the data, and it seems solid and statistically-significant.

The authors conclude the obvious: that women are subtly discriminated against, in spite of the fact that a free market should stamp out such nonsense, since women are free to bring their business elsewhere. Nobel prizewinner Gary Becker provides ample evidence that free markets do in fact make the world more fair, so this seems like counter-evidence.

After reading the paper more carefully, though, I see that the study didn't control for some other potentially-important variables like:

1. whether the wait time was driven by the customer. If females happen to chat more with the barista, wouldn't that matter? What if an indecisive customer asks for the order to be redone?
2. whether the customer was a regular or not. Maybe some of the people are there every morning, making the staff processing more efficient.

Although the study did note that the apparent discrimination goes away when there is more female staff is involved, the number of data points is too small to be statistically conclusive.

Finally, there is another qualitative problem with this analysis: who says longer wait times are necessarily "unfair"? Seems plausible, but maybe on closer inspection we'd find that longer wait time is a function of something else, like better service.

[see also Tim Hartford's analysis]

I'm a Tull

If there's no Espresso Vivace or Trabant, I'll much prefer Tulley's over Starbucks.

[see Crosscut posting about what your taste in coffee vendor says about your sociological status]

How safe is that bridge?

Neal pointed me Bridge Tracker, a site that uses Virtual Earth to let you know the level of safety (or danger) for public bridges near you. Here's what it says I face when traveling to Espresso Vivace (where I must go this weekend to pick up some fresh beans):

The blue markers on the map indicate bridges which have passed inspection recently. Looks like I'll be okay. Whew!

$20,000 coffee machines from Japan

Jason pointed me to a NY Times article from last week about high-end coffee machines, including the siphon pot from Japan.  Also see a much more detailed article at LaughingSquid.

 

Although they give a nice look at Clover Coffee (of course!), the article fails to mention Trabant, which I think is the best place for brewed coffee.

Another coffee shop, please

Mercer Island enjoys plenty of nice coffee outlets, but why do I have to drive to Seattle for the really good stuff?

Slate this week makes a good case for why Starbucks actually helps mom-and-pop coffee houses:

According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation's coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses.

There are so many great ways that a local coffee house can differentiate itself on Mercer Island.

• Exotic varietals in small batches that Starbucks, with its huge volume requirements, can't match.
• In-store roasting: talk about fresh.
• Clover coffee machines (your $11k investment will quickly repay itself)
• Free internet access  (Starbucks makes you pay)
• Kid-friendly areas so the kids can occupy themselves while Mom chats with her friends.
• In-store meeting rooms, available by reservation for group meet-ups.

David Schomer from Seattle's Espresso Vivace has many more tips in his excellent guide to how to compete with Starbucks.  And all of this is especially true for a Mercer Island location, given our proximity to the world's finest roasters and more in Seattle.

The margins on coffee are ridiculously high.  A mom-and-pop operation could even compete on price -- undercharge Starbucks, at least on basic items -- and still make be profitable.  Mercer Island consumers are not particularly price-sensitive, especially not in the morning, and would love to have a high-quality alternative to the same-old-same-old.

So how about it?  Anybody want to go in on an investment in an independent coffee shop?

Clover Factory

A big treat today: while visiting Seattle I stopped by the world headquarters of the Coffee Equipment Company where Zander Nosler gave me a personal tour of their factory and explained the history of the company. What a place!  The machines are hand-assembled by  the engineering team that designs the product.  These people definitely know how to build hardware, and it shows in the flavor you get from the coffee. Besides Trabant (which I visited last month), Clover machines are also in use at Zoka and a few others places in Seattle.  So much excellent coffee, so little time!

Clover Coffee

After reading the writeup in this week's Economist, I just had to try coffee made on one of those high powered Clover machines. Made by a small company in the Fremont area of Seattle, the $11,000 devices supposedly extract a whole new level of flavor from the beans.  Naturally I wanted to try for myself and discovered there is one installed at Trabant, in Pioneer Square so I rushed over there this afternoon.

Unfortunately I missed today's coffee tasting, but the barista was super-helpful and patiently explained the entire Clover equipment process to me.  You can think of the machines as essentially a reverse french press: instead of pouring water on top of the ground beans, a vacuum sucks water through them, at carefully controlled temperature and pressure.  See that round disc under the water spigot in this picture?  Just drop the ground beans there and in less than a minute it brews the perfect cup. 

 So what about the taste?  I tried the El Salvador Mercedes and it was excellent.  It's such a unique flavor, it almost doesn't taste like regular coffee. It's hard to describe, but it tastes more fruity, almost like an herbal tea.  Later she gave me a sip of some of their $54/pound coffee (I think it was the El Injerto).  It was phenomenal!  I will definitely be back.