Coffee Culture
THE BLEND
. MARCH 2013
. VOL. 33
Blue Bottle Buzz the $ 20,000 siphon bar
THE BLEND.MARCH 2013
Chemex
the science behind the cup
Interior Spaces: Truth Cof feecult in Cape Town
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great uses for coffee grounds
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Features 20 Interior Spaces Truth CoffeeCult opens it’s HQ in Cape Town. “The vintage roaster drum is cast iron, this changed in the sixties to mild steel. The cast iron seems to make coffee taste better. By David Donde.
36 The New Blend Flavor: Bourbon is the first-ever curated variety-specific coffee in the marketplace. By Llewellyn Sinclair.
42 Chemex The science behind the cup. The Chemex brew Method at the Madrid-based coffee bar, Toma Café. By Alison Peters.
50 bLUE BOTTLE BUZZ Meet the Man Behind the Buzz. James Freeman with the $20,000 coffee machine and siphon bar. By Michael V. Copeland.
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Departments 20 Interior Spaces Visit New York’s smallest coffee shops. Parlors is an espresso bar in the back of a barber shop. By Oliver Strand.
42 Java Art Jonathan Brilliant’s new instillation piece, over 60,000 stirrers in Sumter, South Carolina. By Ray Proudfoot.
77 First Look
Marcus Young and his new project. It’s called Central City Coffee, the newest facet to the three-plus decades of work being done in Portland, Oregon by a homeless social outreach nonprofit. By Llewellyn Sinclair.
110 Cafe Affair The Revive of the ESPRO Press. The Espro is a press pot that uses a dual micro-filter that’s 9 to 12 times finer than the mesh on a standard press. By Ben Blake.
In every issue 12 theblend.com 16 editor’s letter 112 sourcebook
Blue Bottle Buzz For those who haven’t moved beyond Starbucks and Peet’s, it’s time to hit Blue Bottle. In seven years, the Bay Area coffee company has spread the gospel of freshly roasted organic beans — as in, they’re tossed if not used within seven days of roasting — and coffee made by familiar faces to garner a cultish following that’s spreading to the East Coast. by Michael V. Copeland
Above: The Blue Bottle Coffee Shop in Hayes Valley; The Single Brew Coffee Siphons Opposite: Blue Bottle Coffee Slow Drip Coffee Technique
It might come as a surprise to most espresso drinkers,
but some of the most obsessive figures in coffee take their cues not just from Italy, but from Japan. Just peek inside Blue Bottle Coffee in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on March 10 when it is scheduled to open (inspection permitting). Sharing the counter with two espresso machines are two “pour over” bars where drip coffee is made a cup at a time using a Japanese kettle with a swan-neck spout that delivers a thin, precise stream of water. On weekends there will be “nel drip” coffee made with Japanese flannel filters. And there are the showstoppers, the five Japanese slow-drip devices for iced coffee, each three feet tall — they look like an aristocrat’s science experiment, the wood and brass frames supporting a network of glass globes and adjustable nozzles that mete out liquid at 88 drops a minute. “You precariously take that glass sphere, fill it with cold filtered water, then you stand on a stepstool and nervously and quickly invert it over the reservoir,” said James Freeman, the owner, explaining the process. Twelve hours later, the coffee is ready. “It’s theatrical,” Mr. Freeman said. “It’s incredible tasting, too. It wouldn’t be worth the show 52
THE BLEND.MARCH 2013
and the hassle if it didn’t taste great.”Blue Bottle Coffee, out of Oakland, Calif., is known for making coffee worth the show and hassle. Ever since Mr. Freeman first wheeled his pushcart to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco in 2003, he’s had a fanatical following that doesn’t mind waiting 40 minutes to order a cappuccino. Blue Bottle Coffee now has four coffee bars in San Francisco, a small fleet of pushcarts and notable restaurant clients like Coi in San Francisco and Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. Last November, a new roaster and coffee bar was inaugurated in Oakland, Calif. Danny Meyer, a fan of the original pushcart, contracted with Blue Bottle in 2008 to supply Gramercy Tavern. It put Mr. Freeman in a New York state of mind. “ remember, it was August and it was beautiful, a perfect day,” Mr. Freeman said. After he and his wife bought Mast Brothers chocolate at Marlow & Sons, they stayed for dinner. “We were walking around after,” he said, “and we thought, wow, look at these buildings, wouldn’t it be fun to have a roaster out here? It was a fantasy.” The Williamsburg location is spare and airy — it was designed by DCR, the firm behind Momofuku Ssam Bar — with a glass-panel storefront that will roll up when weather permits. While the coffee bar will start at full steam, the roaster, one of a growing number in New York, will begin slowly, with only five
“It’s really about an appreciation for unnecessary beauty,” Freeman says, “and a willingness to work for it.”
or so different types of coffee at first. (Around 15 are roasted in Oakland.) As production increases, Mr. Freeman wants the New York coffee to be suggestive of San Francisco.“It’s different here,” he said. “Different water, different air, a different neighborhood.” He added: “I might let it evolve. The thing about coffee is that coffee is local. I’m not just showing up in New York, I’m showing up on Berry Street.” Called a siphon bar, it was imported from Japan at a total cost of more than $20,000. The cafe has the only halogen-powered model in the United States, and getting it here required years of elliptical discussions with its importer, Jay Egami of the Ueshima Coffee Company. “If you just want equipment you’re not ready,” Mr. Egami said in an interview. But, he added, James Freeman, the owner of the cafe, is different: “He’s invested time. He’s invested interest. He is ready.” Professionals have long been willing to pay prices in the five figures for the perfect espresso machine, but the siphon bar does make espresso. It makes brewed coffee, as does another high-end coffee maker, the $11,000 Clover, which makes one cup at a time. Together, they signal the resurgence of brewing coffee enthusiasts.
of the country’s most progressive cafes, including Intelligentsia in Chicago, La Mill in Los Angeles and Caffe Vita in Seattle.“You get more of the delicate and floral flavors, the subtle sweetness, the notes of perfume and citrus,” said Duane Sorensen, the owner of Stumptown. “The delicate, pretty, sexy flavors show in a Clover.” “A Clover gives you greater control over the variables,” Mr. Zell said. “It’s a clean, crisp cup, and it tends to play better to coffees that are higher toned, brighter. Like the coffees of East Africa, or the more intricate coffees of the Americas.” It is those brighter notes that excite serious coffee drinkers as they take an interest in single-origin, micro-lot and direct-trade beans — those from specific regions, even particular growers, that are prized for their distinctive characteristics. “Steep coffee in water, and you’re going to taste gradations of flavor you’re simply not going to find in espresso,” said David Arnold, director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute in New York. Though he is an espresso partisan, Mr. Arnold allows that brewing highlights the more subtle flavors of single-origin and micro-lot beans. “Especially if it’s roasted fresh,” he said. “The differences are astounding.” Where the Clover is a workhorse, and its genius is in its programming, brewing coffee with a siphon bar is a fickle art and takes patience to master.
When asked how long you can store beans ground for espresso, he responds:
Could this be the age of brewed coffee? “We’re right there at the threshold,” said George Howell of Terroir Coffee, a retailer of roasted and green beans. “Coffee has never been a noble beverage because the means to perfectly produce it haven’t existed,” said Mr. Howell, who is also a founder of the Cup of Excellence, an annual competition that seeks to identify the best beans in each coffee-producing nation.But, he said, with recent advances in coffee-making technology, “now you can get perfect extraction.” Mr. Freeman is not trying to end the era of espresso. He still starts his days with a cappuccino, and his cafe serves drinks mostly from espresso machines, including a lovingly refurbished San Marco from the 1980s. But he’s excited by the possibilities of brewed coffee. “Siphon coffee is very delicate,” he said. “It’s sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it’s almost moussey.” A professionwide interest in brewed coffee has driven the stealth spread of the Clover. Introduced less than two years ago, it has become standard equipment at some
“About 45 seconds.”
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The secret is in how it’s stirred. A siphon pot has two stacked glass globes, and works a little like a macchinetta, that stove-top gadget wrongly called an espresso maker by generations of graduate students. As water vapor forces water into the upper globe the coffee grounds are stirred by hand with a bamboo paddle. (In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.) The goal is to create a deep whirlpool in no more than four turns without touching the glass. Posture is important. So is timing: siphon coffee has a brewing cycle of 45 to 90 seconds. “The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,” said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. “There’s no way to rush it.” Mr. Freeman said he practiced stirring plain water for months to develop muscle memory before he brewed his first cup of siphon coffee.
Q & A With Mr. Freeman I was walking over here and my friend texted me to say your coffee is like crack. Did you expect to be at crack dealer status this soon in New York? That’s very flattering that we’re getting that kind of response. I studied in New York a long time ago and had sort of a romantic evening in Brooklyn in 2008 and that planted the fantasy of opening up here. Things kind of worked out – we opened our roastery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and that was fun. But on the other hand, it seems like the knowledge of the average coffee drinker has increased like 100% in the last year or two. I mean, I just bought a fucking Chemex. And I am not alone. It’s not even knowledge. It’s not like the coffee SATs. I feel that peoples’ willingness to try something new has increased. Speaking of Chemex, let’s talk a little bit about why you are so pro pour-over. I always have been. The pendulum for a long time was, sort of, everybody serves coffee in an urn. Then, there was the conversation about the Clover. That was an important point for the coffee industry because it started getting people talking about certain coffees individually. What happened was that people started having the desire to make coffee individually — and looking at other means of making coffee individually. Meanwhile, we had been laboring away making coffee individually since we opened. Back to the pour-over technique that you employ in all of your bars. What does that do to the coffee? It makes it a skill, first of all. It’s not just putting coffee in a basket and pressing a button. A skill implies that some people can be better at it than others, so it’s a way of appreciating professionals, which is important.