Wake Up and Smell the Coffee

I’m sitting on the wooden bench outside of Blue Bottle Coffee, observing the flow of people making the pilgrimage from all over the city to this tiny kiosk tucked away on a quiet block of Hayes Valley. It’s truly slow food (or, rather, drink): All of the beans here—from the 100 percent Yemen Sana’ani to the Chiapas—were roasted no more than 48 hours ago; the coffee is ground to order; and each cup of drip is filtered one at a time. Still, everyone waits for their fix without complaint. My notebook out, I’m ready to interview Blue Bottle’s owner, James Freeman, who’s here with his three-year-old son, Dashiell. When Freeman—aged 40 and a former philosophy major whose last job was not in coffee but in classical music as a clarinetist—takes my order, I seize the opportunity to practice the espresso lingo I acquired while hanging out the previous week at Ritual Coffee Roasters, the year-old Mission District cafe that is, so far, Blue Bottle’s only true competition.

“I’ll have a double short cap,” I say coolly.

Freeman smiles, but his eyebrows, which are permanently knit, furrow even deeper, revealing his disappointment that coffee has come to such silly semantics.

Calmly, he enlightens me as to the ways of Blue Bottle, where they only serve ristretto (or short) shots anyway: “Here, we just call it a cappuccino.”This level of coffee connoisseurship is new here, but why has it taken so long for us to catch on? Everyone knows that the Bay Area has pioneered most food categories: We make some of the best wine and most beautifully whiffy cheese in the country, and while the rest of the world is just figuring out what “organic” means, many of our progressive farmers have already deemed their practice “beyond” it.

Although Oakland functions as the port for all green beans arriving on the West Coast (and considering that coffee is the second largest commodity market in the world next to oil, that’s a lot of beans), SF has long had a reputation for being an undiscriminating “drip town.” (Or that’s how Eileen Hassi, the perky 29-year-old who co-owns Ritual, bluntly puts it.) Especially when you compare us to the Pacific Northwest, home to such revered cafes-cum-roasters as Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle and Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. Indeed, Joel Pollock, Stumptown’s head roaster, says that he’s thought of SF as a city offering only “really, really dark roasts and having no true interest in single origin.” And when I ask Erna Knutsen—the grand dame who’s run the SF-based importer Knutsen Coffees for the past 21 years (her beans end up at Thomas Keller’s restaurants)—what she thinks of her hometown’s brew, she says this: “I’ll give you a clue. I sell very little coffee in San Francisco.”

This is the bad news: Even if you’ve been a Peet’s loyalist since the day in 1966 when Alfred Peet opened his first shop on Vine Street in Berkeley; even if you plant yourself at Caffe Roma in North Beach regularly for an espresso with a decent crema; even if you wouldn’t be caught dead with a soy latte—you’ve just been demoted to second class. Or to the second wave, to be more exact. According to the new catechism of coffee, America’s taste has developed in three waves: The first was the introduction of freeze-dried coffees, such as Folgers, made from robusta, a lower-quality bean. The second was the surge of higher-quality but mass-marketed arabica beans, led by Starbucks and Peet’s. But now you have another choice: SF’s third-wave coffee—coffee made with no compromises.

It's September 19, 2006—what appears to be an average Tuesday at Ritual. Outside, a couple of dogs are parked among the fixed-gear bikes. Inside, at the communal tables, is Steve Jobs’ dream come true: Dozens of laptops, little Apple icons aglow, and hovering behind them, their 20-something owners plugged into headphones and cell phones, studying for class, writing a novel or literally holding office hours amid the crumbs of vegan macaroons and empty cups containing the gritty remains of French-pressed grounds. Sufjan Stevens is competing with the whirring of the coffee grinder. If there’s a direct correlation linking good coffee with skinny jeans, tattoos and piercings, checked Vans and vintage T-shirts, the proof can be found here.

From the look of it, you’d think the cafe had been around for years, but Hassi, along with Jeremy Tooker, 27, opened Ritual’s doors in May of 2005. The business partners met when they were sent to SF (Hassi from Seattle and Tooker from Portland) to manage neighboring branches of Torrefazione Italia in 2003. They soon realized they shared a dream of starting an independent cafe and roaster offering the high quality of coffee they were used to up north.

Up until now, Ritual has been selling Stumptown’s beans (which, in itself, caused a bit of a frenzy), but today is monumental: From this point on, Tooker will be roasting all of Ritual’s beans in-house. The rare, appealingly uncomplicated 1919 Probat roaster, set up in the middle of the cafe, is representative of the spread-the-love spirit of this coffee movement: It’s on loan from Stumptown and was driven down by owner Duane Sorenson himself. Tooker treats it as if it were his baby. The former mechanic (and, fittingly, the owner of a beat-up ’63 Plymouth Valiant convertible) runs his hands lovingly through a batch of freshly roasted Guatemala Magnolia Miramar. Coffee geeks and gearheads have a lot in common, it turns out, and a bevy of onlookers—both baristas and customers—watch as he pours the roasted beans into a container and dumps seven pounds of Nicaragua Pueblo Nuevo into the roaster.

Although Blue Bottle sells some blends, Tooker has decided to stick mostly to single-origin beans (“The third wave is about appreciating the farmer,” he says)—some as pricey as La Virginia from Colombia at $24 a pound. Through a sight glass, I see the beans spinning over the flame in a cast-iron drum. Tooker uses what’s called a “trier” to scoop out a few beans to show me their color and smell, which goes from grassy to buttery, like popcorn, and then malty. At around eight minutes, he listens for what’s called “the first crack,” a sign that all the moisture has been released from the beans. I expect to miss it, but it’s loud and clear. The second crack, which comes about six minutes later, signals that the beans are done.

Of course, it’s not that formulaic. Tooker has been apprenticing with people like Sorenson for the past three years to learn the subtle nuances of roasting. The worst crime (which is committed with most SF beans) is going too dark, something that “covers a multitude of sins,” as Knutsen puts it. “When you’re roasting coffee, you’re caramelizing sugars,” Stumptown’s Pollock explains. “There’s the potential for citric notes, herbal notes, floral notes. But when you roast dark, you’re taking all these notes and turning them into carbon—and that’s the same carbon if you’re working with coffee from New Guinea or a piece of chicken.”

I’m starting to understand why people become so romantically intertwined with coffee. From the farmers that grow it in far-off places to the politics of fair trade (for the record, fair trade doesn’t necessarily translate into good-tasting coffee) to the roasting techniques and gear, there’s a lot to occupy a restless mind—especially one fueled by 15 shots of espresso, which is a total Hassi admits she can consume during a day of working the bar.

And we haven’t even gotten to The Machine—which at Ritual is a glossy, brick-red $10,000 La Marzocco. (As to the extremes to which their customers will go, one of the Ritual regulars found the same espresso machine, broken, for sale on eBay. It cost him $1,200, plus $600 to ship. He fixed it and uses it at home, although it hasn’t kept him from returning to Ritual for his daily dose.) The staff here goes through months of training before they’re allowed to touch it. Hassi and I sit and watch Jenny Miyasaki, one of the baristas, rhythmically work the bar, a coffee-stained rag swinging from her back pocket, chatting with customers. Miyasaki makes it look effortless, but when Hassi hesitantly lets me pull a shot myself, I discover it’s not so easy.

“The ideal shot is made,” Hassi says, “with 19 to 20 grams of coffee,” which, once in the portafilter (the piece that hooks directly into the machine), must be brushed off, leveled, tamped once lightly and then again, this time leaning into it with about 30 pounds of weight. After a quick swirl of the tamper to polish the grinds, the portafilter is inserted into the machine for 24 to 27 seconds. The coffee starts out a rich, reddish brown, and when it begins to “blonde,” it’s done. (Blonding too soon means it will be bitter). The result should be a sweet, aromatic espresso that tastes as good as the beans smelled.

But it doesn’t stop there. Consider the milk: Nonfat tends to froth up into a vapid egg-whiteyness, but whole milk produces the desired foam more easily, rich and shiny with no visible bubbles. And of course, any barista worth his or her beans will then pour the milk and simultaneously, with a few flicks of the wrist, create the real crowd-pleaser: a heart or rosette. “I know a barista who can do five rosettes in one cup,” says Hassi, her Caribbean-blue eyes widening in amazement. “It’s mind-boggling.”

All of this for a cup of joe. Back at Blue Bottle—where Radiohead is playing and the line, today made up of opera singers, lawyers and old-fashioned bohemians, has not dwindled—Freeman is still trying to convince me he wants to resist this kind of coffee “pedagogy,” this “radical imperialism,” as he puts it somewhat wryly. “Ninety-five percent of the espressos in Rome are better than all but the very best espressos here,” he says. Unlike Americans, though, “the [Italians] expect it to be good, but they don’t build an altar to it.” He admits that some of the Blue Bottle baristas have participated in the barista competitions that the folks at Ritual spend hours practicing for, and yes, there’s been a Blue Bottle blog (which he had nothing to do with), but for the most part Freeman is determined to steer clear of all the hubbub.

Although he’s scouting locations for a Blue Bottle cafe with an actual roof (his only other location in SF is a cart at Saturday’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market), he says it will be all about the coffee there: no Wi-Fi, no comfy couches, no “museum of muffins” and rotating art. He hopes people will enjoy their coffee and leave. “Although,” he says, “if someone wants to write their novel, we won’t kick them out.” Ritual is also expanding—into a kiosk in a new state-of-the-art plant nursery called Flora Grubb Gardens in the Bayview District, a location that’s just as obscure as the one where Blue Bottle has successfully set up house.

When I ask Hassi if she can just enjoy a cup of coffee without dissecting it, I actually expect a “yes,” but instead she looks at me like I’m crazy. And Tooker, whose next tattoo might be a coffee bean with wings, can’t quite comprehend the question. Freeman is more concerned about his customers’ experience. “I don’t want them to know about the level of geekage that has gone on. I want them to enjoy the product, but I don’t want to shout from the rooftops about what we’ve done to get to this level.”

Which brings me to the enormous quantities of Blue Bottle and Ritual coffee that I’ve been going through in the name of research. Just this morning, I brewed some of Blue Bottle’s Espresso Temescal on my little stovetop espresso maker. To be honest, I wasn’t sitting there thinking it seemed “complex, poetic and finicky,” as its Blue Bottle profile states. I was just thinking it was delicious.

On the other hand, the coffee that I used to drink mindlessly at work from a nearby cafe now tastes burnt and thin. And although I don’t carry a fancy grinder with me, I’ve been bringing beans to work, thinking maybe our office should forgo the Mr. Coffee for a French press. Next thing you know, I’ll be getting a tattoo. Third-wave coffee: It’s a slippery slope.