Specialty Coffee Companies Where Brewing Is an Art
Specialty Coffee Companies Where Brewing Is an Art Wine & Beverages
“If you put a filet mignon on the grill and cook it until it’s well-done, you lose a lot of flavor. It’s the same with coffee beans. The better coffees taste better with a lighter roast,” Pohl says.
While some may complain about the price of the new specialty coffees — a pound can cost from $12 to $30, depending on the variety — the man who opened New York’s first specialty coffeehouse in 2001 begs to differ. Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso, ardently believes that you get what you pay for.
“If people had any idea of how much care and labor go into producing exceptional coffees, they would be shocked. When compared to wine, beer, spirits, cheeses and the like, coffee is an absolute bargain. If priced comparatively, a pound of great coffee could easily cost three to four times what it fetches now,” Nye wrote this year in an online question-and-answer with readers of the New York Times.
“The farmers that produce all of these amazing coffees deserve to be compensated,” he wrote.
Still, as Pohl points out, “there’s cheap wine and there will always be cheap coffee. But people are beginning to appreciate quality coffee, branching out, trying new things. It’s exciting for customers.”
Serve promptly Coffee that sits on a burner in a glass carafe for more than 15 minutes begins to lose flavor as the natural oils break down. “In 10 minutes it will taste flat, in 15 minutes flat and baked,” says Davids. The best solution is to pour it into a preheated insulated carafe immediately after brewing, he advises. Keep it clean Clean your coffee pot and machine regularly to get rid of all that brown icky stuff left behind. Coffee contains oils that can go rancid and ruin the flavor of your morning brew. Just don’t go overboard on the soap or you’ll taste detergent, not coffee, in your next cup. Try a little baking soda or vinegar and lots of hot water instead. To freeze or not to freeze: It’s up to you Coffee experts have argued pro and con about freezing beans to extend their life, but here are some suggestions for making it work: Never freeze them for longer than a month. Store them properly in airtight freezer baggies in one-week portions, to avoid condensation or frostbite. Thaw before grinding and don’t put them back in – it’s the thawing and refreezing that will ruin your beans.
Where Brewing Is an Art
Specialty coffee houses concoct the perfect blend
Twenty years ago, few Americans could even pronounce latte, let alone order one at practically every corner. That all changed when Seattle-based Starbucks began opening shops across the country in the late 1980s, making drinks such as espresso and Frappuccino household words.Top Coffeehouses
New York: Chicago: Denver: Los Angeles: Atlanta: Dallas: San Francisco: Portland, Ore. Phoenix: Seattle: Topeka, Kan. Washington, D.C. Today, the American coffee culture has been transformed once again — not by a big well-known coffee chain, but by a new wave of small specialty coffee companies that are doing for our favorite brew what small specialty farmers and chefs have done for food. Artisan coffee — produced by locally owned companies that give the type of attention to buying and roasting coffee beans that winemakers pay to growing and crushing grapes — has created a new world of neighborhood coffee bars and boutique coffee bean roasters. Coffee roasters — such as Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland, Ore.; Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in Oakland, Calif.; Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea Inc. in Chicago; in Durham, N.C.; and Novo Coffee in Denver — have helped elevate appreciation for our daily cup of joe to a new level. This is particularly good news for older coffee drinkers who represent the fastest growing segment of the coffee market and generally like their java plain. For them, the new coffee connoisseurs are providing more choices for better-tasting, just-roasted coffee to help jump-start the morning. To say these entrepreneurs are passionate about coffee is an understatement. “The people who are delivering and brewing coffee in these cafes are taking it to a whole new level,” says David Pohl, the coffee buyer and director of education for of San Rafael, Calif., considered one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s top small roasters. What makes this new level unique is the emphasis on the beans’ origin, flavor, freshness and roasting. “It’s like a cross between wine and bread,” explains Gregory Dicum, co-author of The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry From Crop to the Last Drop. “Like wine, there are many different kinds of coffee, and “terroir” — the place where it was grown — matters. And like bread, freshness matters. It’s not just how well it was roasted, but how recently.” In the same way that chefs now stress farm-to-table cooking as a way to support small farmers and ensure freshness of ingredients, the new coffee connoisseurs talk about source-to-cup. They work with individual farmers around the world, buying each type of bean from a single source in the same way that winemakers use grapes from a specific vineyard. They then roast the beans in small batches, so that the coffee they sell by the pound or brew by the cup has been roasted just a few days before, rather than months ago, as is the case with many of the vacuum-packed bags of beans sold in supermarkets and discount warehouse stores. This is important, because once roasted, coffee beans rapidly lose their freshness (think freshly baked homemade bread and how quickly it stales). Roasted beans, stored properly, lose quality after a couple of weeks; with ground coffee, it’s a matter of days. The other difference among the new coffee companies is in the roasting. They prefer a lighter roast to enhance the beans’ more complex flavors, which they describe with wine-critic phrases such as “gentle acidity” and “notes of almond.” They sneeringly refer to Starbucks as “Charbucks,” because its beans tend to be dark-roasted to stand up to the milk and flavoring of its coffee drinks.“If you put a filet mignon on the grill and cook it until it’s well-done, you lose a lot of flavor. It’s the same with coffee beans. The better coffees taste better with a lighter roast,” Pohl says.
While some may complain about the price of the new specialty coffees — a pound can cost from $12 to $30, depending on the variety — the man who opened New York’s first specialty coffeehouse in 2001 begs to differ. Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso, ardently believes that you get what you pay for.
“If people had any idea of how much care and labor go into producing exceptional coffees, they would be shocked. When compared to wine, beer, spirits, cheeses and the like, coffee is an absolute bargain. If priced comparatively, a pound of great coffee could easily cost three to four times what it fetches now,” Nye wrote this year in an online question-and-answer with readers of the New York Times.
“The farmers that produce all of these amazing coffees deserve to be compensated,” he wrote.
Still, as Pohl points out, “there’s cheap wine and there will always be cheap coffee. But people are beginning to appreciate quality coffee, branching out, trying new things. It’s exciting for customers.”
How to Make Great Coffee
Buy freshly roasted beans. The older the coffee is, the more the flavor fades. If you’re not buying coffee that’s roasted-to-order, look for a roast date on the bag you’re buying. Most roast coffee takes a sharp dip in quality after about two weeks. Keep it cool and dark. Air, light and moisture are coffee’s enemy. Store your coffee beans in an airtight container – such as a ceramic jar with a rubber gasket on the lid for a tight seal. Coffee expert and author Kenneth Davids with the website warns that “refrigerators are terrible places in which to store coffee because they are damp and full of odors that easily can contaminate coffee.” A cool, dark cupboard or pantry is better. For best flavor, grind before using. Once coffee is ground, it loses quality quickly, so get yourself a burr grinder and grind beans daily, as needed. Measure properly. The standard recipe for making coffee at home is two tablespoons ground coffee per six ounces of water. Most mugs hold eight ounces, so if you measure by the mug, use 2 ½ to 3 tablespoons of ground coffee per mug of water. For those who say they don’t want a strong-tasting coffee, brew it the standard way, then add a little hot water to your cup to smooth out the flavor. You’ll get a better, less bitter result than using less ground coffee in the pot. Want less caffeine without sacrificing flavor? Grind a half-caf mix of decaf and regular beans. Some places, like in Dallas, even sell their own half-caf blend, called Sunset Blend.Serve promptly Coffee that sits on a burner in a glass carafe for more than 15 minutes begins to lose flavor as the natural oils break down. “In 10 minutes it will taste flat, in 15 minutes flat and baked,” says Davids. The best solution is to pour it into a preheated insulated carafe immediately after brewing, he advises. Keep it clean Clean your coffee pot and machine regularly to get rid of all that brown icky stuff left behind. Coffee contains oils that can go rancid and ruin the flavor of your morning brew. Just don’t go overboard on the soap or you’ll taste detergent, not coffee, in your next cup. Try a little baking soda or vinegar and lots of hot water instead. To freeze or not to freeze: It’s up to you Coffee experts have argued pro and con about freezing beans to extend their life, but here are some suggestions for making it work: Never freeze them for longer than a month. Store them properly in airtight freezer baggies in one-week portions, to avoid condensation or frostbite. Thaw before grinding and don’t put them back in – it’s the thawing and refreezing that will ruin your beans.