Of course the videos aren’t perfect representations – the majority of quality focused cafes are actually trying to serve a product using quality ingredients and best practices. They aren’t trying to dupe consumers with cynical marketing hype or gimmicky novelties (i.e. “Malaysian bat guano coffee,” standing in for abomination that is Kopi Luwak). Rather, most of the people I’ve met in the specialty coffee business truly believe in what they’re doing. There’s an almost missional zeal in the coffee world, an evangelical desire to win converts, to open the eyes of the non-believer to the rapturous wonder of a Kenyan coffee that tastes like berries, or the aptly named espresso “god-shot.”

But that zeal can backfire and end up coming across like the videos above. I think a lot of coffee professionals forget how hard it is to learn what makes “specialty” coffee special, and forget all the work they did to learn (cupping, doing comparisons, talking or listening to respected professionals and award winners, dialing in and learning how to evaluate a “good” shot or a brew, closely tasting the same coffee over time, or at different roasts, or different methods of processing, etc.).

While some people might get hooked and enjoy diving into this arcane coffee world, the majority will never come close to this level of self-education, and professional baristas & coffee professionals shouldn’t expect them to. Some will immediately notice taste differences and either enjoy it, dislike it, or be indifferent. But regardless of preference, the majority will be some blend of folks who are primarily consuming the intangibles of the experience more so than the taste, who will never be able to produce a good cup at home, who will prefer adding milk or sugar, and who will say that they prefer the ‘burnt sugar’ flavor of a Monsooned Malabar even after trying that glorious Kenyan.

I think, more than anything, this illustrates the semiotic precariousness of marketing and identity construction. Quality-focused cafes need to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, but these videos give the impression (which I think may be more common than we’d like to believe) that “specialty coffee” is a sham kept afloat by the hot air of snobbery, elitism, and self-serving declarations of “good taste.” The challenge, as I see it, is both to encourage consumers to want to put in some effort to learn (which usually leads to a desire to teach; a win-win), and to package it (i.e. advertising, marketing, public trainings and cuppings, and friendly interaction and engagement with customers) so that it’s easy to learn. This means being open, inviting, and persuasive rather than judgmental, exclusionary, and accusatory.

But what do you think? Do you like a bit of the “Soup-Nazi” treatment with your coffee, is that part of the fun? Or do you feel put off by this? What kind of service do you expect and appreciate from your favorite cafe? I’m supremely curious, so please chime in!

Lilla Kafferosteriet, a cafe and roastery in Malmö, hosts occasional cuppings on Sunday afternoons. I’m terrible at keeping up with the Swedish coffee scene (I don’t speak Swedish) and would never have known about these, but luckily Oscar from Portafilth.com keeps me in tune with where the coffee geek action is happening in Malmö.

Last time I went to a Lilla Kafferosteriet cupping, it was a series of coffees from different regions in Harrar, Ethiopia. The other weekend they were doing something even more interesting: cupping the same coffee brewed with four different kinds of water. If you drink your coffee with milk and sugar, this is the time to tune out and go watch Youtube or something. But if your interest is piqued, read on.

Måns, barista of what I gather is the ‘specialty’ focused slow bar at the back of Lilla Kafferosteriet, started off the cupping by explaining how water’s chemistry, acidity, and mineral levels affect the flavor of brewed coffee. This was in Swedish, so I didn’t understand a word of it. But I’ve read a bit in the past, and some information about water content and coffee brewing can be found at David Schomer’s blog or at Cirqua or Everpure’s websites (both major water filtration suppliers). The SCAA also has a 56 page ‘Water Quality Handbook,’ which you can buy for $35 from the SCAA, or you can read about it on Home-Barista.com.

In short, brewed coffee is mostly water, so it’s important to have water with chemistry that plays well with the soluble materials in the ground coffee. To taste the difference, we had before us the same coffee brewed with four different kinds of water: Pur Pur, a specially formulated bottled water for coffee brewing; Lilla Kafferosteriet’s own filtered and conditioned tap water; unfiltered Malmö tap water; and Evian bottled water.

Evian and unfiltered tap water both muted the flavor of the coffee, obscuring the acidity, and for lack of a better word the ‘sparkle’ of fleeting flavors and aromas that fresh roasted coffee should have.

The filtered and conditioned tap water was much better, tasting like what I’d expect a good brew to be with balanced and defined acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The Pur Pur was marginally better tasting, bringing out a little more nuanced sweetness and acidity, but not with enough difference that you’d notice it if you weren’t looking for it.

All in all this just underscores what I’d mentioned while testing the Coava Disk at Solde, that you need to, at the very least, filter your tap water when brewing coffee at home. I’m not about to advocate buying bottled coffee-brewing water (like Pur Pur) all the time, it’d be excessive and wasteful I think. But it might be a nice exercise to try once, compared with what you’re usually tasting. It could be an eye opener.

(Look out for a proper article about Lilla Kafferosteriet, as well as the rest of the Malmö coffee scene in the future — been busy with my masters program, but I’m working on it!).

Dan from Solde was nice enough to have us over on a Monday morning. The roastery is literally on the wrong side of the tracks, out in the industrial port area of Malmö. We started with a cupping, and then set about the day’s task. Serious, but without any pretensions of scientific rigor, we tried a variety of tests aiming mostly to satisfy our own curiosity about what tastes good. Our main question was the effect of the metal filter on taste, compared to paper.

My personal opinion is that the paper filter tasted too bright and imbalanced compared to the same coffee prepared with the metal filter (using the same grind). With the Disk it tasted more developed, fuller in flavor, with more perceived sweetness.

That said, when the coffee was on the heavier, earthier side (i.e. a Sumatra) I thought the paper filter tasted very slightly better (but not by as big a margin as the lighter coffees prepared with a metal filter). Now, like I said this isn’t a test to end all tests and it really doesn’t prove much, so take it as just one small point of reference. I know that in the past I’ve been happy using paper on the Aeropress, so the next step would be to try comparing different grind settings optimized for each filter…

But I did come to one conclusion, and feel my taste buds somewhat vindicated — when I first arrived in Malmö I felt like the coffee I was brewing at home tasted muted. That set me off on a quest, first, for bottled water – none of which worked well. Then to find a water filter, which, after much searching, I eventually found at a health food store. I guess no one in Sweden buys them, because none of the big stores stock them. And the cashiers look at you funny if you ask about water filters. This is Sweden, only quacks (and coffee geeks) filter their tap water.

But at our little cupping, sure enough the difference was noticeable. Brewing with tap water is like tasting coffee with cottonballs in your mouth. So… buy a water filter if you brew coffee at home.

Full disclosure: We paid for the Disk filters, international shipping and all. And I have no financial interest in the Swedish water filter industry. This is not a conspiracy. Though, if I could secretly make a fortune by recommending filtered water to Swedes, that’d be awesome.

In Korea I tried a lot of cafes, and drank a lot of bad coffee on the way to finding the great cafes that I’ve written about here. Coffee is expensive (I’ve paid as much as $15 for a bad cup of coffee in Seoul), so after a while I started avoiding places with signs that the coffee might not be good. Here are those rules of thumb – but keep in mind that there are numerous exceptions and you sometimes just have to try a place and hope to be surprised!

1. If the shop roasted its own coffee in house on a prominently displayed small batch roaster (or especially an air roaster), it probably meant that you were going to get either bland or terrible coffee. Naturally there are many exceptions, but in Seoul it was very very common for all kinds of cafes to roast their own coffee to give them the aura of artisan production and promote misguided ideas of freshness, when in reality someone on staff just burnt the beans every time. I went to one shop who literally roasted the coffee for you AFTER you placed your order (it was bad). You have to judge whether the roaster is there for style, or if it’s there because someone that works there knows what to do with it, which is hard to do just by looking in a store window.

2. If the signage includes Chinese characters it probably means the owner is from the old school of coffee pioneers in Korea, and thus influenced by (what I assume to be, based on bits of information here and there) older Japanese philosophies of coffee roasting that dark roast, or even burn all the different coffees to achieve a ‘caramel’ and ‘roasty’ flavor. Avoid, because it’s depressing to see so much great coffee wasting away as dark roasts with very little flavor nuance.

3. If the menu offers 10-20 single-origin coffees, chances are none of them have been carefully roasted to bring out the best flavor and instead they’ll all taste fairly generic. They’re also probably stale because that much variety doesn’t turn over quickly. There are, again, exceptions at the places that really take their coffee seriously – you can see some of them in my reviews. But the practice of offering a huge selection of poorly roasted single origin coffee is so normal here that the good cafes really are exceptions to the rule.

If you have any other suggestions for what to avoid, chime in with a comment! Or if you object, tell me why :)

Nice little video from Sweet Maria’s.

I liked this video. I make coffee every day in my office, and lately I’ve been using the V60. I generally use around 18-22g of coffee and pour ~300ml to yield 250ml of brewed coffee (~8oz). I had been grinding fine and trying to mimic the pour-wait-pour-wait style I’ve often seen used with Melitta pourovers, but it results in an over-extracted brew. This continuous pour style, and a grind just slightly coarser than what i’d been doing, has produced much better results in the cup.

Infotainment from TheOatmeal.com, click to see all 15. I’m a bit late posting this but I like it!

“Rice has long topped local food retailers’ best-selling list, but not this year. The country’s traditional staple lost its place for the first time in years, bumped by none other than instant coffee.”

Korea Times article here. Instant coffee is everywhere in Korea, I’ve never been in an office or meeting without it, even though most of them taste like cancer.

I think what this says is that Koreans love coffee, though there’s a long way to go in consumer education for specialty coffee to grow here.

“A psychology professor at Yale University found that holding a hot cup of coffee leads people to judge a stranger to be a warmer person, in terms of such traits as generosity and kindness, compared with a group of people who held a cup of iced coffee.”

Iced coffee drinkers must lead depressing lives. Stick to hot coffee, it’s better for your mental health.

Washington Post / Yale News