Daniel's World of Coffee

Daffy Self-Indulgence and the God Shot of Myhrvold

For many years I read every single word of every single issue of Harper's Magazine. This went on for about 8 or 9 years, until Lewis Lapham retired as editor and I gradually lost interest in the magazine, though I still read it from time to time. For so long I held it in my mind as the epitome of literary and journalistic excellence that even though my ardor has somewhat faded, the name of that august publication still reverberates with deep meaning for me.

How happy then to get an email from an old friend with whom I shared this love (we often traded long-form opinions on this or that Harper's article via snail mail), pointing me to the July 2011 issue where there is a mention of me in a throwaway line at the bottom of page 82.

Amusingly, it's for something that I did, well, many years ago when I still read Harper's religiously. At Coffee Fest in Seattle in the mid-2000's, after competing in my first ever barista competition, I manned the Synesso booth on the show floor. Synesso was a very young company at the time. Up at Victrola Coffee on 15th (the original store) we had the second Synesso Cyncra machine ever built, and the first in any commercial setting. (That machine is still in operation, by the way, right down the street from where I am writing this... I had a shot of espresso off of it just the other day.)

So there weren't that many baristas on Earth that had experience using a Synesso — maybe ten or twelve of us. They asked me, along with my co-worker Kyle, to man the booth over the weekend of Coffee Fest. It was a lot of fun.

A few weeks later, while working a shift at Victrola, I got a call in the back room from someone who wanted private barista lessons. Actually it was the personal assistant of the man who wanted lessons. The man turned out to be Nathan Myhrvold. Apparently I had pulled a shot of coffee (roasted by this guy) for him at Coffee Fest that made him go out an buy his own one-group Synesso (check his wiki page if you are wondering who has the kind of money to buy an $8000 espresso machine based off of one shot). He hadn't been able to reproduce the shot in his home, so I went there and did some private lessons with him. Whether the lessons did the trick, I don't really know.

I forgot about this little episode, except occasionally as an anecdote at coffee parties in Anaheim or Minneaopolis, until last year a fact-checker contacted me to confirm the spelling of my name for a 2,438 page encyclopedia called Modernist Cuisine. This is Myhrvold's magnum opus on cooking. I was pleased and tickled to learn I would get a passing mention in the book, when the subject of coffee was mentioned. I still haven't read the actual book. That's a lot of pages.

Well, in Will Self's article Gastronomia: The beatification of our daily bread (subscription only), he happens to mention my name and the name of Victrola. Again, it's not really much at all. The only reason I'm going into this whole self-indulgent recollection is because it's Harper's, and Harper's was so very dear to my heart for so long.

But here comes the kicker. Self (whose writing I have always enjoyed) singles out Myhrvold's pretentiousness in what is a general take-down of over-indulgent foodie-ism. And I happen to agree with Self that the current, post-modern obsession with food is, well, frankly nauseating.

How bittersweet then, for yours truly, to read what he says:

One expects in life to be talked town to from time to time, but to be patronized by a cookbook? And I could aver that for sheer self-indulgent daffiness, Myhrvold's own account of being pulled a "God shot"—the ultimate and spiritually transfiguring shot of espresso—by Daniel Humphries of Victrola Coffee at a Seattle trade fair, takes the proverbial biscotti.

Well, that's all the daffy self-indulgence I have for you today. Regularly scheduled programming resumes on flurmsday.

NYC Women Are Attracted to the Smell of Coffee?

Aww... I thought it was my rugged good looks.

New York Women Seduced By Scent of Coffee, from NBC New York.

(I note that the survey was commissioned by AXE "body grooming" products... please take with generous quantities of salt).

Monkey in the Airport

I shot these videos in Ethiopia last spring. Just some nice local color, including Danish barista champion Søren Stiller Markussen showing the staff at our hotel how to make a proper cappuccino. Also: the monkey that stole someone's passport (for real).

The woman feeding the monkey is named Montserrat Olivier. I didn't know she was such a big star when I met her. You can see the segment they made in Harar for Mexican television below. I saw the hyena-feeding when I was in Harar in 2008; on this last trip I skipped it. But if you like seeing monkeys get fed, seeing hyenas get fed is pretty cool too:

Coffee Stuff I've Forgotten

Thoughtful comment by Tonx yesterday about the famous unreliability of memory got me thinking about what, exactly, I may have forgotten in my coffee days. Then, this morning, unpacking some boxes with a view of the Olympic Mountains in the distance, sharp as knives in the late autumn cold, I was searching for something to drink my morning out of and I came across this old mug...

(by the way, how ya doin there, Cougs?)

Just the other day I was drinking from a different Washington mug, that is much more handsome but which doesn't belong to me. I remember thinking to myself, "Bummer, I should get myself a Washington mug, since I don't have one."

Well, I do have a Washington mug. I just plum forgot. And, there's something oddly appealing about the cool cheesiness of the one pictured here. I believe I shall make drinking from it a habit.

Anyway, a physical mug can be brought back with (near) perfect fidelity, and a memory cannot, even with the aid of cupping notes or video. That's why the most memorable coffees are a combination of objectively fantastic (just plain old good tasting) and then memorable for some other reason: the person you were drinking it with, the setting, the circumstances.

My favorite part of what I do is that it puts me in strange, interesting, sometimes uncomfortable, but always memorable situations. And then it puts coffee in front of me: sometimes mediocre, sometimes amazingly beautiful, sometimes terrible. When the beautiful and the memorable come together, that particular cup of coffee becomes more than the sum of its parts. It's those moments that really make it all worthwhile.

Smell and Memory

Here's an interesting article on the topic of how the brain processes scent. I sometimes touch on this topic in my classes. It can be frustrating to coffee people when they recognize a smell but can't put a name to it. I always remind people: it's not your fault! It is difficult. Keep trying!

Why is smell so sentimental? One possibility, which is supported by this recent experiment, is that the olfactory cortex has a direct neural link to the hippocampus. In contrast, all of our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed somewhere else - they go to the thalamus - and only then make their way to our memory center. This helps explain why we're so dependent on metaphors to describe taste and smell. We always describe foods by comparing them to something else, which we've tasted before. ("These madeleines taste just like my grandmother's madeleines!" Or: "These madeleines taste like the inside of a lemon poppy seed cake!") In contrast, we have a rich language of adjectives to describe what we see and hear, which allows us to define the sensory stimulus in lucid detail. As a result, we don't have to lean so heavily on simile and comparison.

Smelling, tasting, and using words to describe the two all at the same time is like trying to play basketball, soccer, and a video game all at the same time. The key to getting "good at smelling" is to practice again and again. And when you try something new and unusual, try to make a distinct memory of the experience (including non-smell things like the people you are with, the sounds and sights, etc).

I Had a Dream Last Night...

... that I was explaining the theory behind why green coffee needs to be "rested" in warehouses after it's harvested and processed. Except I was explaining to people in a Nordstrom jewelry show room for some reason.

The Original Traveling Coffee Snobs

This weekend I'm setting off on a series of adventures in continued pursuit of perfect coffee.

Whenever I get stuck on a plane or runway or airport, and I notice myself getting crabby (and when there's no good coffee to be had to lighten my mood), I remind myself that it used to be a lot harder to get wherever I'm going. Tomorrow I fly cross country to the great West Coast. If I get delayed at Newark airport (likely), I can just remember that such a journey used to take several months and there was a high likelihood of dying of hypothermia or starvation on the way [must.... resist... joke about... package of peanuts].

On the plane I'll be reading a Patrick O'Brien novel, the seventh in his Aubrey/Maturin series (I also brought the eighth in case I read number seven too fast). These are swashbuckling adventure books about the British navy in the Napoleonic Era. Lots of nautical terms and naval battles and old-timey talk. There was a movie a while back based on these books starring Russell Crowe, called "Master and Commander."

Humorously, the main protagonists, the bluff, courageous, affable Captain Jack Aubrey and his surly, worldly, lovelorn friend, the doctor/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin, are both addicted to ... you guessed it, coffee!

Barely ten pages go by in any of these novels that someone isn't craving coffee, complaining about the weakness of coffee, or otherwise preparing, thinking about, or drinking coffee. Speaking of counting your blessings, author O'Brien portrays some pretty dreadful, salt-water infused, horribly weak dreck served cold. Sometimes, though, when everything is according to their perfect orders, the captain and the doctor get their preferred brew. Green beans are stored on ship, roasted up in a pan and ground and brewed right to order. Captain Aubrey is just like me: he's in the best of all possible moods when served a cup of perfect, hot, welcoming coffee.

Interesting note for coffee experts: in one novel, The Mauritius Command, the heroes spend weeks sailing about Mauritius and Ile de la Reunión. Reunion Island is of course also known as Bourbon Island, original home of the famous Bourbon varietal I am always raving about. When Aubrey and Maturin manage to get some sacks of coffee from the island in between naval battles, O'Brien shows them particularly enjoying the special rich, sweet taste of the coffee from that place. When I read that little detail, I became sold on the historical accuracy of the rest of the stuff in the books (naval battles, nautical and medical terms), about which I know nothing.

Flash forward 200 years and traveling around the world has gotten a little easier. But nothing has changed about the pleasure one derives from great coffee.

When I post to you on Monday it will be from another far-off exotic destination, that little logging outpost burg known as Seattle, Washington.

Coffee Person: Mandy Aftel

Actually, Mandy Aftel is not a coffee person. She's a scent person. But coffee has scents (boy does it), and I met Mandy at a coffee event and well... let me explain.

A little while ago an old friend in the coffee business asked me if I could speak at an event at the New York Botanical Garden, and I happily accepted. All summer the NYBG has been hosting Edible Evenings, focusing on the intersection of plant life and food (a mighty big intersection, that). Last Thursday was their Coffee and Tea evening. I was to speak on coffee, and speaking on tea was Mandy Aftel.

Now, Mandy's not coffee person, as I said. But actually she's not necessarily a tea person either. What she loves more than anything though, and what she is expert in, are natural perfumes. The first time I spoke to her on the phone she gave me an impassioned speech on the evils of synthetic aromas until I admitted surrender and granted that, yes, natural perfumes are far superior. Naturally.

One beverage that gets perfumed constantly, of course, is tea. At the Botanical Garden event, Mandy passed around scent strips with synthetic and natural versions of different scents (jasmine, rose, etc). Then she passed around samples of different oolong teas, scented with different combinations of lovely scents like mint, jasmine, and turkish rose. It was a real eye-opener to smell the difference that naturally-derived perfume can make.

It was my first trip to the Botanical Garden (this is the big one up in the Bronx that is practically its own National Park, not the smaller but still lovely one in Brooklyn that I have visited several times). It's a lovely setting for events such as this one, or just a great place to wander around. I wish I had had more time to wander the the grounds... I guess I will just have to go back another lovely evening.

(Daniel giving his talk. photo by Maria Diaz.)

Of course, in coffee, we don't want any additives, natural or otherwise. Just coffee, heat, and water please. In my presentation, I spoke about the vast panoply of different aromas in coffee, and where they come from. My friend and colleague David Latourell was on the spot with some impeccable coffees from Honduras and Ethiopia for people to taste and smell.

It's important to remember that coffee is a seed. As a seed, it packs a ton of different organic compounds into a tiny package, to serve as nutrition for a growing plant. We're talking fats, acids, proteins, sugars, etc. That means that when you roast it up and brew it, there is more complexity in that little package than you can shake a flavor wheel at. I'd be interested to know what the total chemical complexity of tea is versus coffee before additives, given that tea is a leaf and coffee is a seed. I'm out of my element to speculate on that, but of course you won't be surprised if I say I wouldn't be surprised to learn that coffee is much more complex.

Being around Mandy Aftel for a couple of hours gets one thinking in these directions. She's done lots of interesting work with various chefs, perfumers, food scientists and yes, coffee people. I've got one of her Natural Perfume Wheels at my side as I type this. In one category, "Floral," she has four sub-groups: Heavy, Soft, Sharp, and Green. And within those groupings, reading from Heavy to Green, I see tuberose, ylang ylang, champa, jasmine, orange flower, orris, cassie, rose, mimosa, lotus, frangipani, marigold, kewda, osmanthus, davana, neroli, ginger lily, violet leaf, linden blossom, lavender absolute, and geranium.

I have a lot to learn. Thanks Mandy and NYBG.

The Sense of Smell

"Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it — nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odor — and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnameable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a words; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception. This is particularly true when a considerable period of time has elapsed."

-Maturin, in Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain