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.

What I've Been Up To

The last time I posted in May, I was in Panama. I'm in Seattle now, and here's a quick run-down on what I've been up to in the coffee world.

1) First of all that Panama trip. As I noted before, I was acting as host for a group of Puerto Rican coffee farmers who were sent to Panama to observe specialty coffee practices in Panama. There were a dozen people in our group, and we spent our time in the western highlands of Chiriqui. I knew it was going to be fun before I left, but it really ended up exceeding my expectations. I'll post some videos and comments about this project over the next few days.

2) Speaking of Puerto Rico, I'm finishing up the analysis of the soil-data project I started way back in November. There's a huge document detailing all of our findings that I've created. I will share part of that this week, and the rest of it when it's all officially available.

3) As always, I'm teaching roasting and cupping courses in California with Boot Coffee. In May and June I was down there with Willem, Jodi, and the rest of the crew for some really great courses. I will be going down there again at the end of July for another 10 days, into August.

4) In the next 12 months I'll be teaching courses in Honduras (twice), Panama, and hopefully Colombia as well. Stay tuned here for more information. Or you can check out the Boot Coffee website.

5) After a long and arduous journey through my own preconceptions, I've become a full-on believer in Kahlua. It's just so much better than every other coffee liqueur I've tasted (and you'd be surprised how many I have tasted.... think double digits). Last September I did some work for Kahlua in Stockholm. In June, this project took me to grand old New York, where the Ost Café folks were as good as good can be to me, despite new babies and new pork sandwich stands springing up left and right. Best cafe in NYC, y'all. In the next few months I'll be doing more work for Kahlua here in the USA. I'm excited to share with you what I've been doing. I'll be sure to mention it here on the blog when it becomes appropriate. Did I mention I get free rum, coffee, and Kahlua?

6) Fresh Cup Magazine published an article I wrote in the June issue, about branching out from the old familiar origins and finding new gems (Nepalese coffee, anyone?). I'll post some snippets here, copyright permitting.

7) Theoretically I have something coming out in Parade Magazine... but I have yet to see it appear and your guess is as good as mine.

7) Somewhere along the line there I was in Houston for the SCAA conference. Somewhere along the line there, Alejandro Mendez from Viva Espresso in San Salvador won the World Barista Championship. Anyone who reads this blog is already well-informed of that stuff. But still... it did happen.

8) All work and no play makes Homer something something...

(PS I am in Seattle currently... oh wait, I already said that).

Daniel in the New York Times on "Peak Coffee"

I've been keeping busy teaching in Honduras and San Francisco. And right now I'm in New York doing some consulting work. Which is fitting enough because today I was invited to take part in a forum for the New York Times.

The Times published this interesting article about the possibility that climate change is the driving force behind the record-high price of green coffee right now.

The Times also runs a neat feature called "Room for Debate" to encourage discussion on their website. The editor of that feature asked me to weigh in on the notion of "peak coffee."

You can find the main page for the debate here, and my own take here. Enjoy!

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:

Clean Shaven

The best thing about coming back home after a trip is returning to my number one shaving kit. I'm an ace at leaving stuff behind me in hotel rooms, so I don't dare take my nicest shaving items on the road. Lo and behold, on this trip, I managed to leave my number two badger-hair brush on the bathroom counter of my hotel room in Guatemala city. So when I get back home, it's nice to see my top gear sitting there, and even nicer to take thirty minutes and a kingly amount of hot water to shave in the morning with a little Couperin on the stereo.

While I was away I received a polite note from an artist whose graphics I had used without permission in this post back in May of 2008. The artist, Scott Mellis, goes by the name of mikoto. You can find all his work here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/mikoto

Anyway, I hadn't looked at that picture for a while, and when I did I decided I still like it, so here it is again. Considering I just came back from a farm newly planted with thousands of gorgeous young geisha coffee trees, I thought it was appropriate. Turns out mikoto has a good graphic for "thousands of gorgeous young geisha" too.

And if you are looking for something cute to get that coffee-lover in your life, there's a t-shirt with this charming design.

Again, all mikoto's work available here: http://www.redbubble.com/people/mikoto

I got some really nice video from my time in western Panama (with all those baby geisha trees). Now that I'm done luxuriating in my shave, I'm going to edit that together and post here soon.

Article on Varietals in Fresh Cup

There's a nice article on coffee varietals in the new issue of Fresh Cup, including quotes from George Howell and yours truly! Check it out in print, or read it online here. The article begins on page 62, and it's written by Dan Leif.

Here's a nice quote to give you an idea:

GEISHA: Unless you and your Probat have been holed up in a cave recently, you've heard about this varietal, which has become the toast of Panama's coffee scene. But what does it actually taste like when roasted correctly? Howell answers without hesitation: "Sweet lemon apricot. It's very intense." Humphries is more metaphorical. "It's got a very sweet character, but it's very citrusy," he says. "I always think about fresh-squeezed orange juice from oranges right of the tree, when they're still warm. And it will smell like jasmine or fresh lilies. It's extraordinary."

$12 cup of coffee now for sale at New York cafes - NYPOST.com

"It is a higher-end coffee, and you have to take a lot of time developing and processing it," said Holt. "Once the coffee is harvested, it is dried on a raised African drying bed -- the actual coffee cherries never sit on the ground."

via www.nypost.com

New York Post covers my old friends at Café Grumpy.

First comment on their website after this post went up? "I can buy 2 32 oz. cans of Folgers for that and get a much better cup of coffee."

Let's see that's one TRUE, and one FALSE.

I'm only disppointed we didn't get any of the Post's trademark rhyming, punning headlines. But I guess we always have the Sprudge Report for that.

Eating Coffee Beans in Business Week

A couple weeks back in Brooklyn, I sat down with journalist Benjamin Wallace to eat some coffee beans. He wrote an article for Business Week about "alternative" ways to get your coffee fix, including a cool new coffee-inhaler type device that I got to try. You can read the article here.

Benjamin Wallace was also the writer who, when working on a story for GQ, tasted kopi luwak with me. Here's Ben giving an interesting talk at the TED conference, based on the article he wrote and the research he did for it.

Coffee Circa 1957

I've been meaning to share these images with you for a while. My old roommate found a slender notebook in a used book store in San Francisco, entitled "Coffee: The Story of a Good Neighbor Product."

It was published in 1957 by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau in New York City. I'm taking the liberty of reproducing large portions of it here. This was a promotional product; I can't imagine anyone objecting to me disseminating it further, albeit 42 years after the fact.

I like the style of the drawings, and the writing style too. The coffee information is almost all still entirely accurate. Here are a few images to pore over... I'll post more in the near future.

Click on an image to enlarge it.

Starbucks Rebrands

I was talking to my sister back in Seattle on the phone tonight and she told me that the Starbucks on 15th Avenue in Seattle had changed its name to "15th Avenue Coffee and Tea." But it's still owned by Starbucks; they are just rebranding three of their Seattle locations with unique names. You can read about it in the Seattle Times here and here in the Chicago Tribune.

I used to walk by that Starbucks twice a day on my way to and from work at Victrola, so I can picture exactly what my sister was talking about. A few years ago, when I really saw the full potential of the super-specialty movement in coffee, I predicted that Starbucks would come out with a new brand to compete. In my mind, they would come out with a separate brand that was a "more funky/sophisticated" take on regular Starbucks, give it a different name, make the colors forest green instead of emerald green, and actually train the baristas how to make excellent coffee; they would open these stores only in certain locations (15th Ave in Seattle being exactly the kind of neighborhood that would sustain one).

I guess I was wrong. Starbucks has done my idea one up, and decided to go with unique, locally-branded shops. I actually think it's not a bad idea, especially if they can really give the new stores each a unique feel. And according to the article they'll be using manual espresso machines, not the super-automatics. Awesome!

A lot of people expect me to hate on Starbucks when they find out what I do for a living. But I just can't. Starbucks is a trailblazer, and I wouldn't have a job if it wasn't for them. And as far as "evil empires" go, they're pretty lacking in the evil department. Travel around Latin America and see the development work they have done and it will de-snark you some. People love to see the big guys take it on the chin; but if you take a careful look at the way the coffee industry actually works, you will see that Starbucks is not the bad guy.

Nevertheless, I'm still an English major at heart and I do love a good dose of self-satire from time to time. In that spirit, I can't resist posting this positively Onion-esque line from the Seattle Times article:

The new names are meant to give the stores "a community personality," said Tim Pfeiffer, senior vice president of global design.

Awesome.