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).

Consulting with Confidence

Every once in a while, people ask me what I do for a living in a funny way, like "So what exactly do you do?" Sometimes it's people from within the coffee industry who want to know why I'm always traveling to origin; sometimes it's people on the outside of the coffee industry who are thinking about making a career change.

It's often hard to respond, but that's because I have a very unique job, and I provide a very unique service.

I am a quality coffee consultant. There are three parts to that:

• QUALITY — I work on the specialty side of the coffee industry. I help people take average coffee and make it good, good coffee and make it great, great coffee and make it completely unique. Quality also characterizes the kind of instruction I give. If I cannot give you absolutely top-flight instruction, I will not take the job.

• COFFEE — The production chain in coffee is extraordinarily long. Many people who are experts at one step along the way (a great barista, an artisan roaster, a family farmer) have little knowledge about what happens at the other steps. My specialty is the whole chain... all of coffee... from the soil to the harvest to the export mill to the warehouse to the roasting plant to the packaging to the cafe to the demitasse. I help make connections and further education all along the coffee chain.

• CONSULTANT — I don't buy or sell coffee, neither green nor roasted. I help people who buy and sell coffee do a better job, make a better product, meet their goals as a company, and increase their bottom line. There are huge dollar values hidden in plain sight everywhere in the coffee industry. Every cappuccino or bag of green coffee could be better, more satisfying, and more profitable. For a fraction of what you spend on your machinery, labor, goods and operating costs, you can hire a world-class expert to maximize your potential.

I don't make sales pitches on this blog usually. This blog is where I write about what's interesting to me in coffee, and where you can get free nuggets of the kind of information I provide when I am working as a quality coffee consultant. But to answer the questions I often get, I'm posting this today.

So that is what I do. I have worked as a consultant in Alabama and New York City and San Francisco and Seattle; and Peru and Ethiopia and Guatemala and El Salvador. And many more places.

Check out my consulting website, recently updated with several new pages. If you are seriously considering improving your coffee knowledge, here is a partial resume of the work I have done in specialty coffee.

This Blog

Welcome Foodistas.

This blog isn't like most coffee blogs. I'm not a barista (though I was, once upon a time), and I'm not a hobbyist coffee enthusiast (though I am indeed enthusiastic about coffee). I'm a coffee educator and consultant, and I travel for development projects and teach classes in the USA and in coffee-producing countries. I don't work for any single roaster or coffee shop, so you get an unbiased expert opinion here... or at least the closest approximation I can manage, given my own personal preferences and friendships.

I also don't tend to post long musings on the meaning of customer service in the coffee industry in this postmodern world of ours, or other such navel-gazing nonsense. There's plenty of that out there, as I'm sure you've noticed. I like to keep my posts centered around my work, and my work centered around interesting stuff like week-long marathon tasting sessions, or trips to Africa. Of course, I also reserve the right to get philosophical, and therefore hypocritical, at any moment. It's my blog.

I was on the road for a development project when I got a notice from Foodista that I'd be featured on their homepage. So there won't be any new videos or anything till later this week... I'm busy working on my latest project in Puerto Rico. But if you stay tuned, I promise you pictures of deep purple colored dirt in a plastic baggy... trust me, it has something very interesting to do with coffee.

If you are new here, there's plenty to check out. I recommend the recent series on Panama... you can find the links in the side bar, "A new kind of hotness," "Getting high in Panama," and "Finca Sofia". Feel free to leave comments, and anyone who really loves coffee, professional, amateur, or aspiring know-it-all, is always free to email me at daniel at dot com coffeescholars, mutatis mutandis. I'll be back in the States with more material on Wednesday or so.

Cheers!

New Links

I've added a couple of new links to the blog roll on the right.

New Coffees lists new releases from some top roasters. Very simple concept and execution from Michael Young in New York.

Brew Methods has been around since January. An equally simple page, it provides a list of links to brewing instructions all over the web, for a variety of methods like press pots, Chemex, and siphon brewers.

Hey, That's My Latte!

Longtime coffee expert and überblogger Tonx took some pictures many years ago of lattes made at Victrola Coffee in Seattle, where I used to work. He put the set on flickr and it has over half a million views. In fact, he made these pictures available on the web even before they were put on flickr.

Many, many more beautiful lattes have been poured (though rarely have they been as well-photographed); but because these pictures were some of the first high-resolution pictures of really excellent latte art that were freely available on the web, they quickly spread all over the place. Now, as is so often the case with internet property, they're completely out of tonx's control; he told me he long ago gave up trying to get credit for all these pictures.

Anyway, a lot of those lattes are mine, and though I'm used to seeing them pop up randomly, sometimes it still takes me by surprise.

With the new Google insta-search that debuted this week (in which it starts showing you results before you have even finished typing... try it!), even if you aren't looking for images, if you type "latte ...", before you even get to the a in "art" a bunch of pictures pop up, and at least as of this week, the one in the upper right is my latte. Kinda weird; it links to some auto-bot sight called thatsweird (dot) net (no linkage for them!).

Bing.com takes you to this page in which one of my lattes is used as an interstitial illustration meant to encourage you. "Latte Art is all the new craze, and looks great," it says, "go on, have a go..."

Lifehacker has this pic, which is my favorite:

But, God bless them, they give tonx credit.

It's been a while since I jumped behind the bar and made two hundred lattes in a morning. I know I still have the chops, but I wonder if my "handwriting" has changed at all. Have you ever looked at old notebooks or letters or schoolwork and marveled at how your handwriting has changed over the years? I wonder if it's the same with latte art.

Check out my own flickr page. I have some latte art pics there, but the nicest photo sets are the ones from Ethiopia, El Salvador, and Peru.

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.

Update

I've been taking a nice summer hiatus, working on a few projects here and there, not all of them coffee-related.

This week I will be in Guatemala presenting a seminar on coffee roasting at the annual National Coffee Congress of Guatemala, put on by Anacafé.

After Guatemala, I am traveling to Panama to visit the farms on some friends in the Boquete/Volcán region, in the western mountain highlands of Panama. I'll be there for several days, then it's back to the United States.

I'm taking my camera of course, and when I return, I will have some pictures and video to share, plus hopefully a little insight into the coffee scene in those two famous coffee countries. You can expect fresh material by the end of the month.

I hope everyone's having a lovely summer in North America, or wherever you are.

Comment Moderation

I seem to have been under especially strident assault from the spam monsters in the last week or so. For the time being, I will be holding comments for moderation. If you leave a comment, it will not appear automatically, but I will try and get everyone's comments up as fast as possible!

Daniel Has Returned... and Søren is Champion

Hi everyone. I am back from my seven week trip which took me to San Francisco, Ethiopia, New York City, and Los Angeles. From the safety and comfort of Seattle in the springtime, I'll be writing a running diary of what happened on my trip, complete with pointers and diagrams and photos and videos.

On my trip I did lots of cupping, roasting, brewing, shot-pulling, and other assorted coffee activities; plus goat-roasting, cold-catching, storm-dodging, train-taking, whiskey-drinking, and people-meeting. So stay tuned for stories and pointers from the World of Coffee.

In the meantime, I would like to offer a hearty congratulations to Søren Stiller Markussen for winning the Danish Barista Championship this week. Søren was part of the Harar Cupping Caravan in March. He's a really great guy, and I have a couple of stories about him to tell in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, here's a picture. Søren's in the front-middle, in the plaid shirt. Hard to tell here, but he's crouching slightly. He's actually a quite tall man (taller than yours truly, behind him in the pink shirt).

A report on the Danish Championship from Coffee Collective here.