Posts from — April 2008

New York coffeeshop Roasting Plant Coffee Company is pioneering an interesting design for the sale and delivery of their coffee–by turning the entire store into a coffee machine. Dubbed the “Javabot”, in truth it seems to be really just the various aspects of a typical roasting plant and retail shop joined together by pneumatic tubes and controlled by a central computer, but the idea is quite cool.

Founded by a manufacturer engineer and former Starbucks executive, I guess it’s not surprising that the focus is on mechanical efficiency and reproducibility rather than the more “touchy-feely” aspects of a coffeeshop. But the design is surprisingly elegant and it seems like it’d be easy to stand at the ordering station, watching your beans rush throughout the tubes in the store and into your cup, and imagine you’re in some culinary sci-fi movie.

It definitely seems like a Javabot would be a godsend to a proprietor of a small shop who works and runs everything himself. Many years ago I did this, running a quaint little shop as the sole employee–taking drink orders, filling coffee bags and bins, cleaning up after guests, doing the dishes, etc. While I like the personal touch of small shops, I can’t deny that a Javabot would really have come in handy in those days. I doubt the Javabot technology would be affordable to someone like that, but if it was, it could vastly improve what it means to truly “run your own shop”.

(Thanks to Mark for sending me the link.)

[I haven't gone anywhere...for some reason WordPress keeps eating my posts. Going to try to tackle this technical issue but if it seems like there's a recent posting drought that's why. -a]

The UK paper The Guardian ran a story today about a “50 GBP cup of espresso” (about $80), served at the Peter Jones cafe in London’s Sloane Square shopping area. Why the expense? Because the espresso blend, dubbed “Cafe Raro”, is made up of two of the most expensive coffees in the world: Jamaican Blue Mountain, and the infamous Kopi Luwak, or “weasel poop” coffee.

It seems like every few years Luwak coffee makes waves in the news as it finds a new market of adventurous consumers fascinated by the novelty. The truth is that it is a good coffee that is difficult and expensive to produce, but it largely seems to sail on a reputation of lurid gimmickry. Normally I’d be tempted to accuse the Peter Jones store of the same, but the Cafe Raro offering comes under a white banner: the proceeds from selling shots of the coffee go to benefit the UK’s MacMillan Cancer Support.

So while I don’t think the store is out to cash in on a foodie craze, I will say this: I doubt it’s a good espresso. Jamaican Blue and Luwak both have extremely soft bodies that would yield a weak mouthfeel in a shot, and both have subtle notes that I can’t help but think would get in each others’ way. The roaster in me considers it a crime to dilute by blending any truly distinctive single-origin coffee, even if it’s with another expensive single-origin. Having never tasted it, it’s all academic, but that’s my educated guess.