“Venezuelans go to the polls on November 23 to elect state governors and city mayors in a test of support for leftist Chavez a year after he lost his first national vote since winning power in 1998.

Venezuela last year struggled with widespread shortages of staples such as milk and beef, which pollsters say contributed to Chavez’s defeat in a December referendum that would have let him stay in office as long as he kept winning elections.

The government largely eliminated shortages earlier this year. But in recent weeks, shoppers have been unable to find coffee in stores, though cafes still serve it and street vendors are selling it at about twice the regulated price.”

Coffee is the world’s secondmost heavily-traded commodity besides oil, and the lifeblood of many second- and third-world nations.  When the commercial coffee infrastructure falls apart in these places, it can have wide-reaching impacts not just at the day-to-day level but at business and government levels.

Read the full story here.

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.)

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.

Considering that Clover brewers sell at well over $8000 each, this is no small feat. The Clover made waves when it debuted a couple of years ago, claiming to have perfected the four variables of coffee-brewing: time, temperature, grind, and extraction ratio. It was the product of several years of research and development by Zander Nosler and was practically an overnight success–at the moment there are only 200-300 Clovers operating in retail stores around the world, but at that $8-10k a pop, that’s a serious chunk of change.

The Clover has many devoted fans, but I must admit that while I admire Coffee Equipment Company’s engineering savvy I never really bought into the device. Most of its programmable features are present in a Fetco Extractor at a quarter of the price, thought the Extractor doesn’t work on a per-cup basis. It’s meant to do per-cup servings consistently at high volumes, but if your volume’s that high, why not just brew a whole airpot? And if your volume’s low enough for a cup at a time, why not just use a French press and a temp-adjustable tabletop water boiler? I’ve had great coffee out of a Clover, but nothing better than what I’ve had, say, from a Bodum French press using a correctly-measured amount of grounds.

Now, though, the point may well be academic. Because Schultz is in effect literally taking the Clover off the market, since it will now only be used to brew Starbucks’ own coffee–which seems like just pointless theater, since the coffee is roasted so poorly that no $8,000 brewer is going to fix it. As Greg Sherwin over at TheShot coffee blog very aptly put it: “Who buys a $30,000 sound system to listen to AM talk radio?”

By “classic” I mean that applicants would travel to Lincoln and stay in the owners’ home, working at the shop 30 hours a week in exchange for training in one of a number of offered programs: Barista Training, Roaster Training, and Small Business Management. Programs last four weeks each, or you can stay for three months and take all three. Here’s a few details on the offered programs as listed on Cultiva’s website:

1. Barista Training (4 weeks)
Latte art, speed training, coffee agronomy and history, and insight on training for regional barista competitions. By the time your training is complete, you will know the basics and be able to demonstrate barista skills that are as seen in regional and national barista SCAA competitions. Jon Ferguson has served as both a NWRBC Sensory Judge and MRBC Technical Judge. Ferguson initially received barista training as an employee at Zoka Coffee Company in Seattle, Washington in 2005. He started Cultiva Coffee Roasting Company in the Fall of 2006, and has been roasting and pouring rosettas ever since!

2. Roasting (4-8 weeks)
We won’t just flip a switch and burn some coffee. I’ll go into depth about buying green coffees from importers, how to get your business certified organic and fair trade. We’ll track our flow of inventory, measure weight loss, discuss “degrees of roast” and how to define them for yourself, how to package, promote, and sell roasted coffees to cafés, bakeries, grocery stores, etc. We will learn how to roast with a few different stylistic approaches, maintain roast logs, and will gain experience on properly maintaining and cleaning a Diedrich IR-12 roaster.

3. Small business management (4 weeks)
I’ll be more transparent with my books than one may expect. I’ll show you our filing cabinet, how I keep them, the problems I’ve had in the past and present and how I fixed it. I’ll basically give you Cultiva’s paperwork ‘tour’ through our filings, talk about city codes, permits, building-out space, loan documents, etc.

It sounds like a fascinating opportunity, and I hope anyone who takes up Ferguson’s offer blogs about the experience. Particularly because the in-shop roasting machine is Espresso Vivace’s old Deidrich IR-12; I live around the corner from Vivace here in Seattle and can vouch for the fact that that machine turns out some of the best coffee possible, making it a great machine to learn on. I can’t refrain from mentioning, however, that my only reservation–besides the obvious disadvantages of spending up to three months away from home with no income, but that’s surmountable–is that Ferguson doesn’t seem to have a lot of experience as a roaster. If I understand his website correctly, then he’s been a barista for less than three years and a roaster for barely one. He clearly has at least some level of real expertise, having served as a judge in two of the official regional barista championships, and he’s got a hell of a machine, so even without the resume it should be worth it to consider the program if you’re new to the coffee industry and serious about learning as much as you can in a short amount of time.

It’s a sly move to expose their product to a potentially new audience, and I wish them luck.  If you’re in the neighborhood–they have locations on Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, Fremont, Seward Park, and down in Olympia–be sure to check it out for some free brew.

I found it interesting that adding a mere 5% Robusta to the espresso blends threatened the model, since the better Robustas can have radically divergent flavor profiles:

The espresso coffees selected for this study were blended mainly from different Arabica varieties with some Robusta (5% Robusta in average). Blending Arabica with Robusta varieties has shown to add complexity to the model and adds some uncertainty in the prediction of the sensory profiles, but the model still shows reliable results. Models obtained with pure Robusta and Arabica samples separately (data not shown here) show results which are more accurate. Nevertheless, predicting the sensory profile of a new coffee depends very much on the diversity of samples used for constructing the model. The broader the sensory and analytical space of the samples included in developing the model, the more robust the model.

Read more about this amazing machine in Analytical Chemistry, which recently published an article detailing the workings of the machine (and from which the quote above is taken). For my own part, my own palette and I don’t feel particularly threatened, and don’t anticpate a day where I walk in and see RoboCop manning my San Franciscan.

Analysts aren’t exactly lining up for a death pool, but there are legitimate concerns about Starbucks’ inability to deliver the experience its brochures promise. Baristas are little more than tollbooth operators now thanks to automatic machines, and even many of its proponents admit that Starbucks has lost what mystique it had, feeling more like a McDonald’s than a coffee house.

In short, the people high up in the chain (as opposed to the customers) are finally wending their way around to the obvious: aggressive expansion for its own sake isn’t a sustainable business model, especially when you’re dealing with a volatile commodity like coffee. So what should your model be?

The [Starbucks] store had a funereal air the other day as a handful of loyal customers sipped beverages and jotted goodbye notes in what amounted to a book of condolences.

Next door, the Broadway Cafe was bustling. “You win because of the coffee,” said Jon Cates, one of the owners.

Anyone over at Big Green listening?

An article in the New York Times

Using halogen lamps for heat and enough glass bulbs to make any mad scientist proud, the “siphon bar” as its called uses a brewing principle similar to a stove-top espresso brewer or a Chemex:

A siphon pot has two stacked glass globes, and works a little like a macchinetta, that stove-top gadget wrongly called an espresso maker by generations of graduate students. As water vapor forces water into the upper globe the coffee grounds are stirred by hand with a bamboo paddle. (In Japan, siphon coffee masters carve their own paddles to fit the shape of their palms.)

The goal is to create a deep whirlpool in no more than four turns without touching the glass. Posture is important. So is timing: siphon coffee has a brewing cycle of 45 to 90 seconds.

James Freeman, owner of Blue Bottle and the importer of the siphon bar, claims that the resulting brew is delicate, “juicier”, and “almost moussey”. I’m intrigued and already considering a field trip…

See a slide show of the siphon bar in action on the New York Times’ site.

In almost any industry requiring a degree of craft, from making cupcakes to speaker boxes, there’s going to be at least one guy who twigs onto the fact that you can trade on mere competence gilded in mystery and an air of exclusivity, rather than naked excellence. In the coffee world, where typically prices are influenced by the commodity market status, R Miguel Meza is that man. From the press release:

R Miguel announced his new venture, R Miguel Coffees, with a bold statement of purpose, “My passion has been to procure and make available coffees that are unimaginably rich, flavorful and rare. [The company] will offer coffees so startling and so rewarding that the experience alone is worth the price of admission. No one can simply buy an RMiguel coffee, as it is made available exclusively by invitation only. These are all coffee beans so immensely flavorful from years of precious care and impeccable processing that tiny amounts are made available from the world’s most loved coffee trees.”

R Miguel coffees can retail for over $200/lb and can be purchased by invitation only. I’d normally say something like “..and it’s causing quite a stir in the coffee world”, except that honestly no one in the industry seems to care very much; most references I’ve seen to the company, when there are any, usually consist of rolled eyes and a dismissive comment. Ironically, this mass indifference is probably the best thing possible for Miguel’s business model. Think about it: you can choose your clients with your invitation scheme, so you deliberately hand-pick rich people who consider themselves gourmands but don’t actually know much about coffee, and don’t know how little they know about it. If what they taste is anything but outright terrible, the high price tag will convince them they’re experiencing magic–after all, it’s been proven that price influences the uneducated palette–and since no pros feel threatened by Miguel, there’s no one contradicting that magical impression.

So if no one gets hurt, as they say, is there any problem with this model? After all, by all reports Miguel is actually a competent roaster, in the past frequently scoring 90+ with his coffees on CoffeeReview.com when he was working for his parents at Paradise Roasters. That’s a respectable track record. So what’s the problem?

I think AndyS at Portafilter.net put it best:

One of the terms championed by Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and others is “transparency.” In our context it means (among other things) that the consumer is educated in detail about where, when and how a particular coffee is sourced. The concept, I believe, is to develop a consumer awareness of the remarkable variety and richness that coffee origins have to offer. Yet when R Miguel names his coffees “Ambrosia” and “Nectar,” it is the precise opposite of transparency. I guess you’d call it “opacity” instead.

Is opacity the next step in our coffee evolution? In other words, will roasters with a proprietary offering “let the coffee speak for itself,” but only from behind a black curtain, so that no one can tell who’s talking?

In a third-wave coffee culture where coffee pros commonly swap hard data that’s integral to the success of their business, is this return to the illusion of coffee as a mysterious synaesthetic experience–in other words, to the world of stereo speakers and luxury cars where measurable build quality and price are necessarily unrelated–an expected occurrence?

The question is particularly interesting to me because I’ve had the occasional and minor “crisis of faith” in the third-wave approach, where roasteries would open across the street from me and ask that I teach them how to succeed against me in the market. I have no true horror stories about it thankfully and in fact have made friends in the business this way, and as a result I believe in the value of transparency. But R Miguel’s approach seems like the logical end of my secret fears about running a coffee business. And here I am, shortly to open another roastery; should I copy his model? Retreat behind a curtain and use vague terms and a nice haircut and sidestep any scrutiny by the fellow roasters who–let’s face it–aren’t the ones paying my bills anyway? But I look at it, and I don’t like it. I don’t see it as a viable long-term solution, as it risks withering in isolation quickly if the repeat business doesn’t come.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not interested in picking a fight with Miguel, and having never tasted his coffees I’d never tell you not to buy them. He has a strong enough track record with reputable reviewers and there are in fact some aged coffees (assuming he’s selling them and that they make up the high end of his offerings) that are in fact worth $100-200/lb. due to both their quality and the incredible amount of labor that goes into producing and properly storing/aging certain varietals. I’m more interested in it as a point of discussion, both from a commodity standpoint and as a question about the third-wave philosophy.