My friend Ben commented on my last post, wondering what difference it makes whether one is “grinding” their coffee with a “blade grinder” rather than an actual burr grinder.

Basically, the “blade grinder” is just a subversively named food processor; some blades whirl around and chop up the coffee beans, with no regard for the size of the pieces they’re producing. If you have used a food processor, you know how this works: One has to watch closely in an attempt to get the results “just right,” but even then some of the pieces are going to be larger than the others.

Well, a coffee ground’s thickness determines how much water (and how much time) is needed to produce an appropriate flavor from that ground; with an inconsistent grind, there is simply no way to get consistent results.

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While I’m waiting for the long-awaited unveiling of foodcoffeelife.com (not hyperlinked because there’s nothing there yet), I thought I’d share my thoughts on “quality-driven” coffee, and some options I hope to evangelize throughout southcentral Kentucky. Below, you’ll find brief explanations on why every home should have a French press and a burr grinder — and why you really should consider putting a vacpot on your Christmas list, despite the fact that you’ve never heard of it until now.

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Me and my coffeehouse… it’s a love/hate relationship, for sure. It’s great on the rare occasion that Shelley and I get to go “sit a spell,” sans kids, and just soak it in. It’s great when someone who actually likes coffee — black coffee, and not primarily due to caffeine — comes in and starts up a conversation. It’s great on the days people are feeling generous, or romantic, or joyful generally. There are plenty of reasons to love it.

It’s not so great, however, when I look at how much time I’ve put into it, then consider how little (financially speaking) I have to show for it. It sucks when customer after customer comes in looking for “a regular cup of coffee,” interspersed with yuppies who want to order everything “grande” and “skinny.” And it really, really bothers me that most of my employees still don’t have a true appreciation of coffees — the differences in origins, roast profiles, brewing methods, etc.

That last one, of course, is my own fault. And it pisses me off.

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“Fresh until March 2010″… So read the label on a bag of coffee at a Starbucks in Nashville. My boss and colleagues decided to stop there on our way to Alabama (and seemed a bit puzzled that I, the real coffee lover of the group, didn’t partake), so I killed time by looking over their vast array of merchandise.

Anyway, I just want to let anyone know… Coffee shouldn’t sit on the shelf that long. At what point did it arrive at that Starbucks, I wonder? How long before that was it roasted? I’d wager a pretty penny that the beans in that bag were roasted in Spring of this year, and so by their “freshness” date would be nearly a year old once brewed, if not even older!

For the record, coffee should be ground right before it’s brewed, and used within a couple weeks of the roast date for optimal flavor. The more time passes between roast and brew, the more bitter notes and the less nuance will be in the cup.

Just another example of how even those who think they “know coffee” — and, no offense, but Starbucks customers seem to think they know a whole lot — either don’t know or don’t care about truly remarkable, truly fresh, truly delicious coffee.

(NOTE: This was written and posted
entirely on my iPhone… The wonders of technology!)

THOUGHT 1: Blogging is light, and I’m not even apologetic this time. I’ve rediscovered working in — as opposed to simply owning — a coffeeshop, and while I miss my time at home with Shelley and the kiddos, I’m doing my best to enjoy a few things I’ve missed:

• Wonderfully made coffee within arm’s reach at all times
• Random conversations with people I don’t know
• Listening to “Hot Rail” by Calexico
• Time to blog, if only for a few minutes
• Standing for hours at a time

Most curses are also blessings, I think, and so I’ve no reason to lament my increasingly busy lifestyle… in the midst of all this busyness, I may actually relearn how to relax.

THOUGHT 2: I’ve long said “I agree with conservatives in principle,” and then voted for liberals… Hell, I may still do that. But for everything I liked and still like about Obama — his eloquence, his thoughtfulness, his (seeming) candor — I’m convinced that this “stimulus” idea simply isn’t going to work. My friends who also voted for Obama will here object: “Give the man a chance!” And I am, and shall, and don’t walk around dwelling on the state of things or looking anew for the next great white hope. But it simply doesn’t make sense.

As I mentioned in a pretty recent post, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at people so they can get their network TV shows and Viagra ads doesn’t seem like a good way to spend tax money (I’ll have a lot to say in coming weeks about tax money). Neither, thinks I, does just spending money on something, anything, make for sound economic policy. Debt got us into this mess — why do we think further debt will get us out? As C.S. Lewis said, it’s telling that we’ve essentially crafted our society around lending w/ interest — the one and only economic policy that God specifically forbade the Israelites from taking part in.

THOUGHT 3 (is related to Thought 2): Larison is always a good read, especially in these Dem-majority times. But he’s outdone himself, tossing out what he may think is a throwaway line that (if only more people read him) should make it into Bartlett’s:

(O)ptimism permits the perpetual deferral of hard choices.

This is the wisest single sentence I’ve read in a long time, and particularly convicting in an age of “hope.” As a spiritual person, I generally aim for optimism. And there’s nothing wrong with optimism, I suppose, when one is speaking in a spiritual sense and of something that’s both realistic and relatively certain. But this refrain of “Americans have come back before, we’ll do it again!” takes all the oomph out of this economic punch to the gut. “Don’t worry, it’ll all be better” is a great message for a 2-year-old who fell and hit his head; it’s at once  condescending and stupid when used on grown men and women who should know better.

THOUGHT 4: My friend Greg has started blogging one idea per day, as well as one haiku per day. I found this one particularly apt (though be warned, it takes a few readings to grasp the meaning):

This sleep that thought thieves
in the new morning will seem
pricey. The thoughts, cheap.

Beautiful.

I don’t get out much.

Used to be, whenever there was a “good show” (performance by a band I liked) anywhere within a couple of hours, I gathered a few friends and went. These days, it takes a free performance by Radiohead or something equally rare to get me to a show. It gets me down sometimes… I wonder if I haven’t lost the capacity for spontaneous fun. But it’s part of growing up, I guess… two jobs, a child and a lot of extracurricular nonsense make “spare time” hard to come by.

When I was just starting in college and beginning my life as a rock star, I liked to “chat” with the artists I went to see, when and if I could pull it off. And, invariably, I tried (subconsciously, I think) to steer the conversation toward how I am in a band, too! and attempting to get some sort of verification that I was really someone.

Looking back, I’m certain, the people on the other end of this conversation just wanted to get out.

•••

This is how I feel, nowadays, when people—good, fine people who have no ill intent or hidden agendas—try to talk to me about coffee, particularly ®Starbucks®. It usually starts like this:

Hey Justin, have you heard that ®Starbucks® is doing xxx?

Uh, nope, haven’t heard that. (I attempt a subtle but direct signal of disinterest.)

Yeah! They’re facing competition from xxx and so they’re trying xxx to get back some business!

Oh, that’s interesting. (I attempt, again, to signal that this is, in fact, NOT interesting.)

Well, you know, I went the other day and this new xxx thing is really pretty good!

At this point, if Shelley’s around, she tries to steer the conversation, as Mr. Lebowski would say, “into the mountain.” This rarely works, but shifts the conversation like so:

Oh yeah (snark snark)! I guess I can’t say “®Starbucks®” around  you, huh? (Snark snark!)

No, it’s okay. (I attempt to convey that, just maybe, there is a whole world of things we could talk about vis a vis ®Starbucks® that would illuminate this instigator and somewhat justify my by-this-time-irritated demeanor.)

The conversation ends here, generally… and I get the feeling that both sides go away extremely unhappy. Me, confounded that I had to endure this yet again and pissed off generally with the state of coffee knowledge; the other person, flabbergasted at my aloof demeanor and thinking that I think that I’m better than them.

But that’s not it at all. It’s that, No. 1, as someone in the coffee industry, I don’t really care about a layperson’s perspective on a corporation that is wholly different from my operation, save for the fact that the earthborn product we sell is the same; and No. 2, that the person doesn’t see that ®Starbucks® is in some ways a legitimate threat to my livelihood, that the idea that ®Starbucks® IS COFFEE is a hindrance to what I’m spending my time and hard-earned money (not that of shareholders) on.

I don’t mind that people go to ®Starbucks®. It is what it is, the Wal-Mart of coffee (although the clientelé may be, on average, considerably better dressed), and it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon. It can even be seen as a help to a business like mine, helping move “boutique coffee” into the mainstream. But I’m a husband/father/entrepreneur with considerably meager means… the David to the drive-thru Goliath. I’m out hunting down my business, armed only with the slingshot of a quality product and knowledgable staff, while the big bad wolf is drawing in prey by means of neon signs and slick plastic interiors and genius marketing.

So no, I’m sorry, I’m not all that interested in what ®Starbucks® is doing this week. I don’t go there—and I don’t mind if you do. But I’m too busy trying to provide for my family to think about the neat new ways some rich guys in an office building found to make another penny per cup.

There’s something about a rainy day, in a colder-than-the-outdoors office, with no actual work to do, that makes one ponder the finer things. Not “fine china” fine… maybe “finer” isn’t even the right word. But the small things that make life just a little better.

Today, that’s 12 ounces of rich espresso, diluted with a bit of water, touched with a bit of cream and accented by a dash of turbinado sugar (it’s grown in volcanic areas of Hawaii).

There are some days—growing more frequent as my responsibilities continue to multiply—that I wish I didn’t own a business at all. There’s taxes to do, systems to improve, business to build; it’s all so damn tiring. But then I walk in and half the customers say “Hi,” and I grind a few beans and push a couple of buttons.

And there it is. Real, honest-to-God pleasure. The pleasure of the unnecessary. The pleasure of a beverage whose roots I know well (but not well enough), whose journey I can trace on a map with geographical certainty.

And a beverage whose true beauties, if it weren’t for me, might not be known by a few accountants and lawyers and artists and other downtown folk. Most of them, admittedly, don’t notice those beauties. But I’ve opened a few eyes to the lesser-known qualities (and opened countless sleepy eyes by sheer virtue of caffeination).

So here’s to a small Americano. You might think that it’s free, for me. But I’ve paid for it many times over… and at this moment, it’s worth every penny.

My posting on “Black Gold” has garnered more comments, both public and private, than any of my blog posts to date… and a few people have asked questions about my little corner of the coffee world.

Unfortunately, my website is under construction (I’m so 2001), but in the meantime I’ll toss out a few tidbits of information here.

1.) Spencer’s sells coffee for home, too! We offer somewhere in the range of 10-14 types of coffee at any given time, including at least three medium roasts, three dark roasts, three flavoreds, and our standard Breakfast Blend, Espresso and Unplugged Decaf. You can get it ground to your preference (usually “Auto-Drip” style, but maybe you’ve got a French press or moka pot?). A half-pound is $7, a full pound or more is $12 a pound, and comes with a free small cup of coffee at time of purchase.

2.) All our coffee — not some of it or even most of it — is fair-trade and organic. “Fair trade” means that the farmer is getting a good price for his beans (at least $1.40 per lb, and often more, as compared to the 20 cents typical of the New York traded “coffee market,” which is what the big companies [Kraft, Sara Lee, Starbucks] mostly base their buying prices on); “organic” means it’s grown without chemical pesticides or growth-enhancing chemicals.

3.) Espresso brewed by hand, the way it was meant to be. I saw a funny quote the other day about Starbucks’ strange decision to close for three hours nationwide, ostensibly for “training purposes”: “Does it really take three hours to learn how to push a button?” But that’s what is happening there (and at Panera, as well as Panera rip-off Buckhead Cafe): The machine does all the work. Problem is, you just can’t get consistent, top-notch espresso from one of these “super-automatic” machines. We adjust our grinder daily, because the humidity and temperature affect such things. Our baristas (fancy name for “coffee-making person”) are trained intensively when they begin… and I’ve got my secret shoppers roaming around, too!

4.) More than just coffee. We also serve a variety of other fine beverages, including Mighty Leaf teas (the best hot teas around), smoothies, and Italian sodas (with more flavors than a Baskin-Robbins). For lunch, we offer handmade chicken salad and tuna salad, as well as turkey, ham, the 3-Way Grilled Cheese, and a number of other sandwiches, as well as a handmade soup of the day. Nothing premade, prebought, whatever.

So we (myself and two of my friends/emps) just got done watching “Black Gold”, a documentary about Ethiopian coffee farmers, the prices they get paid for coffee, and how those prices affect their lives. I can’t really distill the movie, but I’ll share a few of the salient points, along with my reactions.

“How much do you think they pay for a cup of your coffee?” This question is posed, at the beginning of the film, to a group of coffee farmers from a man named Tadesse, who runs the coffee co-op which sells all the coffee these farmers produce. They react with absolute astonishment when he tells them that a cup of coffee is about $2.50 (I’m assuming he meant in New York or L.A.), whereas it sells there in their community for about 15 cents.

“We pray, oh God, that you would raise the price of coffee!” These words are spoken in earnest, by Christian men who grow coffee for their livelihood. The coffee market took a dive about 10 years ago — and Africa has been suffering ever since. Some men try to battle through it, continuing to grow the coffee and hoping that their luck changes. Tadesse, for his part, travels the world, attempt to sidestep the “coffee market,” which (like the stock market) determines every day how much the big corporations (Kraft, Starbucks, Nestle, Sara Lee) will pay for their coffee. He explains that these companies are only the last link in a chain with about six or seven stops, the price increasing (or decreasing, depending how you look at it) at each link. He makes deals with independent roasters, selling his co-op’s coffee directly to them. This means something like a tenfold increase in the price that can be paid to the farmers themselves — men who are using the profits not to build houses or buy cars, but pool the profits in order to build A school for A community.

“We are more interested in trade than in aid.” The film also shows a massive, U.S.-owned plant in Africa which bundles grain, which is then given to the African people as humanitarian aid. Yet they are not looking for this aid; rather, they want to see fair prices for their products. The contrast, though, is startling: We give billions in aid every year to the Third World, and at the same time we negotiate at the World Trade Organization to keep prices low. This is shown as well: African delegations essentially being shut out of the trading process, getting no voice whatsoever over what they will be paid for their products.

I took a few pots of Ethiopian Harrar — quite possibly made from bea grown by those in the film — and it struck me that I’m selling something precious. The coffee is grown by these people, it’s picked by hand, sorted by hand, washed by hand, bagged by hand… then it’s shipped to Nashville (yes, I work with a roaster who buys directly from the co-op), roasted when I order it, and shipped to me the next day. And what do I do with it? I throw it around, I grind and brew and don’t even think about how many people are truly affected by this thing that, ultimately, I am selling to people who do not appreciate their work. They don’t KNOW the work… hell, it’s hard enough for me to remember.

Where’s the balance? How do I explain to people the importance of fair-trade coffee, without sounding like a zealot or bleeding-heart liberal or whatnot? How do I explain why Starbucks is a shameful place, when they give their employees such good benefits? How their “fair trade principles” mean only that they buy 1-2 percent of their coffee fair-trade, so that they can use it as a label and make yuppy consumers feel better about what they’re buying, which is mostly NOT fair-trade? How do I not sound like a prick, seriously?

My heart was touched, at least, by the fact that many of these people are Christians, brothers and sisters of the Almighty that I worship… they’re not nameless, faceless people, but images of God as I am an image of God. And for that reason, I can’t sit idly by and let fellow Christians live in ignorance, going off the assumption that it’s JUST a cup of coffee. There’s a holy God who watches over these people, and through ignorance we do them a great disservice — no, an INJUSTICE — by allowing ourselves to walk through life, drinking Maxwell House or Millstone or Starbucks or whatever, simply because it costs us $9 a lb. with our Kroger Plus card instead of $12 a pound at our fair-trade coffee retailer. And this is not about me… I doubt I will ever make a significant income from coffee. But I do intend to make some sort of a difference, from this day forward, on behalf of Jesus Christ, who died for me, for you — and just as much, for Tadesse and all his farmers.

NEW INFO: I had guessed it already, but I can now confirm that the Ethiopian coffees I serve are from Tadesse’s co-op… which means we were drinking coffee from the very farms featured in the film! Pretty cool.

Monday night, at 7 p.m. at Mass Media and Technology Hall at WKU, there is a free showing of “Black Gold,” a critically-acclaimed film about coffee farmers, fair-trade, exploitation, etc. I’ll be there, serving free 100% fair-trade coffee, and possibly talking about some of the issues. Please come! And invite any coffee-loving (especially Starbucks-loving) friends. Here’s the trailer:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DePOBjunXU]For more info, visit the official website.