Stepping back

Sometimes it is healthy to step back from your daily life and do something different for a while. I just made it back to Portland after a three-week workation in Eastern Washington, where I helped my family finish wheat harvest. Harvest is an annual ritual that helps me refresh my mind, as I work long hours in wide open spaces.

I love my hometown of Dayton (pop. 2,500). It is the archetypical small town. Founded in the second half of the 19^th century, Dayton has a historic Main Street with a variety of shops, restaurants and a restored movie house that also hosts community theatrical productions. A mead works and a high-end chocolatier also recently opened there.

Even though I return there regularly, the first day or two on the ground is always a culture shock. Compared to Portland, everything is so…quiet. But that’s also one of the best parts about it.

One thing I would change about Dayton is the overall quality of coffee available. When I was home in May, I stopped in a café one afternoon to write. The cappuccino I ordered was, to put it bluntly, bad. I didn’t want to hurt the barista’s feelings, so I kept my mouth shut (probably a bad reason, but it was the rationalization I used). After all, I am just someone who writes about coffee, not an actual barista. Besides, it wasn’t her fault she didn’t know how to make good coffee. She had not been properly trained to do so. (Café owners, please train your baristas!)

This last visit, I didn’t make time to look for coffee. In fact, I barely even went into town. Instead, I spent most of the time in the cab of a John Deere combine, driving around in circles (insert metaphor for my life here), harvesting wheat, barley, canola and mustard. We had a good run—great weather and no major breakdowns—and at the end of my time, I felt I had helped them accomplish something. That always relaxes my mind, as do scenes like these:

Creating a better way to go: FoamAroma

When you think of coffee technology, you might think of the sleek, shiny espresso machines sitting on the bar, the mysterious glass orbs of the vacuum pot, or the lengthy, spiral curves of a Japanese ice-brewer. These are the complex technologies on display in a specialty coffee shop—the “stars of the show,” if you will.

One technology you might overlook, because it is much less flashy, is the cup. Despite its relative simplicity, the cup you drink from has a large impact on your coffee experience.

The best way to enjoy hot coffee is to drink it from a ceramic mug. Mugs feel solid in the hand and smooth on the lips. A mug’s open top allows the full aroma of the coffee to reach your nose. As long as they have been washed properly, ceramic mugs do not impart any flavors into the coffee.

Drinking from a paper cup is a much different experience. Paper feels cheap and can add a dull off-flavor to your coffee. When you put a plastic lid on top of the paper cup, you trap most of the aroma inside the cup, further reducing the taste experience. If you drink a cappuccino from a to-go cup, you distort the balance between the textured milk and the coffee (the foam gets trapped under the lid when you tip the cup). On top of its taste deficiencies, using paper cups creates a large stream of waste destined for the landfill.  

Nevertheless, many people drink their coffee from a paper cup. From my own observations, I would estimate that at least 50% of the coffee sold in cafés is ordered to go. For some cafés, the percentage is higher. At the Starbucks I worked at in Boston, the rate was closer to 95% (it was a commuter store). Whatever the exact number, a lot of people order their coffee to go, and a high percentage of them do not get the coffee experience they deserve.

Enter a new lid

Entrepreneur Craig Bailey wants to change this. Bailey, a former engineer in the paper industry, has developed a new version of the to-go cup lid he calls FoamAroma. The new lid allows coffee drinkers to taste more of a cappuccino’s foam and smell more of the coffee aroma. Bailey’s idea came to him one day when he stopped in at Lava Java, former USBC champ Phuong Tran’s café in Ridgefield, WA.

Craig Bailey, inventor/entrepreneur

“Before October 2007, I was drinking coffee for the caffeine,” said Bailey, a former engineer in the pulp and paper industry. “I had this project up in Longview and I happened to stop in at Lava Java. I don’t know why, but I changed to a traditional five and a half ounce cappuccino. I have no idea why. I just had to try it, and it changed my life. It actually blew me away.”

His eyes opened to how good coffee could be, Bailey went back for more.

“I got the same drink to go in the car the next day,” he said, “but it wasn’t the same experience.”

Trapped under the plastic lid of a to-go cup, the cappuccino failed to impress him.  Disappointed, Bailey began to look for ways to fix the problem.

“I took the Solo lid and started poking holes and cutting slots and tearing tabs,” he said. “I got some hard clay in the house—I was going to form molds and fix the problem. FoamAroma is the product of that epiphany.”

Bailey wanted to produce a drinking experience that would mirror that which a mug offered.

“The velvety, textured foam is such a big part of the experience, as is the aroma,” he said.

For two years, Bailey’s interest in creating a better lid was just a hobby, but things changed in the spring of 2009, when a large earthquake struck Chile and damaged that country’s main port. Chile is a large pulp exporter, and as a result of the port shutdown, the world price for pulp shot up. The mill where Bailey was working at the time could not afford to purchase pulp, so it cancelled the project he was working on. Bailey took the cancellation as a sign it was time to turn his hobby into a business. That summer, he found a plastic manufacturer in Florida and a patent attorney, and he has been working on FoamAroma full time since then.

The new lid has a round hole in the center and a large, triangle-shaped hole for drinking from. The triangle mouth hole sits on a surface that is inclined toward the center of the cup. This directs any splashes back toward the center of the cup, unlike a traditional Solo lid, where coffee splashes straight up when the cup is bumped.

The larger holes in the FoamAroma lid also allow coffee drinkers to slurp the coffee, so customers can drink their coffee right away instead of waiting for it to cool.  

“It turns out that if you can slurp air through as you sip, it cools the fluid off and you don’t burn your mouth,” said Bailey.

FoamAroma is currently available in black or white for standard 12-24oz. cup sizes. A version for an 8-oz. cup has been designed and prototyped, and should be in production soon.

These days, Bailey spends much of his time visiting cafés and other places where coffee drinkers and café owners gather, spreading the message that a better to-go coffee experience is possible.

“I’ve learned that most baristas don’t drink from paper cups, so they don’t know how bad [the old lids are] until you get them to do a side-by-side comparison,” he said.

Besides coffee, Baily is also targeting the tea industry. FoamAroma’s first major order was for a container load to England, where tea is the most popular hot beverage. At the London Tea Festival, one tea shop owner called the FoamAroma the ‘holy grail’ because it allows tea drinkers to smell the teas’ aromas. 

Whether or not FoamAroma becomes the new standard for the hot beverage industry, Bailey says there is no turning back now.

“I cashed it all in,” he said. “I’m in this 100%. I’m not going back to spending days with chemical engineers behind a computer. I like talking to coffee people. It’s a lot more fun.”

You serve what? (a lesson in expectation management)

Most cafés hang a sign in the window near the door telling customers what brand of coffee they sell, but not all. The other day I visited an unfamiliar shop in Downtown Portland that was tight-lipped about its coffee.  

“What kind of espresso do you have?” I asked the barista.

You would have thought I asked her for her phone number. She shot me a look that told me not to ask stupid questions. “It’s store-bought,” she replied, curtly.

Now it was my turn to give her a look—a puzzled one. In all the cafés I have visited, this was the first time someone said an espresso was “store-bought.”

Confused, I sputtered, “Any…particular store?”

She looked at me coolly and said, “It’s from Cash and Carry. Do you want one shot or two?”

“One, thank you.”

Inwardly, I dreaded the first sip of the espresso, but to my surprise, it was drinkable. While the coffee would not stand out in a tasting competition, it did not have any off-flavors or obvious defects. Considering the circumstances, I was satisfied. Never underestimate the power of low expectations.

Espresso Jell-O Shots? hmm….

Yesterday, following an hour at Boyd Coffee (still a family-owned company after 112 years), I decided to take the scenic route back into the city. Instead of taking I-84, I drove west along Sandy Boulevard through Parkrose toward the Hollywood district. Not quite coincidentally, I ended up at Case Study, a café that keeps pulling me in, partly because I never know what new beverage might be available to try. The last time I stopped in, I tried the shakerato. Yesterday, I was planning to just have a glass of ice-brewed Geisha (from Panama), but Ricky, the barista always creating new things, insisted I try the Jell-O shot too.

It was, in a word, interesting.

The concoction was a small cup of espresso-flavored gelatin (slightly larger than a shot glass) with whipped cream on top. Case Study makes the base with unflavored gelatin, espresso and a little sugar. Each of the cups contains approximately the equivalent of a shot of espresso (in this case, a single-origin from Guatemala). To serve it, they add the whipped cream and create a confection that is somewhere between a chilled vanilla latte and a coffee aspic.

The thing that stood out most about the Jell-O shot was the texture. The gelatin was chewy and buttery. Normally when I think of Jell-O, I imagine something light, but the shot was rich and heavy. You could split one with a friend and be satisfied.

If you are a big fan of Jell-O, the espresso Jell-O shot is worth a try. I recommend you don’t wash it down with iced coffee, though—especially if you have a relatively empty stomach. The caffeine/sugar combination of the two together packs nearly as much punch as Marlen Esparza. 

Tales from Bostonia

We spent a few days in Boston last week, and the trip reinforced my belief that Portlanders are very spoiled by the amount of high-quality coffee available to us.

The first thing you notice when you drive around Boston (rather, the first thing I notice) is the presence of Dunkin’ Donuts shops everywhere. There are even more Dunkin’ Donuts than Starbucks. Apparently, Massachusettsans (or their less-polite fellow citizens) like bad coffee. Dunkin’ tried to establish itself in Portland a few years back, but the city’s coffee connoisseurs ignored the company, so it left town.

But Boston is not Portland, and Dunkin’ Donuts has a special place in the hearts of New Englanders. The chain was founded in 1950 in Quincy (pronounced quin-zee), Massachusetts, a few miles south of Boston. From the original shop, the business has grown to approximately 7,000 stores in the US alone (10,000+ around the world). Earlier this year, Dunkin’ announced it wants to double the number of US stores in the next two decades (a sign of the impending apocalypse?). The success of the business is unquestionable. The quality of the coffee, on the other hand…..

Give it a shot

Trying to keep an open mind, I stopped in at a Dunkin’ Donuts one morning and ordered a small coffee. The server asked if I wanted it “regular,” which, in Massachusetts, really means “with milk and sugar.” I said yes.

The coffee, unfortunately, met my expectations. It tasted like lightly-sweetened water. Bleh. It puzzles me that Dunkin’s coffee is so popular, but there is more behind the company’s success than just coffee.

In Boston, drinking DD coffee is almost a badge of honor, a symbol of loyalty toward the place New Englanders call home. People drink Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee, not because it is high quality, but because it communicates something about their values. They identify with Dunkin’s working class, egalitarian American ideals (“America runs on Dunkin’”). In other words, Dunkin’ serves the common coffee drinker.

When I worked for Starbucks in Boston, customers would occasionally come into the store and grumble about the cup sizes, saying something like, “I just want a large. I don’t speak Italian, or whatever that is,” implying that Starbucks’ use of a foreign language was elite West Coast snobbery (I wonder what the customer would think of this post). In the least snarky voice I could summon, I would reply, “That’s okay, we speak English here too.” (Hopefully, they detected some sarcasm, but not too much.)

The marketing/branding lesson in the story is that it takes more than just a quality product to be successful. You have to have something that resonates with your customers’ values.  

Hope for future coffee snobs

Given Dunkin’s history in the Northeast, it would be a challenge to separate New Englanders from their DD coffee, but people are building a better coffee scene in the “Hub of the Universe.”

Thanks to some enterprising Bostonians, it is possible these days to find good coffee with a little effort. One shop providing better beverages is Thinking Cup, a café across from Boston Common that serves Stumptown coffee. The shot of Hair Bender they served me was not quite what you would get from Albina Press (where I’m sitting as I write this), but it was tasty.

Other quality cafés are popping up around the Boston metro area too. Unlike five years ago, when DD or Starbucks was about all you could find (in addition to the Italian coffees in the North End), these days you can find Stumptown, Counter Culture, Intelligentsia and George Howell coffee if you know where to look. That’s a significant improvement, and I expect to see the trend continue in the future. Boston will be hosting the 2013 Specialty Coffee Association of America Event, which means that the pressure will be on for Boston cafés to show off their best stuff. Boston might not be ready to take the title of America’s Best Coffee City from Portland, but it is heading in the right direction.