Seattle Coffee Works

In the current New Yorker (April 5, 2010), Adam Gopnik writes about the Le Fooding phenomenon in France (Annals of Gastronomy: No Rules! The new French school of food.)

Le Fooding is meant to be a composite of Food and Feeling. Fooding-istas define themselves as folks who reject the old French school of rules; break down the distance between chefs and diners; make space for true experimentation and innovation.  Traditional French cuisine is a highly evolved yet mechanical application of skill. Chefs admired by Le Fooding fans are just as skilled but more importantly they cook with their hearts and souls. If traditional French cuisine is a highly evolved science Le Fooding leans toward art.

The article reminded me of a recent conversation in our cafe about the different French bakeries in town. A friend of the house who’s attending culinary school loves a couple of the popular bakeries – one in West Seattle the other in Ballard. I share his admiration for their skill. And, believe me, I am a sucker for one of their extra-buttery croissants. There is another bakery in town, run by a couple of Japanese descent, whose line-up includes both the traditional French pastries and more unique explorations like green-tea muffins with red beans. This bakery showcases great skill and creativity in their assortment.

I’d like to say that here at Seattle Coffee Works we’re more on the Le Fooding side of our trade. At a recent cupping, one fellow cupper remarked how free-flowing our cupping was compared to another roaster’s more traditional cupping. At that roaster there was a whole protocol around cupping; the cuppers’ experience is structured around using different sense and discovering coffees along variables such as aroma, flavor, body, acidity.

Our philosophy is that you should cup and see what happens. By and large you know a coffee is good when the adjectives describing the coffee just keep popping into your head. The good coffee doesn’t let you stop talking about it. The bland coffee will be forgotten within minutes. I know that sounds banal. Yet that’s simply back to the basics. Just like Le Fooding, we don’t need a church of food, the bible of coffee to tell us how to feel about our coffee. We should be able to experience the coffee on our own terms, informed by convention only in as much as convention is helpful in sorting out our feelings.

Last week we had a pleasant surprise when Sebastian Pinzon and Juan Villegas came by the cafe to check out our Colombia Huila Monserrate. In the picture Sebastian (left) and Juan are enjoying a cup made in the Chemex. We were excited to present them with what we thought is the best our Colombia Huila can be.

Sebastian and Juan often travel to the town of Monserrate. They are responsible for the super-premium segment at one of Colombia’s largest (if not THE largest) coffee exporter, Racafe.

While enjoying some coffee - we also sampled a great vacuum pot of our Tanzania Blackburn Estate - we had a great conversation about what has made the brand of Colombian Coffee so strong: a relentless focus on quality by the all powerful Colombian Coffee Growers’ Association.

I hope no one is surprised to read that we think that our coffee is the finest there is. We’re constantly cupping new green coffees and trying out new blends; we’re also continuing to tweak our roast profiles to bring out the best in each of the coffees. If you disagree let’s at least state that we’re trying REALLY hard.

But does it matter?

We’ve long found that our ability to sell a coffee has a lot to do with what the label says. For instance, our variation of the Mocha Java, the Obama Blend, has been one of our best-sellers ever since we introduced it last November; when we renamed our Atlantic Blend into Seattle Sunrise, we immediately saw a significant up tick in sales of the very same coffee. 

The big packaged-good companies know the drill much better than we do: a can of cola consists mostly of very expensive aluminum packaging filled with water and sugar and trace amounts of flavor, color and caffeine. Most shelves in a regular supermarket are full of this kind of stuff: it’s all about the art of selling an inferior product with the help of expensive and good-looking packaging. Wall Street types, immune to immoralities such as endangering half the nation with obesity, have made great money with this deceptive practice. It also comes as no surprise that our corporate competition in the coffee business, the one with the green logo, has a number of consumer-good veterans on its board.

Even though we’ve smelled the success potential of good packaging, we’ve concentrated most of our efforts on the stuff that’s inside the bag. Turns out, there is a chance we might be working in vain. In an experiment at MIT, participants were asked to describe the smell of rose pedals concealed in two separate paper bags. One bag had a positive label on it, along the lines of “deliciously fragrant roses;” the other said something about lawn clippings. To everyone involved the first bag smelled much better than the second. What gives?

Is possibly Katie’s artful description the real reason why we have a hard time keeping our delicious Sulawesi Toraja in stock?

Photo Credit: Shabby Chic 

Last week we drank coffee for the soul (for every bag of our limited edition Presidential Inauguration blend we offered a $2 donation to the Facing the Future organization).

This week we’re drinking coffee for the body.

A piece in The New York Times last Friday touted the health benefits of our most beloved caffeinated beverage. A 21-year study by researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, determined that men and women who drank three to five cups of coffee per day were 65 percent less likely to develop dementia, the progressive decline of mental faculty associated with aging.

Reduced risk of dementia joins coffee’s list of little-known health benefits. In the past few decades, studies have revealed numerous positive effects of coffee, including reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and cirrhosis of the liver. It seems that a cup of joe gives the body more than just a mental buzz.

Which is a relief for so many coffee drinkers concerned with their health as they sip their way through four or five cups a day. Coffee’s stimulant often gets a bad rep and many drinkers have heard contradicting coffee facts, leading to a very confusing medical history for our favorite drink.

Fed up with all the pros and cons surrounding coffee, The New York Times writer Jane E. Brody mapped out a few of coffee’s contradictions and finally put to rest some of the medical myths surrounding the mysterious black drink, including the infamous correlation between coffee and hypertension. Brody swept through a list of serious ailments purportedly induced by coffee drinking and defended the drink with counter evidence of the benefits of coffee. Much like red wine’s recent heart health hype, there are indeed reasons–like reducing dementia and diabetes–to order that second cup.

Okay, so it’s not the magic elixir of life, but coffee drinkers can at least raise their mugs to coffee and health. Here’s to drinking the good stuff.

Jennifer Cabala of Q13 Fox News swung by yesterday to geek out with us about coffee tasting. We took in press pot, espresso, and real-deal cupping samples. We had a great time, and we believe we were able to sufficiently caffeinate the Q13 team.

Read more about it on the Q13 website. We’ll update this posting with the clip, once it’s out.

UPDATE: Here is the clip…