http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2009/04/gibraltar-the-fools-cappuccino/

The thesis statement of this piece offers:

“The purpose of this post is to demystify, debunk, and, well, defrock the Gibraltar before the misconceptions behind this invasive species are allowed to propagate any further.”

While the author does a good job demystifying the origins of the Gibraltar, the “misconceptions” are exacerbated by the end of the post. I’m not taking the stance of a Gibraltar apologist, nor am I posing as an angry blogger out to  slash and burn other blogs. Rather, I take the above post to be emblematic of traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism, and I’d like to address that using some of the rhetoric of the post, while simultaneously making a case for the symbolic importance of the Gibraltar.

The author of “Gibraltar: The Fool’s Cappuccino” employs the repetition of a handful of phrases that are rooted in traditionalism: “regulation cappuccino”, “proper espresso drink,” “proper cup.” Furthermore, he laments “how badly America screwed up the cappuccino”, “America’s milk-engorged bastardization of the standard cappuccino” “…in a cheap restaurant supply glass.”

My gut reaction is “Who cares? I’d love to see a blog of an Italian living in Italy bemoaning that he can’t get a proper American hamburger.” In that sense, it would be easy to dismiss the article. What really bothers me, however, is that the Gibraltar is taken strictly for face value, as a corruption of a precious Italian import, rather than a symptom of a larger trend. It is that lack of context that makes traditionalism for the sake of traditionalism an empty outsider ideology.

My experience with coffee traditionalists is that they seem to rely on a rose-tinted, selective culling of features of Italian espresso culture. Traditionalism only applies to beverage portions, glassware, and when convenient, notions of “proper” dosing and brew ratios. What is overlooked or ignored are the other features of Italian espresso: stale coffee, coffee ground to fill a doser, and the widespread usage of Robusta and lesser-quality Brasils.

These things too have context, and I am not criticizing them; they work in Italy for plenty of reasons. (Disclaimer: I have never been to Italy) Italian espresso is a utilitarian beverage, made fast, sweetened, and consumed fast. Espresso was born out of a recovering post-war economy, a time when Italy was rapidly mechanizing but economically weak. The price of espresso was nationally standardized, locking roasters into a low baseline for sourcing coffee, hence the prevalence of robusta and commodity Brasils. It is these conditions that inform the tradition  of Italian espresso in Italy, not in the United States.

I should say at this point that my experience with traditionalism might be limited and not consistent with yours.  There is not one Tea Party banner of traditionalism. There is, of course, the online presence of people like Giorgio Milos and Todd Carmichael, but beyond the internet, my experience is informed primarily by working in San Francisco. San Francisco has long had a visible Italian population, and the North Beach neighborhood boasts stalwarts such as Caffe Trieste and Steps of Rome. While San Francisco has had a strong Italian identity attached to espresso, more significant, I think, is the post dot-com leisure class that encounters espresso in Italy and returns seeking an “authentic” experience back home. “I’ve been to Italy, it just isn’t the same here!” It is this population that remains strongly attached to the 90s second-wave Frasier Crane continental affect, and it’s this traditionalism that I speak to.

I know a lot of coffee professionals, and I know that the vast majority have never been to Italy. “Have you ever made the pilgrimage?” I’ve been asked. For many of us, the first transcendent espresso epiphany has happened domestically, perhaps in the very cafes we work in now. What made us excited about coffee in the first place likely had little to do with espresso, “traditional” cappuccino, or any other vestigial Italian by-products.

And so enter the Gibraltar. Right now, it feels a little like beating a dead horse to talk about a beverage  now long-in-the-tooth, but as I said, traditionalism is still extant and worth confronting. The Gibraltar was conceived as emulation, but once it took hold, it became an endemic creature, rather than a non-native invasive species. Its success and proliferation, and possibly its standardization, is not simply a trifle to scoff at, but rather it’s a signifier of a larger cause: the creation of our own regional, national, global coffee culture.  As the words “traditional”, “regulation”, and “standard” get thrown around, we can ask: whose traditions? Whose regulations? According to whose standards, and what do they have to do with me?”

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As an aside, I’d like to relate this so my own experience. When I was a student of linguistics, there was a big black line drawn between grammatical prescriptivism and grammatical description. Prescriptivism was to be avoided and left to the staunch Oxford grammarians. Those notions of “proper grammar” are hold-overs from when Latin grammar rules were superimposed onto English for grammatical pedagogy; the split-infinitive and sentence-final preposition indeed  make no sense in Latin, but when you and I use them in English, they are perfectly understood. The job of the linguist is to describe. Language is a continually changing thing; if dialect, whether ethnic or regional, induce a shift in language that would previously be considered ungrammatical, it is not the job of the linguist to take these shifts for face value, to say they are wrong and bemoan the degeneration of English. Rather, these new language features are taken to be significant products of cultural shift, expressions of changes of society at large.

In the realm of pourover, there are two schools: circular pour, and center pour. My technique is of the latter. I really like my V60 technique. I don’t like it because a refractometer tells me it’s ok to like it (it usually does, by the way), nor because it’s theoretically sound (I think it is, anyway). I like my V60 technique because I really, really, really love the cup of coffee it produces.

Now, there is more than one way to skin a cat. When dealing with coffee, there are few absolutes, only a handful of tried-and-true black-and-white. Hypothesizing and conjecture throw darts onto a gradient and rarely hit a solid black line. Consequently, it’s OK to have different techniques for one brew device.

I make this point because my hackles raise when I get the phrase “high and dry” lobbed at me.

Sometime last year, Scott Rao published a book, “Everything but Espresso”, with some fairly absolutist claims on coffee preparation. While I respect Scott and consider him a friend, I disagree with some of his theories on pourover. I don’t have his book handy, but Scott told me once while I was at work: “I believe it’s a myth that coffee drips through at all points of the filter.” While I don’t think that coffee filters out evenly through all points of the filter, I believe that the ridges of a V60 provide channels that encourage cohesion and adhesion. To what extent – i.e., how much coffee flows down the ribs – I don’t know, but it can be observed in a clear glass V60. All I know is that what I’m making tastes good to me, my roaster, my boss, and our customers.

So, the high and dry thing… I remember a conversation I had with a customer pretty clearly, one of the times “high and dry” was lobbed at me…

“What about the high and dry grinds?”

“Oh, so you’ve been reading Scott Rao? That’s great.” (don’t take this with a sarcastic tone!)

“Who? What? Uhh… Umm, no. I’ve got this friend, he’s into coffee. He told me high and dry grounds are bad.”

“Well, I don’t think they are. See these ridges? They allow coffee to exit the filter at all points. That’s why I’m pouring right down the center. As for those grounds that are left on the side – sure, they aren’t in contact with the water as long as the bottom of the filter is, but take a look, when I stop pouring… that liquid continues to extract. As it gets lower and lower in the filter, it increases in concentration, so it becomes less solvent. I think it balances out.”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, judge for yourself. This coffee is going to taste great. Not only is it going to taste good now, it’s going to taste awesome as it cools. I think that’s the hallmark of a great extraction, it should taste amazing cold.”

He was sold.

So, in my mind, the concern of uneven extraction along the vertical axis is unfounded; as the coffee continues to extract, it increases concentration and is less and less effective as a solvent as it works its way down through the bottom of the filter.

Scott also brought up to me that he thought the center pour provided inadequate agitation. Just like observing the drip-through in a glass V60, if you have ever prepared a sample roast or a terribly stale coffee, you can see for yourself… in these situations, the thin veil of foam parts and you can see a churning under the surface; this is agitation, though it’s usually covered. I’ve overheard several times from other baristas that the darker regions of the coffee crust indicate underextraction, and that you have to “paint” the coffee with the stream. I think this is nonsense. I don’t see how the foam or crust is any indication what is happening below, it’s like the bubbles floating on top of a bubblebath.

With regards to this crust, I think there is an unintended but nevertheless beneficial consequence of the center pour: fines suspension. When you aren’t “painting” the crust with the stream, you are allowing the fines to remain suspended over the slurry, rather than forcing them into solution. I think this contributes to the crystalline cleanliness of the cups I enjoy.

I didn’t want to write this post to line-by-line refute Scott Rao’s claims; that would be a contradiction of my “shades of gray” stance. I just wanted to bring up a few thoughts on why I think tastes good tastes the way it does.

Now, I just can’t leave it at that: “my V60 tastes better than yours.” What I’ve held off saying until now is: “my V60 tastes great with the coffees I prepare in them.” So now we are back to the ways of skinning a cat. The coffees I most often use are from Four Barrel, where I work. I speak for myself, and not for my employer, in that I think our coffees are super balanced, nicely developed, and very clean. My V60 technique works well with these coffees, and I have tried other methods.

The center pour necessitates quite a fine grind compared to the concentric pour. What I’m going to describe is pure conjecture, but it relates very strongly to my experience with taste. A fine grind and quick extraction tastes different from a coarse grind and a long extraction, even at the same extraction level. In this sense, the refractometer/Mojo only gives us a simplified account of the extraction (this is for another post, so I’ll keep it brief here). The solubles in coffee are not uniformly soluble, that is, they do not all extract at the same rate. It’s my guess that a fine grind/quick extraction emphasizes compounds that have a lower molecular mass (acids, aromatic compounds). A slower extraction with a corresponding coarse grind, conversely, will emphasize the body and sweetness components which are of greater molecular mass: sugars, browning products, oligosaccharides, etc.

So, based on my taste experience, I think the center pour works well with Four Barrel’s coffees: they are inherently very sweet and balanced, and with a slight sacrifice of body, the resulting cup is powerfully aromatic with a tightly integrated and articulated acidity. Not only that, the coffee maintains its balance and structure symmetrically throughout the cup, even when it is hours cold and icy cold. I prefer the center pour over the concentric pour for Four Barrel’s coffees because, while the concentric pour has yielded tasty hot cups, as they cool, they fall apart: rather than (figuratively) straight lines following a parallel course, there is intersection, disjunction, incongruity.

On the other hand, I have prepared other coffees that have exhibited inverse behavior. Numerous times I’ve prepared coffees of lesser development and found the center-pour cups to be hollow and disjointed. With a longer extraction, however, these coffees have really shined with a high inherent acidity matched with the integrated sweetness of an extended extraction.

The point is, the Hario V60 is another tool for the barista to use in interpreting coffee. It doesn’t dictate one singular approach, but offers, in consideration of its mechanical properties, a range of possibilities. Different coffees from different roasters will taste different under different brewing conditions, so it’s important to be open to different methods – it makes a big… difference.

While drip coffee is surging in popularity, it is not without its detractors. Oliver Strand’s recent article in the New York Times acknowledged and praised the recent trend in hand-pour drip, but also paid fodder to the nay-sayers. I don’t think people are reacting to drip coffee directly; who doesn’t like a nice cup of drip coffee? It’s more accurate to say that the cynicism towards drip is a churlish stance against the theme of drip.

The accusation, as I understand them, is that baristas think they are reinventing the wheel by “discovering” brewing methods that are actually quite old. “Historical revisionism”,  “trendy”,  “ evolution of pop culture”: The Todd Charmichaels and Greg Sherwins don’t like to see young people excited about anything. It’s more than just cynicism motivating the backlash against the popularity of drip, it’s an ignorance to the undercurrents that have propelled the rise of drip.

In my mind, two distinct events have been behind the popularity of drip coffee: the acquisition of Coffee Equipment Company, and the release of the Extract Mojo.

When the Clover was released in 2005, the world of coffee retail was collectively bemused and inspired. Throughout its tenure as darling of high-end specialty coffee, the biggest impact the Clover left was on the awareness of the potential of single cup brewing. While the Clover was pricey and in some ways alienating to the consumer, it made people on both sides of the counter excited about drip. When CEC, the manufacturer of the Clover, was acquired by Starbucks on March 19, 2008, a huge vacuum was created. Coffee professionals were still thirsty for a transcendent brewed coffee experience, but retailers were shedding their Clovers as the realities of Starbucks-Clover exclusivity set in. Meanwhile, perhaps only peripherally, retailers questioned how valuable the Clover was in the first place. While it provided theater and potentially great coffee to the consumer – was it worth it? Was it worth distancing the consumer with an exorbitantly priced machine a consumer will never get their hands on, never relate to? Indeed, the acquisition of CEC sowed the seeds for alternatives.

In early 2009, VST Technologies’ Extract Mojo was released, and initially, interest circulated slowly. The refractometer and software bundle was at a price-point that made retailers skeptical of the return-on-investment. Gradually, however, the merits of the Mojo system became evident, even to those who didn’t use it firsthand. What the Mojo offers to coffee professionals is a better understanding of extraction. While no one is denying that single-cup drip has been extant for decades, the Mojo divides the older approach from the newer approach. The biggest single contribution the Mojo has offered, in my opinion, is the restricted dose range:  by using a fixed brew ratio, the focus can be placed on the level of extraction. The “older approach” is marked by a blind tendency to underextract: “this cup tastes weak, I’ll just use more grounds!” The constraints of the Mojo system dictate “this cup tastes weak, I must be underextracting; I’ve got to do something to increase extraction, perhaps fine up the grind.”

These two things in concert have driven the demand for the drip “revival”. While the drip detractors speculate at the longevity of this “tcraze”, they fail to acknowledge that this “fad” engages the consumer in improving preparation of coffee at home. This, I think, gives this “trend” staying power. “We don’t need expensive machines to make drip, and neither do you!”

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As an aside, I’d like to relate this to my own experience. Back when I was a “home coffee enthusiast”, 2006 or so, I gave the Chemex an try as an alternative to French press. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really have a good idea of what I was doing, just a rough set of guidelines that I created a dogma around. Some batches were tremendous, but not repeatale. After too many unsatisfactory cups of coffee, I set aside the Chemex. About a year ago, confident with a better understanding of extraction and troubleshooting, I gave the Chemex another shot. After some trial, error, and informed corrections, I was in love with the Chemex all over again.