Coffee Snobbery

Admittedly, years of working in gourmet foods stores have given me somewhat of a particular palate. Still, I’ve never really considered myself a food snob. I enjoy a grocery store chunk of jalapeño Monterey Jack Cheese paired with a cheap beer, I still crave the hotdish my mom made out of ground hamburger and tater tots, and I’m certainly not above buying $5.00 olive oil at Trader Joes. But there is one area where I have to confess to full-fledged snobbery.
My name is Jenny and I am addicted to coffee.
Being that I still consider Seattle my hometown, this isn’t a big surprise. Some rumors about Seattle are not true (it really doesn’t rain everyday) and some are (people do wear fleece and running shoes to nice restaurants). And the rumor about the coffee? Completely true. Of all the cities I’ve lived in it is by far the easiest location to find a really good cup of coffee or a perfectly made espresso. For better or worse, this snobbery has been passed on to The Husband who has embarked on a personal mission to teach all baristas he encounters that a latte and a cappuccino are not the same thing. When we visit (or move to) a new city, the first mission is always staking out a good coffee joint. When we moved to Manhattan I thought the biggest challenge would be mastering the subway system. Contrer, Mon Frere. Turns out, finding a good cup o’ Joe in the big city is much, much harder. (so far, Think Coffee and The Tasting Room win) Thankfully, an influx of Pacific Northwest-trained baristas on the east coast have lifted the bar, especially in Brooklyn where The Husband finally found his perfect cappuccino (try St. Helen Cafe, or Gimme). On a recent visit to Chicago, I finally had the chance to visit Intelligentsia coffee shop, which also has a location in Los Angeles. I’d heard about Intelligentsia’s commitment to high quality coffee and espresso and to their growers around the world. They form personal relationships with their coffee bean growers and pay them at least 25% above the fair trading price for beans. What most astonished me about my visit, however, was when I was buying beans and the barista asked me what qualities I like in coffee, I stuttered and said, “Uh, I like it strong?” Me, who can think of hundreds of words to describe flavors in cheese and wine and who has been drinking two cups of coffee a day for most of my adult life, could not articulate the characteristics I love in a measly little coffee bean. The barista then said to me, “Strong isn’t actually a flavor” and I was officially humbled. He threw some words at me – fruity, smoky, chocolately – and somehow I still could not translate these words into tastes that came out of a cup of coffee. Did smoky mean that bad burnt flavor that Starbucks sometimes has? And fruity…have I ever tasted fruitiness in my morning cup? Chocolate…that sounded good, I guess.
I left with a pound of beans he recommended and a vow to start attending some of the Cupping seminars I’ve seen advertised at coffee shops like Peets and Victrola in Seattle. Cupping coffee is pretty much the same thing as wine tasting. It involves sniffing, slurping, comparing, and committing to memory what your senses have experienced. At this point, I may know how to taste when Pinot Noir is from Burgundy and when it’s from Santa Barbara, but I have no clue how tell if coffee is from Guatemala or Kenya. Since I am completely committed to being the coffee snob that I thought I was, hopefully this is something my palate will be able to pick up after some Cupping sessions. After that, the only remaining coffee mystery will be figuring out why coffee shops in New York don’t let you put your own milk in your coffee….