Off to the Rust Belt

I depart tomorrow morning (early!) for 6 days visiting my family in NW Indiana and then a few days in Madison, Wisconsin- back May 8, when I expect our pin cherry tree in the backyard to be nice and fragrant for those precious few days in May.

Blog ya later!

Spring is back (again), and a Starbucks experiment

What a day! After the grim last week (the cold and snow didn’t let up for a full seven days), we had some decent if a bit cool weather yesterday, and today is just- wow. Weather amnesia kicks in and I’m happy to be where I am, geographically and meteorologically speaking.

Tulips, daffodils and assorted cognate greenery is looking battered but very much alive:

Chives are doing extremely well- not sure how they taste but they look like happy chives:

And yours truly took the decadent step of standing on the cold muddy lawn in shorts and bare feet to gloat at and tease the melting snow behind (sorry about the quality but shooting myself has always been a challenge):

And so as is so often these days my thoughts turned to coffee. I’ve been seeing lately what I can get out of beans that aren’t necessarily renowned for their artisanal quality; we’re awash in good beans these days in Calgary but I’m still curious about what the lesser-knowns can give me. There’s a credo among baristas: “any bean, any machine,” or something like that, meaning that a good barista can get the best out of unexceptional beans and lesser quality machines. I have a very decent if quirky home espresso machine but am still curious about what will happen if I start to, or have to, buy the beans that I used to before the “third wave” crashed into town- for example, once upon a time I used to get beans from either Second Cup or from the Faema outlet in Toronto. What if I did that now, given what I know and being blessed with better equipment, machine and grinder-wise?

I decided to try this with beans from the silver bags (the beans behind the bar, not the stuff on the shelves) at my local Starbucks (15th Ave and 14 St SW). Now, I have no idea how fresh these beans are but am optimistic that they are a lot fresher than the prepackaged ones. I bought a half pound for $8.95, which is about par for the course for “better” espresso blends. Here’s the bag:

And they are, as expected, dark and oily as hell, which is not considered ideal (at all!) by espresso aficionados these days:

I ground at “6″ on my Rancilio Rocky, which is pretty fine and what I’ve found to be necessary for dark beans (likely because they’re more brittle and less dense, having been carbonised and all).

I pulled a shot with my naked portafilter to witness the extraction, and here is a film of the result:

Well. Hmmm. It looks really good. Beautiful mousetail extraction, nice striping, and it looks nice in the cup with variegated crema, and thick crema to boot. I tasted it with a patina of sugar to see how durable the crema is (to see if the sugar floats on the crema, in other words) and it tasted… not bad. Not not bad- it was good! Not the best shot I’ve ever had but better than many, with some expected chocolate notes but not that much charcoal and just a smidgen of brightness too; I’d have been happy to get this shot in any caffe.

So am I going to start getting coffee at Starbucks? Coffee beans, maybe, sometimes, sure. Espresso from their bar? Never. This was INCREDIBLY better, just ASTONISHINGLY better than the espresso I’ve actually purchased at Starbucks outlets themselves. This makes me happy because I like to see that I can do this, get a nice shot–a really nice shot–from beans that coffeegeeks deride as mediocre or worse. But it also pisses me off: If I can do this, why can’t Starbucks?

“Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.”

And yes that’s from Rosalita by Bruce Springsteen. Sorry for the boomer reference (I HATE “CLASSIC ROCK”), but it fits.

One question I get a lot after our move to Calgary is something like, “oh, winters must be brutal!” Actually, no, and this past one was, aside from a couple of the usual arctic outbreaks (-37 one bitter morning as I recall), really not bad at all. In fact, we only had one below-zero (below-freezing for you Fahrenheit junkies- that’s below 32 degrees) high in all of February. March was lovely too.

It’s not winter that’s brutal. It’s SPRING. April? April can be vicious here, from the unpredicted blizzard of a week and a half ago to the torture chamber we find ourselves in now. Four straight days of snow predicted (starting yesterday), and a high of below zero- it SHOULD be 14, or a very pleasant 57F, this time of year- until next Friday. Basically, a week worse than any we had in February. Sucks.

Here’s some of what I saw today, this after a dump of maybe 10 inches yesterday and more coming in flurries all day today. First, our patio:

Puts you in the mood for a picnic, eh?

You might be wondering how my tulips are doing. They’re under there somewhere:

Before setting out (to shovel snow, again, then off to lunch), I had to don these studded things so I wouldn’t slip on all the unshovelled walkways…

…and then I walked across the street to get this amazing (IMHO) shot of our house through the budding poplar branches:

Beautiful shot if I do say so myself, and it says it all- well, not until you see overexposed me, as the SUN was starting to poke through and making everything blindingly bright:

Ah, me. I can’t deny there’s a brutal beauty here, and the moisture is great. I guess another week won’t kill me, unless I die in a car wreck, which is a distinct possibility.

Stay warm! And shovel your damned sidewalks, Calgarians!

Research ideas: On connoisseurship and what happens when somebody spoils the party

Tempus fugit, not that I have to remind anybody. Spring is very officially here (even yesterday’s unexpected snowstorm- 23 heavy centimetres, a new record for this date, are going to make the grass green), the lilacs will soon enough be blocking the light from the windows in my basement cave here, I have ONE week of classes left to teach, and, even though I did not get my bloody SSHRC grant, I have to start think about what I want to accomplish research-wise over the summer.

Well, I don’t have the budget for travel and the sort of fieldwork that travel permits, but I have lots of ideas around the “coffee” theme still, and the one I want to cogitate on today (in this post- watch me cogitate!) has to do with two coffee-related news items of late:

1. McDonald’s is going to have “baristas” at its stores (some? all?) in the US. Now, this effort of McDonald’s to sell “specialty coffee” is not new; in fact, anybody who’s been abroad, in Asia, South America, or Europe, and for all I know in Australia or the Middle East and elsewhere, has been exposed to the “McCafe.” We saw these when Brian and I were in Argentina in 2004 (and noted that they were all 100% smoking- not so in the one I ducked into in Cologne, which was one of the very few NON-smoking refuges in that smoky city). My only experience actually drinking the coffee (a double espresso) there was laughably bad, but that’s not really the point. Well, it is sort of the point, but the REAL point is what happens when an already corporatised and watered-down thing that used to be the provenance of aficionados- espresso and espresso-based drinks- gets FURTHER routinised and bastardised by being sold out of a McDonald’s.

I just saw a commercial on one of the US stations about this, and I’d love to link it but can’t (yet) find it online. Two women are at a woody-looking coffeehouse and one says, “Did you hear McDonald’s is selling LATTES?” They both erupt into relief about how now they don’t have to act all snobby and read books and so forth. It’s actually pretty funny and reflects how this dumbing-down is part of McD’s promotional strategy, and is reflected in their “unsnobby  coffee” web campaign too. But what about us coffeegeeks? Is something being usurped here? Well, no, not “taste.” But this does give us (and me, wearing my sociologist hat) something to talk about.

2. Starbucks bought Clover Equipment. A “Clover” is a machine that make brewed coffee a la minute and by the cup. Before Clover, brewed coffee had to made in pots or receptacles that entailed making a huge batch at once and selling progressively-less-fresh cups; what’s more, those cups all had to have the same blend or varietal of coffee. If a customer wanted an Ethiopian Sidamo and all that was in the pot was a “house” blend, a decaf, and, say, a Colombian, then there was no way to give the customer her Sidamo. The only alternative would be personal drip stations or press pots which both take several minutes, for one cup (versus the 20 or so seconds it takes to make espresso, but this isn’t about espresso). Enter the Clover, which makes ONLY single cups and does it fast, about as fast as espresso, and permits the operator to “Clover” any bean in stock. Very cool. Until recently, Clovers were the provenance of a small number of shops that could afford the technology (about C$11,000 per maker, versus say $2500 for a standard drip maker) and who had the customer base who knew enough to support it. Clovers shine at bringing taste profiles out of good beans, and good beans are expensive. So Clover-brewed coffee tends to be expensive as well.

The entrepreneurs at Clover sold the company earlier this year and as of now it looks as if they’ll delimit all sales of new Clovers to Starbucks ONLY. It does appear that they (Starbucks, presumably) will still provide service and support for these machines, but there has already been fallout from the third-wave coffee community about this, to the extent that one outstanding shop/roaster (Stumptown in Portland) has sold all of its Clovers. They don’t want to be affiliated with or otherwise attached to Starbucks. We have three shops in Calgary with Clovers at this time- Phil & Sebastian, Caffe Artigiano and the opening-very-soon Kawa Espresso Bar. I’ll keep my ear to the ground.

These two developments- the McDonald’s “invasion” into specialty coffee and the Clover sale- are sociologically interesting because they expose and problematise issues surrounding “taste” and distinction. This sort of thing is a constant challenge to connoisseurs: what happens when your “thing” is usurped? Well, we’re seeing it happening right now in the coffee culture, and I look forward to following it.

My idea for the 2008 U of C sociology hoodies slogan:

U of C SOCIOLOGY
No, not social work.