There’s change brewing in the world of coffee.
Over the last 10 years or so, an assortment of independent “third wave” coffee roasters has appeared in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Austin, and Boulder—in other words, the same high-tech hubs we cover here at Xconomy.
Each Xconomy editor has his or her favorite local coffee bars—we’ve listed a bunch of them below—and we’ve had fun watching the new generation of tattooed, eyebrow-pierced baristas attempt to reeducate coffee drinkers about the importance of how coffee is grown, harvested, roasted, ground, and brewed. These third-wave artisans offer a tasty alternative and a much-needed philosophical challenge to the ancien regime at Starbucks and Peet’s (who were, of course, themselves the rebellious “second wave” coffee purveyors of the 1960s and 1970s—the “first wave” being the generation of watery, mass-produced brews given to us by Maxwell House and Folger’s).
| Xconomy’s Favorite Third-Wave Coffee Bars | |
| Boston/Cambridge Area 4 Boston Common Coffee Company Diesel Dwelltime Barrington Coffee George Howell Coffee Simon’s The Thinking Cup 1369 Three Little Figs Voltage |
San Diego Bird Rock Coffee Roasters Cafe Moto Caffe Calabria Pannikin’s Zumbar Coffee & Tea |
| Boulder/Denver Alfalfa’s Market Boxcar Coda Roasters Dazbog Huckleberry Roasters Novo Coffee |
San Francisco Bay Area Blue Bottle Coffee Café Zombie Contraband Farley’s Front Four Barrel Coffee Philz Ritual Coffee Sightglass |
| Detroit Astro Comet Coffee Germack Pistachio Company Great Lakes Coffee |
Seattle Espresso Vivace Fremont Coffee Company Onyx Milstead & Co. Stumptown Trabant Coffee & Chai |
| New York Café Grumpy Gimme Coffee La Colombe Roasting Plant Southside Coffee Stumptown |
Texas Ascension Buon Giorno Coffee Houndstooth Mudsmith Oddfellows Pearl Cup Southside White Rock Coffee |
| See also: Where Innovators Meet Up: The Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster | |
But from a consumer’s point of view, third-wave coffee comes with its own problems. For one thing, it’s slooooooow. That’s part of the point, of course—but find me a person who actually likes standing in line for 20 minutes at Blue Bottle Coffee and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t have anything important to get done at work. Personally, I’m not even convinced that manually pouring hot water over coffee grounds, the way many third-wave drip-brew coffee shops do, always produces magical results. Sometimes I side with my Boston colleague Greg Huang, who says “the longer it takes to brew, the worse it tastes.”
Proprietors face challenges too. There’s the hassle and expense of training third-wave baristas, and the difficulty of achieving consistent results even after such training. On top of that, each variety of coffee bean should ideally be brewed according to its own special recipe—the combination of grind size, coffee/water ratio, water temperature, brew time, and stirring procedures shown to bring out that bean’s best flavor qualities. All of this complicates life on the barista’s side of the counter, and slows the process down even more.
All in all, it’s a situation that’s causing a few engineers who have peered into the third-wave coffee world to start whispering the A-word: automation.
I’m not talking about replacing baristas with robots—although that’s exactly what Austin, TX-based Briggo Coffee is doing with its networked coffee kiosk on the UT Austin campus, which lets you order a latte, Americano, or espresso from your smartphone and pick it up in 2 to 3 minutes. I’m just talking about countertop devices that digitize and mechanize some of the trickier parts of the third-wave coffee experience. If impatient patrons get their way, you might start to see such machines turning up in your local organic, shade-grown, direct-trade, single-origin, burr-grinding, microroasting coffee house within a couple of years. And that, in turn, might help the specialty coffee industry grow beyond its humble base. (By most counts, there are only a few thousand artisan coffee shops in the U.S.; by contrast, Starbucks alone has 18,000 stores with 150,000 employees.)
The coffee-machine company I’ve been following most closely is Blossom Coffee. Founded by a pair of mechanical engineers—MIT-trained Jeremy Kuempel and Cal Poly Pomona-trained Matt Walliser—the San Francisco startup is building an elegant, wood-paneled device that turns artisan coffee brewing into a repeatable science.
The Blossom One, which is currently in the beta-testing stages, connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi to download brewing recipes customized for each type of coffee bean. The recipes give baristas precise control over parameters such as water portioning and water temperature in the brew chamber.
“There are thousands of varietals of coffee, each of which requires its own unique recipe, but equipment manufacturers haven’t responded to that yet,” says Kuempel, Blossom’s president. “Current systems only have two modes, on and off. The response has been to throw those systems out the window and replace them with a single barista who knows what he is doing. But you can absolutely automate parts of the process.”
A couple of weeks ago, when I visited Blossom’s garage/laboratory space off one of the obscure back lanes of San Francisco’s SoMa district, several Blossom One prototypes sat around in various phases of assembly. Kuempel used one of the working machines to demonstrate how attentive brewing can bring out unexpected flavors even in a standard second-wave coffee—in this case, Major Dickason’s Blend, the flagship deep roast from Peet’s.
Kuempel started by sending a few tablespoons of beans through a $3,400 burr grinder. (You should throw away the blade grinder in your kitchen right now; coffee writer Michaele Weissman says they “basically beat the crap out of the coffee. Not good.”) Then Kuempel downloaded a recipe that directed the Blossom One’s boiler to heat the water to 192 degrees Fahrenheit. Following the recipe, he let the ground coffee steep in the hot water for 120 seconds, gently ladling the life-giving liqueur with a spoon four times.
A special set of heaters around the Blossom One’s brew chamber kept the water at exactly 192 degrees throughout the process. “Other coffee brewers control only initial water temperature, but obviously coffee responds to whatever environment it is exposed to, and temperature changes over a period of time affect flavor,” Kuempel says.
Finally Kuempel pressed the liquid in the brew chamber through a filter into the cups, using a manual lever attached to syringe-like plunger that is the perhaps the Blossom One’s most striking external feature. (The plunger is modeled after the AeroPress, a single-cup coffee making gadget invented by Stanford lecturer Alan Adler—the same guy who invented the Aerobie flying ring.)
The resulting coffee was the best cup of Peet’s blend I’ve ever had. Though I added no cream or sweetener, the careful brewing process brought out cane-sugar flavors that I’d never tasted in coffee before.
Kuempel says the complex genome of the coffee tree gives beans more than 800 flavor components, compared to only about 350 in a glass of wine. “The job of the roaster is to develop these flavors in a way that you can appreciate them,” he says. “And a final step in a very long chain is the brewing process, and even in brewing there is a very high variability in our ability to bring those flavors to the forefront.”
Kuempel, who says he spent most of his MIT years monkeying with cars—he rebuilt a Volkswagen Rabbit to run on vegetable oil—discovered good coffee around his junior year, in 2008, at a Cambridge, MA, coffee bar called
