Feb. 15, 2012 - Issue #852: The Coffee Issue
The usual suspects
Vue Weekly hosts an elite coffee klatsch
Poul Mark, Transcend: I wanted a place for conversation to begin with and then the push for quality led me down into a path of passion for the people that grow the coffee and the desire to know them and celebrate their hard work and promote their hard work.
Geoff Linden, Credo: I was in construction my whole life and this was more a home passion that's come to life in our cafe. [My wife] Joanne and I, whenever we visit a city it's going into the coffee shops and cafes, not the bars and restaurants so much, and realizing that that's where the heart of the city is. That's what we wanted to recreate.
PM: For some reason it got in my head that I wanted to roast. I got a popcorn popper and started to roast in my house. That was a bad idea ... too much smoke, but eventually it grew from there.
Michael Harvey, Café Haven: I didn't have my first cup of coffee until 2007. My first one was at Transcend, when Andrew Legg served me a four-shot Americano and it was the best thing I'd ever drank ... I'd only been a tea drinker up to that point in my life.
I took a lot of education from Chad Moss, who at the time wasn't even part of Transcend. He was up north doing construction, but he was an ex-barista champion from Australia. It totally fascinated me—as soon as I got an inkling that there was so much to this I was blown away, really intrigued.
Nate Box, Elm Café: The first coffee I ever started drinking that I thought was of any quality was at [Da Capo Caffé owner] Antonio Bilotta's shop when he was at Leva. That was '03, '04, and that's when I was doing my undergrad and I just hung out there. It was a quaint spot for me to skip university and I got introduced to proper coffee and milk and realized there's a whole other culture to coffee.
GL: Leva was a great place because of the home machines as well—that's where my background is in coming into this industry. I call it the "home passion gone wild" and this is what it progressed into. That's where we experienced coffee for the first time and then took it from there.
PM: On roast level there's a massive gap between what we do and what Starbucks does. Even their "Blonde," which they've just released, is 10 times darker than anything I roast. So there's a huge gap in flavour profile between what Starbucks does and what we do.
And in quality there's a huge gap. I've seen the coffee on the patios that Starbucks buys, I know what the quality level is. Compared to what we're after there's a marked departure and that's part of the reason I think they perpetuate the dark roast, is they have to hide a bit the lack of quality in the blend.
GL: From the café point of view, they allow us to do what we do: they created that café culture and they introduced it to the mass market. I don't know if "abandoned" is the right word, but they left the top tier of that available.
MH: Originally they didn't.
PM: They used to be very, very good.
MH: They used manual machines and were dedicated to the pulling of an espresso shot correctly, but corporate mentality changed all that.
GL: So maybe "abandoned" is the right word.
MH: Pretty much, yeah.
PM: They went to the super auto [fully automated espresso machines] and that's when the quality really started to crash—you can only do so much with something like that.
NB: Starbucks and Second Cups have introduced so many people [to coffee] and you can't fault them for that. I mean, my mom knows what an Americano is and 10 years ago she had no idea—she was drinking Sanka.
MH: Sometimes I think we're almost out of touch with the real world. Last week Tim Hortons brought out a 24 oz cup for their coffee. That's terrifying! That's three-quarters of a litre of coffee. For us, if we're going to drink black coffee, it makes sense to drink a little at a time. You're going to enjoy it more, it's not going to get stale.
PM: It's like the Big Gulp of coffee.
NB: When we were opening we were honestly considering just doing an eight- and a 12-ounce cup. That was going to be our cup sizes, a small and a large. We went around to friends and people in the neighbourhood and asked, "What do you think of these?" and we put an eight and a 12 and asked about a 10 and a 16 and nobody picked an eight-ounce cup. And that's in downtown Edmonton.
MH: Eight ounces is such a nice size, it really is such a nice size for a cup of coffee.
PM: A standard cappuccino is five ounces, a macchiato is three ounces. It's the problem we have in North America, we're addicted to cheap, we're addicted to big, and we're fighting against that. It's not always easy and sometimes it's frustrating but that's the reality of it.
GL: [Coffee company] Intelligentsia, their espresso appealed to our palate on a home level. That sold us at that point and from there it was creating a café that allowed us to use that level of coffee that was completely different from anything that was being served in the city at that time. We're able to be very proud of what we serve because we enjoy it. They're actually the pioneers of buying direct-trade coffee and visiting farms, it's a great education from there, it's been a great ride for six years with them.
MH: From a café perspective there's several things you're looking for. There has to be a complete package in terms of the quality they're providing you, the end product you're getting from your machines and the level of service they're providing you and support. You're dealing with complicated machinery and you need to be able to handle that and prepare that and we've had our fair share of problems with that over the last year, and Stumptown has been phenomenal for support. Stumptown, along with Intelligentsia, is one of the grandfathers of the third-wave movement and the way that they source coffee, the prices they pay is up there. The way they work with farmers, it can probably be echoed by what Poul does as an approach.
PM: Transcend is a small roastery, we're small still in terms of the overall specialty industry. This year, we'll probably do 85 000 pounds. Intelligentsia does around three million pounds, Stumptown probably around the same. That puts us in perspective. 49th Parallel is probably doing a couple hundred thousand pounds ... Tim Hortons roasts 100 000 pounds a day.
We're after some of the highest levels of quality coffee in the world. That works for us because we have a mostly retail marketplace, we're not wholesale. We're able to pass on what is, in some ways, outrageous prices for the coffee we pay to our customers.
MH: There's a finite price point you can charge for a cup of coffee. Us in this room, we're staying pretty close to what the franchises are charging for a cup of coffee because we have to to survive, but it's shocking for us all because we know just how much better the coffee we have is compared to those guys. But that's just the way the game is, that's the business we chose.
PM: Because of the crash of the US housing market, investors got scared and focused their attention on commodities so, in the last year and a half, speculation in the commodity market has driven the price up to a point that's almost the highest price coffee's been at in 60 years. That's wreaked havoc on a lot of business models because the industry got addicted to this cheap coffee but the problem with this cheap coffee is that 90 percent of the people growing it are impoverished and can't afford to eat, let alone send their kids to school or feed their families.
The 20-billion-dollar-a-year industry that coffee is worldwide is largely built on the backs of the impoverished of this world and it's really appalling for the most part. That's the challenge that we have to face and consumers are going to have to get their heads wrapped around it because the reality is that prices are going to keep going up. With climate change we've hit peak coffee, the supply cannot meet the demand anymore, and so the prices are just going to go up and up and up and up.
GL: We don't want a menu of 100 items. We're a coffee shop so we'll stick to baking. That's a complement and that's the end of the day for us.
PM: We didn't ever do food, we just did bakery as well for the longest time but then we had Chad [Moss], who's a Red Seal chef and used to roast for us. He wanted to get into the food thing and so we took the dive last year ... and we rolled out a Latin American street-food menu. We're giving Edmonton an opportunity to experience food that comes from where coffee grows.
MH: Transcend's quite vertical: you have the roastery and then you have the cafe to showcase your coffee, so it makes some sense to have that food experience follow that approach. For a lot of us it's more about being that community cafe, having the food as a part of the lunch menu for us. We have comforting, hearty, interesting food, a little bit different from the typical coffee shop.
NB: For us coffee was almost a secondary thing to what we're doing in our location. We saw coffee as something to fill a void in that neighbourhood. I've lived in that neighbourhood for five or six years and the best cup of coffee you can get is at Starbucks. That's hard because on Saturdays you want to be able to wander across the street and get a coffee. So we looked at it like, "We need to do coffee and we need to do it well," and the food side of it, that's what I'm passionate about, so we wanted to do that in a way that people aren't used to and draw people there.
GL: I think the bottom line is that all of us are bringing that sense of quality to the food we offer the same as the coffee. Everything we make is from-scratch, in-house, it's baked daily and it's fresh and every one of us is doing exactly the same thing. I don't think we could do anything else as a group, so that's what we're putting forward.
GL: I haven't changed staff in almost eight months. That's incredible actually and I sit back in wonder of it. In this industry, that's just amazing.
NB: The food industry is notorious for having constant turnover of people and the fact that we're sitting here saying we've got staff willing to stick around is a testament to how you're running your business.
It's not an illustrious career and, to be honest, you can't pay everybody behind the bar a lifetime salary. They're there because they want to be there. They enjoy the environment and they enjoy the work and they're keen on coffee and what you're working on.
GL: If you've got someone who wants to achieve that, it's easy to teach the tools. Technique is easy, it's just practice and it's understanding what the elements of it are.
PM: Training is a big part of it. We've calculated that it costs about $2000 to train someone to become a barista—it's a huge investment.
Normally, when we do a hire, you're café staff for three months—you don't get to touch, you don't even get to look at the espresso machine. It takes time to develop. There's skill involved to making a good cup of coffee, there's a lot of skill involved.
MH: There's some real challenges with the training, especially with espresso. A lot of staff really have never tasted espresso before, so you need to be really willing to learn to taste espresso which is an intense thing to get into ... That's probably one of the hardest things because you're really trying to get them to understand their palate. And that's huge.
PM: I'll freely admit, I don't even understand it anymore. I'm not qualified to work at Transcend, I'm not a barista—they won't let me near the bar. I haven't done it for such a long time and you lose touch.
MH: It's true, you don't know, "Should I be adding more coffee to add sweetness or will that make it too sour?" The barista who sits and plays with those things knows it. They start to break it down.
GL: It always comes down to the variables and eliminating one variable at a time until you come down to the problem or the success. That's how we break it down in the shop and that's how we approach it. That's separate from training, that's the next level. That's when you find the people that are truly in the game, they understand it from that level.
NB: We're trying to keep things simple. We've got a small shop and we don't have the ability to do that, nor are we interested in providing people with a gamut of choices of things they don't need. If people want to drink coffee we should be giving coffee to them as coffee, not as Orange Mocha Frappucinos—that masks everything you're trying to do.
We do one syrup which is vanilla and it's just vanilla paste and we leave it at that.
GL: Simplicity's a big one for us as well. It's about doing what we do well and presenting that. We have chocolate and we have vanilla but that's almost a wink and a nod—they're from beans.
MH: We make our own vanilla syrup, we use an organic, Madagascar vanilla bean and actually make the syrup. Something we've been keen to do is to get people used to our drinks ... if they want to keep it a little bit sweeter that's fine, but we have to stay true to what we're trying to do, which is make a good coffee drink.
NB: It's a question of how you go about it, too. You're not going to mock and ridicule people, say, "We don't do that here," and show them the door. We're trying to bridge a gap between people who've been introduced to six different flavour sources and now they've been introduced to your cafe and you're trying to make them stick around.
GL: We're all only three or four or five years away from that ourselves and it's a progression we've all gone through. There's no harm in it and no reason to look down on anybody for it. They're there and we're glad they're there.
PM: At the end of the day it comes down to quality: the lack of quality requires doctoring to make it palatable. That's why Tim Hortons' most popular drink is a double-double—because the coffee doesn't taste that good on its own and people want their coffee but need two or three packages of sugar and to fill it half full of cream, and Starbucks is no different.
When you serve better quality coffee you can let the coffee sing and that's what it's about, really. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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