The Importance of Words

Yesterday Kyle Glanville, co-owner of G&B Coffee in LA, former Intelligentsia rainmaker, and all around well regarded figure within specialty coffee, made the following statement:

                : Specificity > Vague Adjectives – Sustainable, artisanal, traceable, specialty, fresh, seasonal mean nothing now. :

This has been a longstanding complaint across the food spectrum – the adoption by marketers of half these terms, the cynical appropriation of expanding these terms to industrial practices, the ever-so-twee application of the heirloom cupcake. The dilution and back-and-forth over the terminology of organic certification. Pumping out “artisan” bread at one loaf every 6 seconds from a machine. And in specialty coffee, the use of direct trade to mean everything from breaking bread with the farmer who you see twice a year, to talking with your importer and ordering your coffees through your importer the way you have for the last 20 years. And in many circles there are, from farmers to small scale value-added food producers to coffee folk, frustrations with terms and a total willingness to throw everything out, or otherwise mock/demean/cast out anyone who uses the terms as hollow hacks or naïve schills.

Three things about these complaints:

1)      There is a kernel of truth in them. Whether government regulated definitions or voluntary, non-trademarked adjectives, there are very many misappropriations and misuses of these terms. These dilute and destabilize the efforts of people who do produce agricultural products in a truly sustainable matter (and there is such a definition, see 3), or source their materials in a way respectful to producers or of high qualifications of craftsmanship (see 3).

2)      If there is anger over this, at least in specialty coffee, people seem more content to whine and emote about it than actually call people out on it. Playing nice within the industry matters more than attempting to make firm definitions and parameters for some of these terms through trade associations, professional firms, or other outlets. Sustainable ag has done this for a while with regards to organic certification, decrying certifiers with loose standards, farms electing to sign on with certifiers who have standards above and beyond the stringency of the NOSB parameters, and advocating/lobbying for more stringent organic rules and norms in law. We need to constructively critical of businesses and individuals who view this strictly as a marketing thing and understand there are systems and values that need to guide businesses, not aesthetic niceties and soundbites, and this is something specialty coffee writ large is really unwilling to do.

3)      The complaints about terms shows the exceptional lack of knowledge about these terms by people in specialty coffee, which is my key frustration. Having kept one foot in food justice and sustainability politics as long as I’ve been involved in specialty coffee (almost a decade now), and consistently amazing to me is the lack of interest in examining or involving oneself with sustainable agriculture or craft industries (with craft beer or cocktails being perhaps the one exception, and sometimes, not even that). There’s no awesome definition of sustainability? I’d lead you to the triple-bottom line definition and promoted by Cradle to Cradle, or the host of Food Policy Council definitions all of which take into consideration elements of ecology, financial, and social demographics and outcomes. Artisanal? The terms and definitions given to vendors by The Good Food Merchants Guild. California Certified Organic Farms, the Soil Association of the United Kingdom, and Oregon Tilth have the most strident, systemic definitions of what constitute organic and certified organic; if that doesn’t seem enough, look to Demeters biodynamic definitions and practices. Fairtrade, for all its failings on quality assurance, at least takes a serious task in democratic norms and workers rights into consideration for its certification. And no one at this point can touch the transparency of Counter Culture has produced in their Direct Trade program (and note – not every bag of theirs has it on them). Not sure what makes your “local” economy? Look at Localism 101, an organization who defines it in terms of inter-generational wealth building within community-based businesses.

These frustrations can be summed up in a recent (also-twitter based) interaction. I interacted with James Hoffman via twitter a few months ago, wherein I was critical of an exercise he held with some associates seeing if they could differentiate in taste between organic and non-organic produce that was procured from a grocery. I asked whether or not this exercise wasn’t faultily constructed – cultivar, degree of organic certification & growing practices, and geographic provenance have an impact on flavor, and with the host of non-taste-derived benefits of organics, is it fair to assess these two as equivalent (especially when, as the outcome proved inconclusive, the walk-away is that there is no major distinction between organic and non-organic, so why support it)? The response was it was just a fun exercise. Half-snarkily, I asked if they could taste the soil degradation or smell the pesticide residue in workers lungs.

As an industry we need to be thoughtful, engaged, and proactive about both words and systems. Words like “sustainable” or “artisan” are only as useful as the systems that prop them up, and only those systems can provide a model alternative for businesses who may only know those words as a marketing ploy or a half-assed definition of the term. Traceability can mean something if companies are willing to put groundwork for it. Expertise can be qualified by other experts. And craftsmanship can be delivered through the end product; hospitality isn’t just about greeting and expediting – it’s culture making. We do not need to scream from the rafters about the values of our work – our cafes, our product, our employees can do that without having to utter a word. And we as an industry need to be willing to commit ourselves and our energies to promoting, upholding, and advocating for these definitions not just for our own companies but companies of our grade and parameter. We need to be the builders, the warriors, the weavers of our craft, and start making those connections between words and systems, starting now.  

Blue Bottle Comes Out

Reported today in the pages of the NYTimes, TechCrunch, and the Wall St. Journal, James Freeman, the artsy, occassionally eccentric and overall generally loveable founder of Blue Bottle Coffee Company is no longer the owner, having transferred most of those remaining rights to the head of True Ventures, Bryan Meehan. True Ventures placed a 16.8 million dollar flux of cash recently, buying out the previous 6.8 million given by Kohlberg Ventures back in 2008 (remember how Mint Plaza, the MoMa expansion, and the New York adventure started all about the same time? Now you know). While James will be staying on as some sort of face for the company, he is officially announced that he is no longer the owner. 

The thing is, he hasn't been for a long time -- since the Kohlberg venture in 08, he's had a minority stake in his own company, having more or less a creative directorship of sorts. And since 08, the company itself hasn't even been a "local" SF or Oakland company, with Kohlbergs official legal title being in Portola Valley, CA, and True Ventures having their legal title in Great Falls, VA, the profits from those operations are diffused between different entities and individuals, most of whom do not live in the Bay Area. While Blue Bottle staffs many people in the Bay Area (and to this day, provides one of the best in-house pastry programs I have seen for a cafe, courtesy of Kate), it hasn't been a local player in the larger economic sense for a while. 

This is sort of the worry and the case study for investment capital typically -- whether the La Boulange example, or Stonybrook in the case of dairy -- the purchase of companies by entities that eventually take them (financially) outside of the local economy, as well as the ownership. Quality considerations are always in question, because the notion of who is in charge and what the qualitative stakes and positions are of the new company (including how much per pound green, in the case of coffee, should be expected). And while quality has never been a big suit to Blue Bottle (Chris Tacy, in a Wired piece on the matter, notes that Blue Bottle has mostly been about image, marketing, and concept. I think this is largely true, but also wasn't always the case.) the question of what the product, the service will become can be held in question. 

Consumers should be aware of such changes, and the gimmick of keeping staff on even though their overall power within a company might be limited. James is being kept on retainer with increasing shares to keep him at Blue Bottle. And Duane Sorenson, as the Willamette Week has checked into a number of times, hasn't quite been forthcoming about the control, ownership, and direction of Stumptown (despite whatever one might think of Todd Carmichael or Tony Dreyfuss, the documentation concerning the legal corporeability of Stumptown can bring into serious question what the nature of such relationships are, and what the overall nature of the relationships, purchasing methodologies, etc might be in the future). If we care about the issue of local economies, then these companies have little to offer. 

Now some say these investments are a great validation of the specialty coffee sector (aforementioned Chris Tacy gives the best evaluation of this argument in his blog). And I agree it is fantastic when capital gets behind good projects. This is contingent on two things however. One: the company has to still be lead by the same practices that made it awesome. The relationships must be kept in place, the procedural methods and the risk-taking, with a high focus on quality (be it conceptual and/or material) being maintained. And secondly, we have to remember that food products are different than technology. The quality of care in procurements, in the treatment of relationships, and the ecological, economic, and social concerns of those producing it, especially in the case of products such as coffee, chocolate, or tea, are conssumately protected. Capital tends to obfuscate or eliminate both of these goals; in the case of Stonybrook, smaller independent farmers gave way to larger cooperative dairies that would not meet the original Stonybrook mission of ecological protection (but fit the bill -- barely -- on organic standards). La Boulange swears that artisan materials can be maintained when being produced regionally and distributed nationally. In coffee, we have yet to see, but if the intial drop in quality that occurred when Blue Bottle grew in 2008 is an indicator, or if the generally lackadasical hiring practices that we've seen at Stumptown (has anyone had a really good shot of Hairbender in the last two years? Please let me know where), there is generally something lost when that geeky obbsessive, eccentric person no longer has control over what gets put out into the world.

Growth is a good goal, but it is not the only goal. Part of what makes specialty coffee -- and indeed, much of the sustainable food community worthwhile -- is that it is growth moderated by the ability to pay attention to social, ecological, and economic concerns. Quality fits into many of those, as people who are paid well pick better coffee; farmers paid more to pay attention to ecological concerns tend to produce better cherries and better harvests. And baristas and staff paid consummately and trained to be educated in their approach to coffee tend to be able to translate into better profits as they know hospitality and enthusiasm in their right place and balance with customers. If those are forgotten at any length of the chain, then specialty coffee ceases to be impressive, and simply becomes a marketing ploy. And if that kind of growth is what eventually becomes of specialty coffee, we might as well go and hit the showers. 

Three Bourbons....

As tends to happen in the coffee industry, for whatever reason, a Twitter fight erupted several months ago concerning the importance of botanical cultivars versus geographic designations in retail coffee bag labelling (tawdry and banal, I know). The argument is a sensible one, trying to figure two things at once: one, which point of information is both more relateable and useful for consumers for us to transmit, and two, which of the two functions gives us a better idea of the flavor profile of a given coffee? 

My mind on this at the time was a bit of an eye-roll. As I've written previously, the flavor development in coffee comes from a number of factors -- soil, environment, processing, varietal, storage & age of the coffee, and the hows and reasons for roasting, to name just a few variables -- play into what flavors we find in a coffee. Of those, the soil & environment interplay with varietal to produce the general flavor outcomes we find in a given coffee, manipulated by roast and brewing method.  All of these variables -- such as a country's predominant botanical strain, the predominant style of processing, etc -- give way to the "general characteristics" that have long defined the flavor profile of regions or countries. On top of that, the history of testing all of those characteristics to determine what the "individual" quality of a given botanical is under average conditions -- something wine has been able to do to a point that we know what specific clones of Cabernet will do in clay, loam, and sand under various elevations and environments -- does not exist in a way that gives us something more than "Bourbons tend to be sweeter, cleaner" or "Jember tend to be earthy and herbal". A lot of coffee cultivars were bred specifically for certain conditions (SL-28, et al) or for specific resistance to diseases (Catimor), and so flavor in some varieties were not entirely a consideration. So to have this argument -- which says more, country of origin or botanical cultivar, is somewhat unnecessary. 

Now granted, this is changing -- individual farms, processors and co-ops are experimenting or examining individual cultivars, creating seperated lots, or trying different styles of processing (the 2008-9 craze of honey processing and Central American natural processing, anyone?). This degree of exploration is allowing the process of cataloguing to begin on an individual farm level (the way individual chateau do so in wine-making) and in certain cases creating national registers such as what Anacafe in Guatemala has been doing for a few years now. That all said, we need to keep an open mind when talking about the notion of which comes first -- the country or the cultivar. (The farm, for the moment, will stay out of this particular conversation, though as in wine, it can have a mixed record of use in terms of consumer utility.)

This brings me to the three samples of bourbon I've had the chance over the last week or so to sample: Stumptown's El Injerto Bourbon (Guatemala, Washed), Counter Culture's Varietal: Bourbon (a blend of two bourbons -- Guatemala and El Salvador, both washed) and the MadCap Coffee Varietal Series El Porvenir (which is Bourbon with trace amounts of Typica, all washed). All three were sampled from days 4 - 15 post-roast, stored appropriately, and done either as V60 pour-overs or as Japanese-style iced coffee (hot-brew). All three bags emphasize that these are rooted in the varietal / botanical cultivar of coffee and are supposed to be representative of the cultivar in question, in this case Bourbon.

Here's where things get tricky. Bourbon is not a uniform class of coffee -- there are a number of sub-cultivars and mutations that exist in its class. Orange, Yellow, Red and "pink" Bourbon exist, as well as a number of cultivars ("Kent") that are taken as Bourbon but do represent in some cases a biologically distinct cultivar. All coffees are washed, which I won't take argument with here (based upon distinctions that may exist in certain cases, but largely speaking we considered the processing here to be a constant). Also in consideration but not weighted was soil -- all the farms connected here have differing soil types, elevations, and enrichment programs (speaking for El Porvenir, there is an extensive composting and enrichment program that exists at all of Gloria's farms). Lastly, the roasters in question are all qualified, and all produce awesome product. Aside from regional distinctions in roasting profiles, we also considered these constants, of a sort.

The reason I raise the points above -- all three were distinctly different coffees. El Injerto was a bright, snappy, deeply citrus-and-olive oil affair, fruity with a balance familiar to coffees from Huehuetenango; the El Porvenir deeply chocolately, heavy bodied, and unctuous, with a kirsch-like element; and the Varietal Bourbon was the most balanced and delicate of the bunch, with an elegant acidity and a mild spice-cake like finish. These are three radically different taste profiles coming from 3 roasters (4 farms total) from 2 countries (Guatemala and El Salvador) and 2 regions (Huehuetenango and Apaneca-Illanpatec). From this view, its hard to say that there is/was a firm case that arguing cultivar is a key way to inform consumers when the notion of what those cultivars do -- in conjunction with all those other stages -- can be so very distinct. This is not a criticism of cultivar-centric labelling or projects, but as coffee pros we need to be open to the ways in which coffee, and the ways we manipulate it, can be as individual and distinct as the people who grow it. I'll get the taste clouds posted soon -- Squarespace is having an issue bringing them up, but I'm sure they'd be insightful.