ultra-hyper-barista-ing on twitter
ultra-hyper-barista-ing on twitter
Two very brief announcements, at the top because they’re important.
First, this column is now on twitter. So far, tweets are mostly comedy, links to good writing, and photos of lunch. Please take a peek. We could use a follow or five.
Second, Arcade Bakery in New York City may soon close, and my heart will break a little more when it does. It’s an amazing operation, well worth seeing, and you have 4 weeks left to visit.
The first really good coffee I had, the coffee that got me into coffee, was in Washington, DC, at the place that became Peregrine Coffee. The baristas took an age over each espresso, caressing the tamper and whispering to their espresso machine before each shot. The first time I had a pourover was a couple years later, at Monmouth Coffee in the Borough Market in London. They had a post-apocalyptic setup made of plumbing pipe with a half-dozen filter cones perched on top, cups below. There was one barista working the whole thing, loading beans, cleaning cones, pouring cup after cup with commonplace, efficient grace.
The internet was young then, and good coffee was actually still hard to find. Coffee websites discussed the science of brewing and extraction, and in that pre-YouTube age they were full of labored tutorials in which people tried to describe, using only the English language, their quasi-mystical tamping processes, or the precise rotation of their fingers for their portafilter sweeps. (A portafilter is the thing that looks like it belongs in a mechanic’s workshop but actually holds the ground coffee in the espresso machine).
When I went to my first professional coffee training in 2010, the emphasis was still very much on the manual skill of making coffee — instructions on tamping, timing shots by watching the crema, how to hold the kettle as you made your pourover. The instructor raved about the newly crowned World Pourover Champion, a Japanese iconoclast who held the kettle perfectly still as he poured and let turbulence take its course in the cone filter.
I think 2010 was also the year they launched the first really high tech piece of coffee equipment to be built in America, an on-demand hot water tower with super-precise temperature control. The prototypes were built in a Boston workshop and dispensed water through a sketchy looking but presumably replaceable piece of clear plastic tubing. I feel fairly confident saying that was the first innovative piece of professional coffee equipment in years.
Today I work around the corner from one of the best coffee shops in New York. It’s staffed by chipper baristas in white shirts and skinny ties and smart aprons and both the drip and espresso are consistently delicious. The interior is sleek and relentlessly tasteful. Instead of a bulky espresso machine, they have four stainless steel taps with hardwood handles set into a gleaming white counter. Their pourovers come from a polished brass contraption straight from a steampunk fantasy.
It is also almost completely automated. When you order an espresso, a barista pushes a button on the grinder, which doses ground coffee into the portafilter. It’s accurate to a tenth of a gram. They move the portafilter to another machine and hit a button to tamp the shot. Another barista then moves it to one of the shiny steel tap heads and pulls the lever. The machine times the shot, and if you ordered your espresso with milk, a third barista will steam the milk and pour you a perfect latte heart. When you get a pourover, a barista grinds the beans into a filter cone and loads it into the brass retort. They push a button, and the machine dispenses the water according to a pre-set program which even allows the coffee time to bloom.
As far as I can see, making coffee here consists of doing two things: weighing beans for brewed coffee, and steaming milk for espresso. In a decade we’ve gone from feats of nearly indescribable physical coordination to pushing buttons and calibrating machines, with a concomitant increase in the amount of time the baristas spend, well, being hospitable (this is not to say that baristas who work with fewer machines are rude, just that they have to spend more time making coffee).
The baristas here actually do know how to make coffee the old-fashioned way, tamping by feel and waving a gooseneck in a weird mating dance over a drip cone. They need to, so they can calibrate the machines, which they do at least a few times a day. It wouldn’t be fair to call their work unskilled, but they now make coffee from at least one remove. It has become knowledge work. Adjusting the tamp now involves using buttons to manipulate numbers on a screen, and almost incidentally the behavior of a machine. Perhaps skill will concentrate — instead of having 6 baristas who can all make coffee, they could decide to have only one, who works in a hypercaffeinated haze from doing all the tasting and tweaking, while the rest just move the coffee grounds.
Perhaps this is the logical endpoint of the barista’s profession, or indeed of nearly any profession in hospitality. Perfectly consistent espresso made by machines and delivered by dapper people who make charming conversation while they move ground coffee from one machine to another. Perhaps this is ultra-pure, hyper-refined hospitality — people being nice to you while machines make you something perfect. With every coffee I get, I wonder whether it’s more or less satisfying to work this way, to spend your day sharing a product that you used to make yourself, and now have machines make instead.
This piece was inspired partly by a recent 99% Invisible episode about Horn & Hardart Automats. More (probably too much) about this next week.
Speaking of podcasts, I was recently introduced to the Farm Report, which is a long-running series about the American food system. If you read this newsletter consistently, you’d probably enjoy it. Try the episode about Cooks Venture or the one about Dig Inn to start.
Steph sent this article about the migrant children who work in America’s agricultural sector. It’s an excellent piece of reporting, multi-faceted and human in its coverage of a topic that tends to invite a much more strident, click-bait kind of writing. Read it for the discussion of how America’s labor regulations facilitate this situation.
I was in Pittsburgh last week, and walked past Las Palmas #2 by accident. It was the 4th of July, and we were trying to get to an ice cream parlor which turned out to be closed. The place consists of one guy with a propane griddle and a table of salsas, all out on the sidewalk in front of a Mexican convenience store. When you pay inside, they just ask how many tacos you’re getting, because they’re all $2.50. I thought about this partly because of the transparency of the operation (one guy makes tacos and serves tacos and it works exactly as you expect) and partly because the tacos were really excellent.
The fillings were great, but what really did the job was the tortillas, which were the best mass produced tortillas I’ve ever had - produced in Illinois by El Milagro (a third generation family firm started by an immigrant orphan) and apparently shipped throughout the middle of the country (also available online). They were, in fact, better than most of the house-made tortillas I’ve had in NYC — I think I’ve had only 2 house-made tortillas here that were as good or better.
We ate so fast and so messily that I didn’t get photos. So here instead is a photo of D with a langoustine.
Thank you for reading let them eat cake, a weekly newsletter about food systems and food. And as always, a super-special thank you to my pre-release readers, Jen Thompson and Diana Kudayarova.
This newsletter is free and a labor of love. I’m explicitly doing this to develop a platform as a writer. If you like it, the best way to show your support is to send this along to someone who might enjoy it, or give it a shout out on social media, or simply click that little heart at the top of this email to like this post. You can find me @briocheactually on both twitter and instagram.
best,
tw
p.s. I’d love to buy you a coffee. Drop me a line!