I noticed that New Yorker, Fred Wilson, used Gridskipper to find Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco this weekend (while looking at colleges with his daughter).
I learned to drink coffee in San Francisco, so the topic is one I have passion for. So does San Francisco lifestyle book, 7×7.
7×7, in effort to provide context for what it calls “the third wave” in coffee culture, quotes Joel Pollock, head roaster at Stumptown in Portland (an even more advanced coffee market):
“When you’re roasting coffee, you’re caramelizing sugars, there’s the potential for citric notes, herbal notes, floral notes. But when you roast dark, you’re taking all these notes and turning them into carbon—and that’s the same carbon if you’re working with coffee from New Guinea or a piece of chicken.”
I love the way this man talks about coffee.
The 7×7 article points out that two roasters in San Francisco–Ritual and Blue Bottle–are focusing intently on craft.
“I’ll have a double short cap,” I say coolly.
James Freeman, 40, smiles, but his eyebrows, which are permanently knit, furrow even deeper, revealing his disappointment that coffee has come to such silly semantics.
Calmly, he enlightens me as to the ways of Blue Bottle, where they only serve ristretto (or short) shots anyway: “Here, we just call it a cappuccino.”
When an enterprise dedicates itself to excellence and takes great pains to achieve it, you want to support them. You want to indulge in their creations and tell others about the experience, (Ritual and Blue Bottle both mail order beans, btw).
courtesy of Blue Bottle’s Flickr page
543 people have reviewed Blue Bottle on Yelp.
