Transforming water into coffee
The act of making coffee — or wine, for that matter — is not a question of mystic transformation. It does not require divine power; there is no moment, when I turn on Mr. Coffee, that I require concentration, that I require instruction.
I don’t know the New Testament nearly as well as Peter, not to mention my friends who are religion majors or simply religious; and I’m not a vintner — but in my experience, making coffee out of water is a much less spiritual procedure. I pull some coffee beans out of a paper bag, or Tupperware, or Ziploc baggie; I run them through a grinder; I spoon them into a paper filter; I flip a switch; and five minutes later, I have a pot of coffee.
It’s a process so un-romantic, so lacking in spirituality that you can buy instant Folger’s and just pour a spoonful of dried crystals into a mug of hot water. Voilà: Coffee. Of a sort. And at any lunch counter in New York City, or at Golden Olympic in Evanston, a buck twenty-five gets you as many mugs of coffee as you can drink before your bladder and kidneys fail permanently. Tell your waitress that Jesus Himself put slightly less flair into making wine out of ordinary well water (a process that is chemically impossible) than she put into getting the carafe out of the coffee maker, and she might pour coffee in your lap. But you’d be right.
An aside: The opening of the second chapter of the Gospel of John, versus 1-11, when Jesus transforms water into wine, really is that anti-climactic. In fantasy novels, this sort of stuff involves great concentration, or incantations, something. Jesus just says, “Fill the jars with water… Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” And that’s that.
For some reason, humans put a great more mysticism in alcoholic beverages than in beverages that aren’t. Coca-Cola’s secret recipe is the exception, not the rule; Starbucks and Peet’s tell us exactly what makes their coffee different, but good luck getting the folks at Easter Elchies House in Moray to tell you exactly what goes into making The Macallan one of the most expensive Scotch whiskeys in the world. That’s just the start of it, too.
Wine is the principal example, and it’s the gold standard by which all other beverages are judged. You see, the ingredients of wine, i.e., grapes, differ only very minutely between a $10 magnum of Gallo “cabernet sauvignon” or a $2 bottle of Charles Shaw and a $350 bottle of 1997 Opus One. Yet when you taste one product and the other, there is a clear difference, or at least anyone who’s ever tasted the good stuff can taste the difference, and in a blind taste-test, I imagine you would still choose the good over the bad.
Why is that, and what does it have to do with coffee?
All of these variations in wine have to do with whether the wine is stored in wood or in metal, what kind of wood it’s stored in, how long it’s stored, and the mixture of different sub-varieties of grapes grown in various places. (I can’t discount the difference between grapes, because there are literally dozens of kinds of Vitis vinifera grapes, which are clearly different. They’re not all that different — for instance, table grapes are mostly from Vitis labrusca instead — but there are differences.) When you read a wine review, and you hear “oaky” or “dry” or “fruity,” or any of the hilarious caricature buzzwords like “hint of peach,” or “cinnamon,” that’s just a taster’s way of describing the various ways in which one wine is different from another. I’ll never understand that; I have a lot of experience with red wine, so I can sense “fruity,” “dry,” “oaky,” “complex;” but anything more than that is really beyond me. It’s just fermented grape juice, on some level.
The history of the differences in wine is really an interesting one, because it’s very much a European story. It’s not hard to imagine the state of the wine industry prior to the 19th century: wine didn’t travel much, because it spoils quite easily. Sailors mostly carried beer — the India pale ale so commonly micro-brewed in the U.S. was developed as a beer that would keep on long voyages — and people generally drank the local alcohol, otherwise. During the 19th century, with the advent of rail transit in Europe and eventually faster voyages across the Atlantic, winemakers began hauling their wine around Europe in casks, and eventually began shipping it in bottles instead. (Why bottles? They were tamper-proof. Often, buyers complained that their wine had been watered… which was, as it turned out, a common practice dating from the Greeks and Romans, but that’s some consolation when you’ve paid for 750 mills and you only get half that, plus water.)
And in order to demonstrate the differences between the tastes of these wines, they developed a shorthand that Europeans still use today: they called them by their regions, with only a couple of exceptions. So you shop for a Bordeaux, or a Chianti, or a Rioja. Americans don’t necessarily appreciate this, especially because in the U.S. these descriptors have mostly been superseded by the names of the grape varieties (‘cabernet sauvignon,’ ‘merlot,’ ‘zinfandel,’ ‘pinot noir’) because of the prominence of American-made wines. My dad is of the school that the origin of the wine is more important than the variety, and I agree, but we’re unusual — did you see “Sideways”? Talk about disparaging merlots, for no good reason. Most Americans don’t appreciate why I tell them, buy Californian cabernets and merlots and Oregonian pinots, buy Australian shirazes and Chilean cabernets, et cetera. The savvy wine buyer thinks in terms of both characteristics, but I think geography is primary… even if you like cabernet, and I do, the only cabernets I’ve had from Oregon are pretty bad, and I’m not a big fan of Californian pinot either.
At any rate, the historical development of the modern wine market follows a pretty neat arc: first, single local varieties with graduations in quality; then, a wider range of local varieties; and finally, the combination of the origin of the grape with the specific type of grape to provide the modern description of the wine. In some parts of Europe, serving wine with nearly every lunch and dinner has long been common; but American ‘temperance’ has always stigmatized that practice. So the idea of having wine outside a restaurant is a comparatively modern development. This has been done practically overnight — since the ’70s, when the arrival of high-quality Californian wines democratized the American wine market.
I’ve studied enough marketing and advertising now to explain what happened, without consulting a textbook. You see, in marketing there are two classes of products: low involvement and high involvement. Each of these has two subclasses, “thinking” and “feeling” products. In the U.S., before the advent of Californian wines, wine was a low-involvement thinking product for most Americans, along the lines of soda. They bought wine in basically the same way; if they liked red, they bought red, and if they liked white, they bought white. Maybe they were associated with a particular winemaker — Gallo’s been at it a long time, for instance.
But since the ’70s, wine has turned into a feeling product; the model that I’ve based these remarks on, the Foote, Cone and Belding model, suggests that it’s a low-involvement product, but I’m not even sure about that. Wine has turned into a high-involvement product, if you ask me, to the extent that it’s expensive and a connoisseur-oriented product. These are products that you spend a lot of time deliberating over, and from which you have high expectations.
Now. I’m from a coffee town, in a coffee part of the world. There are Starbucks on opposite sides of the same intersection in downtown Portland… I wouldn’t be surprised if we have one of the highest per-capita densities of Starbucks, and certainly of total coffee shops, in the world. We drink a lot of coffee.
I mention this to explain the transformation of the coffee market that I’ve seen since I first began drinking coffee in the late ’90s. The side of the coffee market that has often been explored is that it seems to lead to booming independent coffee houses as well; the reason this is so seems to be that Starbucks’ high market penetration helps people to discover better coffee.
But what hasn’t been explored is the transformation of coffee from a low-involvement thinking product, the Folgers class of coffee, the kind of product that you buy based mostly on an initial decision and then habit formation. It’s been turned into a high-involvement feeling product, just like wine. When you walk into a Starbucks to buy a pound of coffee, you don’t see a nickname anymore; front and center is the country or region of origin of the coffee, and the continent that it’s from. Coffee buyers today know — with, among other things, Starbucks’ helpful chart — that Sumatran coffee is different from Javan coffee, that South American coffees are different from African coffees. I can still remember when this wasn’t the case.
When I first started drinking coffee, in 1997, Starbucks was just beginning to introduce those descriptions, but nobody asked for them. For the most part, the coffee market was still in a transitional phase. People bought “Italian roast,” which has the beans roasted until they’re quite dark; or “French roast,” a medium-dark roast; or “medium roast;” or the “breakfast blend,” for instance, a mix of beans carefully chosen for the lowest acidity. I think the first time I ever paid attention to the origin of my coffee was in 2004, when I started writing coffeeshop reviews for PLAY, the Daily’s weekly entertainment magazine. I needed a way to make a sense out of the many kinds of coffee I was having, so I found it.
It’s become much more prominent today than it ever was, in those days. The first time I ever asked a Starbucks barista what the day’s drip coffees were, in 1998 or 1999, they were “Italian,” “French,” and “decaf.” Yesterday I went to a Starbucks, for the first time since I was in Phoenix in March, and I got a cup of drip — the choices were “Latin American,” “Sumatra,” and “Espresso.” Plus decaf, of course. (The espresso roast, in this case, is a specific blend of Latin American and Southeast Asian beans, dark-roasted.)
The funny thing is that, unlike wine, I don’t think the marketers have been driving this development. It seems to have been driven, quite unlike red wine particularly, by enthusiasts, who have been flocking to independent coffee shops and asking funny questions, like, “Where does this coffee come from?” and “How much do you roast it?”
My suspicion is that coffee, unlike wine, could make the leap from a low-involvement product to a high-involvement product without the involvement of marketers because there aren’t any commercial restrictions on the sale of coffee. With wine, the degree to which the product is regulated — by importers and by the ATF — and the nature in which the product is sold means that consumers had no choice but to pay attention to the differentiation being marketed to them. And it was a conscious decision.
With coffee, on the other hand, Starbucks is behind the curve. All the places I first noticed this decision to advertise the origin of the coffee, all of those curious wine-like descriptions, were independent coffee shops, who buy their beans from independent roasters. Intelligentsia, in Chicago, has an extensive listing of all of their excellent blends, describing where the coffee comes from and what it tastes like; the same is true of Stumptown Roasters in Portland, and of Fratelli Coffee, also in Chicago.
Nevertheless, I think the point stands that coffee is at the point of a huge transformation. Right now, the coffee market is not nearly as mature as it could be, and the ratio between the price that a pound of even the very best coffees (Jamaican Blue Mountain, or Ethiopian Yergacheffe) and the price that a pound of mediocre coffee commands on the market is nowhere near the ratio of the best wine to the worst. There is no $250 pound of coffee: Right now, a pound of Intelligentsia’s Yergacheffe retails for $13, and a pound of their Sanani is $16, and their house blend is $9.35 a pound. Starbucks’ house blend is $10, and my morning coffee, their Komodo Dragon blend (an Indonesian-only blend), is $13 a pound. Folgers is $5 for 12 ounces.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the prices of certain varieties of coffee jump a lot — in other words, if coffee doesn’t start looking a lot more like wine. You don’t think Starbucks wouldn’t love to be able to sell Kenyan coffee, or the Komodo Dragon blend, for $25 a pound? There’s an Italian coffee that my brother brought back, a pound for me and a pound for my dad, which my dad loved so much, he’s seriously considering ordering it from Italy, at $50 a pound. The big coffee importers, and big coffee roasters, surely have marketing coordinators salivating at the prospect of reeling people like him in.
And at the end of the day, people like Yours Truly, who don’t make a fortune but are really fond of certain unusual coffees, Ethiopians and Indonesians and Kenyans, are about to get priced out of the market. I really liked that Italian coffee, but for me, $50 is three and three-quarters pounds of Komodo Dragon, or five pounds of house blend medium roast, and I can’t justify getting just a pound of coffee.
Consider: Does the Gospel of John, chapter two, versus 1 through 15, mention where the wine was from? The real shame, the really hilarious thing, is that coffee’s just filtered water anyway. Even Jesus can’t change that.
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