The Luddite Regression: A Brief Taste of L.A. "Third Wave" Coffee

Had a rare couple of days in LA a couple of weeks ago,  after an even rarer week in Santa Barbara. I have mostly very happy memories of growing up in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and San Diego, but due to cost rarely make it back that way anymore.

We were in the company of an old and dear coffee industry friend I've known for decades, so in addition to some wonderful food and wine in his company I got a brief tour of the current state of the art in retail coffee in the area.

LA's hip and rapidly gentrifying Silver Lake neighborhood is apparently as good at it gets these days for coffee. We went to Lamill Coffee (http://lamillcoffee.com/) first, a coolly luxurious space that was packed at 4:30 on a weekday afternoon. There's espresso of course and a very small (3-4 choices) selection of single origin coffees, brewed by a (too) wide choice of methods, from Clover (they have 3 machines) to Hario to Chemex to Vacuum pot.

I ordered a cup of Clovered Kenya ($6 - the $20 price for a small vacuum pot seemed a bit much!) and my companions ordered the proprietary Valrhona-based hot chocolate. The Kenya was a bit cereal-like from slight under-roasting but clearly an excellent auction lot. I think the other choices were a Rwanda and a Colombia.

The hot chocolate might as well have been Hershey's given how overly-sugared it was - about as far removed from authentic French or Italian hot chocolate as one could imagine (and I say this having had the genuine article at Valrhona’s home city of Tain l’Hermitage). Service was as unfriendly as it was uninformed, but apparently the food is good and the wine and beer lists were attractive. Lamill also does tea but the list is heavy on flavored and blended stuff and so lacks appeal. Lots of hand-tied show teas but not a single estate-grown black tea worth drinking.

The overall feeling here is of a place long on attitude and short on product knowledge (pretentious menu descriptions notwithstanding), though I have no doubt that customers paying more for a simple cup of coffee than a sane person would pay for a full pound feel they’re drinking the very best.

Next we visited Intelligentsia (http://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com) where there was a line out the door, though that may have had as much to do with the tiny space and the half-dozen or so seats available inside the bar being occupied by laptop-enthralled latte sippers as it did with sheer volume of trade. The choices were equally limited here: Black  Cat or Kenya based espresso drinks or Kenya, Colombia and one more choice that escapes me brewed by the cup in a Hario or Chemex.

The cost of the single cup of Kenya (made in a Hario V60) I ordered would’ve been $6.50, had not an old coffee industry friend (who now does sales work for Intelli) very kindly bought me my coffee, which was perfectly roasted though slightly inferior as a green coffee to the lot at Lamill. A very good but not great Kenya auction lot. I noticed the asking price for a roasted pound was $32 - a scandalous margin even given this year’s high auction prices.

Tasted an espresso here as well and it was the usual Third Wave case of a very well-selected and roasted blend brewed so as to be undrinkable except with milk (or by masochists). From the look and flavor it was the now-standard 20+ grams of coffee with a bare one-ounce yield: thick, bitter uber-ristretto that is the coffee equivalent of Herb Caen’s old joke about the ideal cocaine substitute (smear the inside of your nose with battery acid and burn a hundred dollar bill). It's particularly sad to see state-of-the-art machinery and skilled baristas offering something so atrocious when a reduction of about 5 grams in the dose and a half-ounce or so more yield would produce something worth savoring straight, instead of drowning in steamed milk

Intelligentsia is for me perhaps the extreme example of the snobbery, hypocrisy and narcissism of today’s third wave coffee scene at its worst. The spare menu (and insufferably pretentious web site)  purports to feature only “seasonal” coffees, yet the coffees on offer were no more seasonal than many others that could easily have been available, from top quality Central Americans to Indonesians to Yemens or Ethiopians.

Given the volume they're doing they could clearly be offering a couple of excellent single-origin coffees batch-brewed in a top-of-the-line 1-2 gallon commercial brewer  for a couple of dollars per cup (and with far better extraction and temperature, especially if they upgraded their grinders to a small roller mill), but that would of course involve factoring the interests of the customer and some level of concern for value into the equation, and why start now, especially with a line out the door?

The sad theater of employees painstakingly brewing individual cups of drip coffee when that method's whole raison d'etre is to efficiently brew a pot of coffee to be shared among friends perfectly mirrors the alone together isolation of the customers on their iPhones and Macbooks (all with ear phones!) sitting at the bar during my visit, drinking coffee together while communing with invisible others in the virtual world. This 21st century café is as removed as one could imagine from the rich tradition of the coffeehouse as a place for lively exchange of ideas and with it the creation of community.



Earlier in the day I visited a busy Peet’s in Santa Monica. The only caffeinated choice in the urn was Italian Roast, which I of course scolded them for even brewing (“the only thing worse would be French Roast”). Surprisingly they willingly brewed a pot of Ethiopian Fancy and in addition had a plunger pot of limited edition India Peaberry for sampling. The Ethiopian was perfectly brewed but as is so often the case these days simply couldn’t handle its roast, with only the slightest bit of residual acidity to mark it as something African. The India was a bit better but lacked the multidimensional spice of previous years, coming across more like a decent lot of Estate Java from years gone by.

On the other hand, the Peet’s was impeccably brewed on good equipment at a tiny fraction of the asking price of the other cups of coffee, by employees with actual training in customer service.

All-in-all what a wretchedly narrow range of poor choices these experiences represent. This kind of retail scene is a huge step backwards from ten or even twenty years ago, when places like Pannikin and The Coffee Connection were in their prime. No wonder consumers are throwing in the towel and going for their Dunkin' Donuts drip, Keurig K Cups or Starbucks Via. And what an opportunity for anyone with the temerity to offer fresh, moderately-roasted and professionally brewed coffee at a fair price.