I won’t defend Starbucks for burning their coffee, but I will defend them against the charge that they don’t do enough to promote recycling of the 3 billion paper cups the company goes through each year. Over at the Examiner I take a look at some of the obstacles to finding uses for all those cups and wonder whether it’s worth making the effort.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)From the category archives:
Coffee
A commenter notes that Starbucks stores in California are prohibiting smoking outside their stores:
Starting Monday, Starbucks customers are welcome to sit outside and sip a while — as long as they don’t light up. The international coffee giant is extending its ban on indoor smoking to outdoor patios and dining areas in California.
The change was prompted by an increasing number of communities that have enacted smoking prohibitions in outdoor dining areas.
This is their right obviously, though I would have preferred their hand not be forced by excessive regulations. Previous coverage of Starbucks and smoking policies here and here.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (5)Camper English has an interesting article in this weekend’s San Francisco Chronicle about the new wave of coffee cocktails and high-end coffee liqueurs finding their way onto bar menus:
The craze for organic, shade-grown, micro-roasted slow-drip coffee has percolated into the cocktail world. Bartenders are improving classic coffee drinks, finding ways to harness the beans’ bitter, aromatic qualities rather than just the caffeine kick. [...]
Coffee liqueur got a good bit more serious with the April release of Firelit Spirits Coffee Liqueur, made with coffee from Oakland’s Blue Bottle coffee roasters and brandy from distiller Dave Smith of St. George Spirits in Alameda. Jeff Kessinger, the brand’s founder, says Firelit was inspired by a desire to create a better version of his wife’s family’s homemade coffee liqueur recipe. The original called for instant coffee.
The first batch of 1,800 bottles required several hundred pounds of coffee from Yemen and a multi-stage brewing, distilling and flavoring process, with about one-half to one-third the sugar in other liqueurs. “The goal was just to make a coffee liqueur that was about the coffee, not about the sugar,” Kessinger says.
The coffee bitters from me and Lance Mayhew get a mention as well. They’re simple to make and our recipe for them is here; for a cocktail to use them in, try the Antigua Old-Fashioned.
Other coffee cocktails on this blog include the Lebowski-inspired El Dude and the Dimmitude made with clarified coffee.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)Following up on last month’s post about libertarians and Fair Trade coffee, it’s worth noting that leading roaster Counter Culture Coffee has released its annual transparency report for its Direct Trade certified beans. It’s available here in PDF format and is very cool. For every coffee in the program it tells you which employee visited the farm, when they last visited, the price paid for the beans, the beans’ cupping score, the number of years CCC has been buying from that farm, and a paragraph-length description of their work at each location. You really can’t beat that level of transparency.
To put the numbers in context, here’s a quick summary: The minimum price required for Fair Trade certification is $1.26 per pound. Counter Culture’s Direct Trade certification has a minimum of $1.60. The actual lowest price the roaster paid last year was $1.65. They paid as high as $4.45, with many coffees falling somewhere above $2 or $3.
As I said before, I’m not reflexively against Fair Trade, but I don’t want consumers to think it’s the best or only game in town. When you put that program up against the Direct Trade programs of the best specialty roasters it’s easy to see why many coffee lovers prefer the latter model.
[Via @CoffeeGeek.]
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As I discussed at Cocktail Camp a few weeks ago, one of my interests lately has been finding ways to use coffee in cocktails without having to brew on demand. Making coffee bitters is one solution. Clarifying coffee is another. This isn’t a perfected process yet but the results are interesting and I’m hoping this post will encourage others to try it out.
My goal with this was to create a cold coffee with a shelf life of at least a few days that could be kept in the refrigerator and used when needed. The easiest method would be to use a Toddy brewer to make a cold-brewed coffee concentrate. This certainly works but cold-brewing and hot-brewing have different flavor profiles. Cold-brewing pulls out dark, chocolaty, nutty flavors. Hot-brewing captures more of the acidity and fruit notes found in many great coffees. For making iced coffee I much prefer the Japanese hot-brewing method popularized by Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano to Toddy and other cold methods. Hot-brewing produces more the flavor I was looking for.
That’s where gel clarification comes in. The basic idea is to create a web of gelatin to capture the oils and solids in a liquid so that only water soluble flavors remain in the final concentrate. It’s like making a consommé except that you’re adding gelatin to liquid instead of utilizing the gelatin that occurs naturally in meat. Harold McGee explained how the process can be used for all kinds of liquids in The New York Times a few years ago. Soon after World Barista Champion James Hoffmann applied it to coffee.
I’ve run two different coffees through the process so far: Stumptown’s Ecuador Quilanga and Counter Culture’s Sidama Michicha, a natural coffee from Ethiopia. I was really happy with the results. While I wouldn’t expect any cold coffee to match the aromatic complexity of a fresh hot cup, the two were distinctly different in flavor, with the fruit notes of the Michicha standing out surprisingly well. Cocktail ideas immediately started presenting themselves. How about a flight of drinks mixing neutral vodka and three different clarified coffees? Could be fascinating.
I tried several methods of clarification and none so far none have worked better than the one James originally posted. I’ll explain that briefly below but please visit his site for a full explanation. The good news is it’s easy to do. The bad news is it will take some time, about three days total (though I’ll discuss a faster alternative below), and space in a freezer and refrigerator. This will rule out its use on many professional cocktail menus, but it could still be something fun to keep behind the bar or for home experimentation.
Here’s the method I followed:
Step 1: Brew coffee and filter through paper. I brew at home in an Eva Solo which I then had to filter through an Aeropress. Ideally one would just use a pour-over or Chemex instead of this roundabout method.
Step 2: Bloom 8 grams leaf gelatin in water, then dissolve and whisk into 500 grams of the coffee (slightly more than a liter by volume).
Step 3: Allow to set for a few hours in a refrigerator.
Step 4: Transfer to a freezer and freeze into a solid block.
Step 5: Lay block in muslin, place in a colander, and suspend the colander in a bowl. Put everything back in the refrigerator until the ice thaws. I sped the melting by breaking the block into a few pieces, increasing its surface area as in the photo below.
Over two days the ice slowly melted through the muslin and colander, taking water soluble flavors with it. A thin layer of coffee gel was all that was left behind.
In the bowl was the clarified coffee. Obviously some coffee is lost in the clarification. I went from 500 grams down to 381 grams. As James notes you can increase the clarity even more by repeating the process, but you’ll lose more liquid too. I stopped at one run through since I’m going for clarity not complete lack of color. For comparison’s sake, here’s the clarified coffee next to a Toddy brew and coffee run through a paper filter.
After all that waiting I was ready for a drink. Here’s one I’ve been experimenting with and calling the Dimmitude cocktail, inspired by the traditional caffé corretto (espresso and grappa). I may play with this a bit more when I’ve made my next batch of clarified coffee but it was working well with the Michicha:
1.5 oz grappa
1 oz clarified natural coffee
1 oz Dimmi
Stir over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.
Dimmi is a light, floral, herbal liqueur blended with a touch of grappa. Natural coffees like the Michicha are dried with the cherry still on the bean, sometimes resulting in dramatic fruit or berry notes. Combining these with quality grappa makes a unique, lightly fruity cocktail with a gentle coffee bitterness. (If you saw my presentation at Cocktail Camp I made this drink with vodka there. Grappa is a better choice; I’m currently using Uva Viva di Poli.)
Is clarifying coffee for cocktails worth the effort? Probably not for regular use, given how much time and space it consumes. Using good iced coffee is more practical. However it is fun to work with and the clarified coffee looks great in a stirred drink, plus it seems to last for at least a few days if refrigerated.
Agar method: There is a faster way to clarify liquids using agar in place of gelatin. Agar sets at a higher temperature than gelatin, so one can follow a similar process to that above but melt the ice at room temperature instead of in a refrigerator. Indeed one can omit the freezing step altogether, gently squeezing agar curds through muslin. Obviously either of these methods will require less time than gelatin filtration.
The downside to using agar is that it also hydrates at a higher temperature. So while gelatin will work just fine in freshly brewed hot coffee, agar works best in boiling liquid. Unfortunately boiling brewed coffee will cause overextraction, resulting in a bitter cup.
To get around this one could theoretically boil agar in, say, 100 grams of water, then mix that into 400 grams of coffee brewed to a correspondingly higher strength and proceed with the freeze-thaw approach. Of the agar clarifications I tried that method came closest to the results with gelatin, however it was not quite as clear and the taste was a little off. It was close though and worth another try. (Using the fastest method of just squeezing the agar gel through muslin may leave some residual agar in the liquid. This is another time when an Aeropress comes in very handy for filtering it out.)
Coffee clarification is something I’m still experimenting with and I would love to hear from anyone else who tries it or incorporates it into cocktails. Perfecting an agar method would be ideal and I’m also curious to see what other drinks people create, either with coffee or with other clarified liquids.
[As with so many of these kinds of posts, thanks to David Barzelay for advice on using these different methods.]
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (3)[...] why are so many libertarians opposed to fair trade coffee?
It would seem to me that fair trade coffee is fairly hard to argue with on the principles of consumer sovereignty (i.e. the claim that consumers know their own interests best, and are able to realize them through the market mechanism). If consumers want to pay a premium for coffee that has been produced ‘fairly,’ then this should be no more troubling for libertarians than consumers wanting to pay a premium for e.g. luxury chocolate (which often is made from the same basic material as very-good-but-not-horrendously-expensive chocolate), and arguably less troubling.
Then Jim Henley piles on too:
Where I was going with that when planning out the post is, if one isn’t careful, the appreciation of the ironic power of self-interest to fulfill social needs can slide into, first credulity – there’s got to be an irony in here somewhere! meaning, almost anywhere – and then decadence: mere contrarianism. At worst, contrarianism that isn’t just sloppy but smug: proud of itself for asserting ironical, “politically incorrect” claims that widely recognized beliefs and decencies are actually myths and vices. Tee hee! Look how upset everyone gets when I tell them how wrong they are to hold their comforting nostrums!
They’re both right that Fair Trade is just another form of voluntary free trade and that the hostility some libertarians express toward the idea of paying more for coffee to help poor farmers is distasteful at times. However at the risk of being one of those smug contrarians Henley dislikes so much, I’m going to defend the libertarians on this one. Partially, anyway.
The simplest reason to object to Fair Trade coffee is that it’s just a stupid name. It suggests that all other coffee is unfair and exploitative. As a sign at one coffee shop I visited put it, “Fair or Unfair? It’s that simple.” Well, it’s not that simple. And if, as I do, you think the insights of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other economists are hard-won intellectual achievements, then a label that implicitly opposes those ideas is going to rub you the wrong way. This could have been avoided if we labeled Fair Trade as something like “Charity Coffee” instead, which would be more accurate and avoid disparaging any economic theories. But then it might not have caught on as well because buying it wouldn’t let people signal their opposition to globalization, which brings us back to why so many libertarians dislike Fair Trade in the first place.
That’s probably as far as your average capitalist goes in his reasons for disdaining Fair Trade coffee. But if you’re actually into coffee, you know that some of the smartest critiques of Fair Trade are coming from good-hearted liberals working in the industry. They’ll tell you that Fair Trade is out of step with the current market for specialty coffee.
The first complaint you’ll hear about Fair Trade is that it doesn’t do enough to encourage quality. I’ve had some very good Fair Trade coffee and I’ve had some that’s terrible; the label doesn’t promise anything. It sets a price floor without any real link to cultivating better beans or promise that the roaster knows how to handle them. Even worse, by mandating a co-op model of production, Fair Trade can reduce incentives for individual farmers to improve their crops. This may not matter if consumers are buying Fair Trade coffee just for charity, but over the long-term they may not continue paying more for the label if they’re not perceiving higher quality in the cup.
A bigger objection to Fair Trade is that it’s no longer the best deal for farmers. The Fair Trade minimum of $1.26 per green pound is often higher than commodity coffee prices but well below what premium coffee roasters will pay. For example, Counter Culture’s Direct Trade program pays a minimum of $1.60 per green pound with additional incentives for exceptional crops.
There’s much more one could say in criticism of how Fair Trade certification works; there’s no need to repeat them here but see this recent Guardian article or Kerry Howley’s excellent piece from Reason a few years ago if you’re interested.
What’s frustrating about the successful branding of Fair Trade is that it’s used as a cognitive shortcut by consumers for what qualifies as an ethical coffee purchase. I speak from experience selling coffee in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. The type of customers some libertarians enjoy mocking would often come in asking for Fair Trade beans. Sometimes I could engage them and explain that what we were offering was better than Fair Trade, that farmers got more money for the beans and the quality of the coffee was outstanding. Other times I couldn’t and they walked out for another shop, likely ending up doing less good for farmers and with a worse cup of coffee. Customers’ loyalty to Fair Trade can be just as uninformed as some libertarians’ knee-jerk opposition to it.
Here’s Jim again on why Fair Trade seems like such a bad idea to people who’ve taken to heart Adam Smith’s lesson that following one’s self-interest is often the best way to do good in the world:
[...]something like Fair Trade will seem like it should be the kind of thing where there must be a catch. Here are people trying to act out of benevolence and still getting dinner! It would make perfect sense – and be a lot of fun! – if these do-gooders were actually doing harm.
But by this point, you can start getting lazy. Like, assuming that fair-traders must be screwing up “price signals” that are the market’s way of telling poor foreign farmers to stop farming.
I’m not convinced that buying Fair Trade actively does harm, though excess production is a legitimate concern. If you’re shopping at Costco and debating between a big bag of Procter and Gamble’s regular coffee or their Fair Trade beans, you’re probably making some farmer marginally better off by choosing the latter. Fair Trade may play a useful role in mass market coffee. However if you want to pass the maximum of your purchase price onto coffee farmers, your best bet is to buy the highest quality coffee you can from roasters like Counter Culture, Intelligentsia, or Stumptown (to name the usual three, though there are many others).
In fact, it doesn’t even matter whether you care about coffee farmers or not. If you selfishly pay for quality in the cup you’re very likely buying beans that brought more revenue to them than Fair Trade would have. Adam Smith was right and so, sometimes, is the libertarian’s ironic intuition.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (8)Yesterday’s Cocktail Camp event at Portland’s New Deal Distillery was a lot of fun. My presentation was about the use of coffee and tea and cocktails, so I’ve been trying out some interesting experiments that I’ll be posting here later this week. My talk ended up coming in two parts. In the first I gave a quick Coffee 101 lecture, discussed the basics of brewing, and explained why coffee can be a difficult ingredient to work with in a bar setting. Many of us craft bartenders treat it horribly. We’d never serve citrus juice that we’d squeezed a week ago but we essentially do that with coffee by using stale beans, pre-grinding, or just not brewing properly. Many standard coffee cocktails could be improved simply by getting the fundamentals right.
However some bartenders may not have access to good coffee and we may not want to limit coffee cocktails to hot drinks, so in part two we got to the fun part: Actually making cocktails using coffee as an ingredient in other ways. One of these is by making coffee bitters. Lance Mayhew and I started working on our first batch of these in December and are really happy with the recipe we’ve developed since then. It’s fairly simple so we hope others will try them out as well. The ingredients are:
750 ml Lemonhart 151-proof rum
peel from two medium-sized oranges
24 g coffee, coarsely ground with a mortar and pestle
approximately 2.5 g orris root*
1 star anise
Combine all ingredients in a jar and let steep, tasting daily to check their progress; 4 days to a week will probably be enough time. Decant through a fine mesh strainer and transfer to a bitters bottle.
For the coffee we used Stumptown’s Costa Rica Herbazu in each batch for the sake of consistency. I’m curious to see how other coffees might affect the bitters, but I think any Central American coffee that hasn’t been too darkly roasted should be fine.
The above recipe makes a lot of bitters and uses an entire bottle of rum, so feel free to halve or quarter it for a smaller yield. And for a cocktail to use them in, try the Antigua Old-Fashioned featuring English Harbour rum.
* Update 4/18/10: Quick clarification: This is dried, chopped orris root, not powder.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (9)Grape and Bean, a great coffee and wine shop in Alexandria, VA where I worked a couple years ago, is the subject of a new video by Caleb Brown:
The video is part of a contest highlighting free enterprise; vote by liking it here, and if you’re in Old Town drop in to visit David and Sheera at Grape and Bean. (Also, I’m glad to see that the Clover is still brewing good coffee!)
Previously:
Minor rebellion
Grape and Bean opens in Alexandria
I would have posted about this sooner had I known tickets were close to selling out, but on Sunday, April 11, I’ll be among the presenters at CocktailCamp PDX, an inaugural event for cocktail lovers in and around Portland, OR. I’ll be drawing on my barista experience to talk about ways to use coffee and tea in cocktails without destroying these wonderful products. Steve McCarthy from Clear Creek Distillery will also be presenting, as will blog pals Matt Robold, Blair Reynolds, and Craig Hermann. Check here for the complete list of presenters.
Tickets are only $10, but as of tonight there were only 10 seats remaining. Head over now to purchase one if you’d like to be a part of this fun event.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (1)Greg Beato’s take on Starbucks in the new Reason is right on, acknowledging the company’s successes while recognizing that its attempts to reinvent itself with shops like the undercover 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea won’t restore its reputation as an innovator:
For all their ostensible authenticity, such adventures in interior design cannot match the truly radical act of installing espresso machines in bank lobbies. Like Seattle’s other great cultural export from the early 1990s, Nirvana, Starbucks has always been most vital, most interesting, most revolutionary when at its most commercial. [...]
At [15th Avenue Coffee and Tea], the quest to cultivate highbrow customers continues. There’s a wall covered with excerpts from Plato’s dialogues. Blended drinks are banned from the premises, and you can safely assume that Bearista Bears, the highly sought-after plush toys that Starbucks has been selling since 1997, won’t ever appear here either.
But if Starbucks really hopes to re-establish its authority as an innovative, forward-thinking trailblazer, it should perhaps use its next experimental venue to honor its heritage as the first chain to take gourmet coffee culture beyond the narrow boundaries of traditional coffeehouse values and aesthetics. Imagine a place with matching chairs, clean tables, beverages that look like ice cream sundaes, Norah Jones on the sound system, and absolutely no horrid paintings from local artists decorating the walls. A place, that is, exactly like Starbucks!
I walked by 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea on my most recent visit to Seattle. It looks like a nice shop, but it’s a tiny part of the Starbucks empire and the coffee, of course, is still Starbucks. In a city that’s full of great coffee shops I’m not sure why anyone would seek it out.
On a related note, it looks like Starbucks is about to launch pour over brewers in some of its stores. There’s probably no better example of the company becoming an imitator than this. Pour over bars have become one of the leading trends in quality-oriented coffee shops as they shift toward brewing individual cups on demand. Part of the reason they’ve become so popular is that the high-tech Clover machine was bought up by Starbucks and taken off the market, forcing those shops to turn to alternative brewing methods. So it’s funny to see Starbucks copying low-tech pour overs now too. It’s as if the company believes installing all the accoutrements of an indie cafe will bring in the coffee lovers when its real problem is that it doesn’t have the systems in place to match the quality of its smaller, nimble competitors.
Nonetheless I hope that Starbucks succeeds at generating interest in individually brewed coffee; that would be a great step forward, though I find it hard to imagine that there will be a mass consumer shift from drip to pour over. I hope too that the customers who are introduced to the method at Starbucks will also try it at a shops with greater passion for the product and lighter roast profiles.
(And if you can’t tell, I’m still bitter about losing the Clover, which I’ve always preferred to pour overs anyway.)
[Pour over link via Starbucks Gossip.]
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With my dual interests in cocktails and coffee it was only a matter of time before the two collided in the same glass. Most recently I’ve been experimenting with coffee bitters. Many roots and barks can be used as bittering agents, so why not the pleasant bitterness of coffee beans? My friend Lance Mayhew and I have tried out several recipes for coffee bitters and with batch #5 we’ve hit on a combination that I find very satisfying. We use Lemonhart 151-proof rum as a base and add in a few complementary flavors like orange peel and star anise. The final product has a distinct coffee aroma and taste without overpowering the other ingredients; it might be more accurate to call these coffee-orange bitters given the strong orange note they produce. (Coffee geeks will be interested to know that the beans are Stumptown’s Costa Rica Herbazu; how much of a difference origin makes in these bitters is yet to be determined.)
My favorite use for the bitters so far is in a rum Old-Fashioned. I’ve tried this with a number of rums, searching for a spirit to give the drink the right amount sweetness without tipping too far in the direction of strong caramel flavor. My favorite so far is English Harbour, an Antiguan rum with just enough time in barrel to give it depth. It’s well-suited for a classic Old-Fashioned preparation:
2 oz English Harbour rum
.5 tsp superfine sugar
2 dashes coffee bitters
Stir all ingredients to dissolve the sugar, add ice, and stir again. Finish with a strip of orange peel.
The rum Old-Fashioned with coffee bitters has been a popular off the menu item at Carlyle for a couple months now and will be making the jump to prime time later this week.
Update 4/12/10: The recipe for our coffee bitters has been posted here.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (7)I’ll be back in my hometown December 25-29. Obviously I want to stop in at Anvil, where bartender Bobby Heugel is serving up creative cocktails. And word is David Buehrer has finally brought great coffee to Houston with his Tuscany Coffee. Good Tex-Mex is a must and easy to find. I’d usually consider barbecue essential, but Podnah’s Pit in Portland is such a good fix that I might do without. Where else should I visit?
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Mixology Monday returns today with a collection of cocktails that’s all about dairy, hosted by the eGullet forum:
Any drink using a dairy product is fair game: milk, cream, eggs, butter, cheese, yogurt, curds, you name it. Given the importance of dairy products in drinks dating back centuries, there are lots of opportunities for digging through vintage receipts for a taste of the past, and as always innovation is highly encouraged.
Not everyone is in to dairy drinks. Me, I love ‘em. I’d drink straight heavy whipping cream if it weren’t so unhealthy. I’ve written frequently about raw milk. The Golden Cadillac is a guilty pleasure. That said, I don’t order milk-based drinks often and generally save them for the occasional dessert libation.
My drink for this month is a variation on the White Russian. The White Russian’s enjoyable as is, but it could be a lot more interesting. Kahlua’s a one-dimensional liqueur and vodka is, well, vodka. I decided to rehabilitate the drink with Patron XO Café, a tequila-based coffee liqueur, in place of the cloyingly sweet Kahlua, and then added a few other things to make El Dude:
1.25 reposado tequila
.75 oz Patron XO Café
.5 oz heavy whipping cream
.25 oz triple sec
cardamom tincture to taste*
wet whipped cream**
cinnamon
Combine the first five ingredients, shake over ice, and strain into a shot glass. Float wet whipping cream then finish by grating fresh cinnamon on top. It’s an indulgent drink, but it packs enough heat to balance the sweetness. And now that I’ve published it I really need to get around to finally watching The Big Lebowski.
For your added pleasure, here’s a bonus cocktail from the American Bartenders School that’s totally beyond hope of rehabilitation:
*Grain alcohol infused with cardamom seeds.
**The cream should be whipped just enough to float yet still be liquid enough to drink; the cream in the photo is actually a little too stiff. To make this on the fly pour cream in a cocktail shaker with the spring from a Hawthorne strainer and shake for 10 seconds.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (6)The latest bit of nanny state over-reaching comes from New York City, where authorities have decided to take yet another pleasure away from cigar smokers:
The owner of a Financial District tobacco shop was amazed to learn he was violating the law by offering his customers a free cup of joe while they legally puffed away on his cigars. [...]
Health officials had no problem with all the cigars his customers were puffing on — a handful of businesses, including Nastri’s, are exempt from Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-smoking laws — but decided a $9,000 coffee machine was grounds for closing the place down. [...]
Nastri found himself in a classic Catch-22 situation.
To serve coffee — even free coffee — he needs a permit to operate a food-service establishment. But smoking is banned in food-service establishments.
Realizing that resistance would be futile, Nastri had the machine removed.
The inspectors were presumably acting within the letter of the law, but this is clearly another attempt at harassing smoking businesses and making them as uncomfortable as possible for the people who frequent them.
[Hat tip to Jonathan Blanks.]
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (3)Jim Romenesko at Starbucks Gossip links to a blog dedicated to replacing the aroma of tobacco smoke outside of Starbucks stores with the sweet smell of self-righteousness:
A blog established to encourage Starbucks (SBUX) to stop supporting smoking at their stores. SBUX, where it is legal, allows smoking outside of their stores. Not a very “socially conscious” policy. Not to mention, how does a business so closely tied to the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure (breast cancer), reconcile allowing smoking at their stores?
Yikes, giving people a place to smoke, even if that place is outside, now detracts from a business’s social consciousness? And wanting to find cures for cancer now requires taking control over customers’ personal behavior? Obviously Starbucks is a private business and if they decide to ban smoking outside their stores they have every right to do so, but:
1) It might be more reasonable to ban it only in some stores, such as those with small urban storefronts. Suburban stores with large patios could easily accommodate smokers and non-smokers.
2) A guy smoking a cigarette in open air isn’t going to give anybody cancer. He might be annoying but so is the guy with the portable radio, the guy who hasn’t bathed in three days, and the friends chatting too loudly about their sex lives. In a civil society we learn when to tolerate such things and when to ask the store to intervene and it’s not clear that a chain-wide ban is needed to deal with them. In any case, allowing people to smoke outside where they do harm only to themselves is perfectly compatible with raising money for cancer research.
3) This blogger’s “campaign” is part of the trend to demonize smokers, portraying their behavior not just as unhealthy but as anti-social. This kind of thinking is what has led to extending legislated smoking bans from indoor spaces to places like beaches, golf courses, and public parks, where it’s absurd to claim there are any deleterious health effects from secondhand smoke. Starbucks might reasonably decide that forbidding smoking would be good for business but this would not put them on moral high ground.
4) Yes, it’s rude to light up next to other people without asking their permission but where else are smokers supposed to go? Now that they’ve been exiled from indoor businesses, even from tobacco shops in some jurisdictions, one can understand why they feel entitled to the outdoor spaces they have remaining.
5) Starbucks actually deserves great credit for their non-smoking policies. As I wrote about in 2006, they’ve been a pioneer in international markets for creating smokefree cafes in countries where these were predicted to fail. (The title of this post is a translation of the signs they posted in Austria explaining their policy: “aroma protection through a smoke-free space.”) They’ve probably helped change expectations for American cafes too. Given all this, it’s a bit spiteful to call them socially irresponsible for accommodating their smoking customers outside.
6) Sitting outside on a summer day with coffee and a cigar can be a wonderful experience. If you can find a place to do so where you won’t impose on other customers I highly recommend it.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (9)The Washington Post has a great article today about Counter Culture Coffee and the company’s unique business model: No retail stores, no shipping past the East Coast, fully staffed training centers in major markets, and an emphasis on free coffee education for the public. There are other roasters producing comparably great coffees, but I don’t know if any have done more to raise the bar for coffee standards in the areas they serve. Check it out here.
Permalink - Share/Save - Comments (0)Portland’s getting a little more like Northern Virginia and Northern Virginia’s getting a little more like Portland. The good news for Portland is four more Five Guys locations opening up soon. The local burger chain option here is ok, but it’s no match for Five Guys.
The good news for Clarendon is that Boccato Gelato and Espresso is now serving Stumptown coffee. The store had just received its Synesso when I moved away last summer. I haven’t tried their coffee, but the gelato is very good. With Murky closed a place to get well-crafted coffee drinks is a welcome addition to the neighborhood.
[Thanks to Clarendon's coffee-deprived Chad for the Boccato link!]
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Jacob Grier is a freelance writer, barista, mixologist, and magician in Portland, OR. He writes, eats, and drinks a lot. His articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Reason Online, The Oregonian, and other publications.
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