Seattle’s New Way to Fetishize Coffee

For a half-dozen patrons at Victrola Cafe and Roastery on East Pike Street, 11 a.m. on Wednesday is a time to adjourn to the back room, gather around a chest-high table, look furtively at one another, and then get down to some serious snorting.

The table is ringed with tumblers, each containing a few millimeters of ground coffee. And not any old coffee—"single estate" coffee, where the beans have been purchased from individual farms. During this free weekly coffee "cupping," Victrola is aiming to open its customers' eyes—and more important, their nostrils—to just how rarefied these beans are.

The nascent cuppers stare at the glasses like first-timers at a salsa lesson sizing up their dance partners. Then Perry Hook, Victrola's head roaster—a ringer for Ben Chaplin if you subtract 10 years and add shaggy hair—instructs everyone to walk around the table, roll the glasses in their hands to agitate the grains, and stick their noses deep inside to sniff the dry grounds. After that, Hook and assistant roaster Joe Anthony pour 190-degree water up to the rims, set the timer at four minutes, and wait. The participants pass the time lobbing questions at Hook, which range from "Where do you get your coffees?" to a request that he clarify the difference between an Ethiopian coffee that's been naturally fermented and one that's been "washed." Clearly it's a mixed crowd.

The timer dings.

Each of the tasters now takes up a deep-bottomed soup spoon and delicately swishes it in a glass to "break the crust"—the mix of bubbles and grains that forms when the hot water releases carbon dioxide from the beans. This is a critical moment, and Hook tells the tasters to stay close to the glass as they stir to inhale the fresh burst of aroma their spoon releases. Hook and Anthony then skim off the remaining scum floating on the top, and the tasters go back around the table (and around and around), spoons and paper spit cups in hand, to take sharp, ratcheting slurps of each of the samples, aerating the coffee and spreading it across the palate, noticing how the flavor changes as the coffee cools. Swallowing is optional. Hook encourages us to notice the bright berry aromas of a Sidamo Guji, note the mouthfeel and body of a bourbon bean from Colombia. "I catch a clear aroma of bergamot in this Yirgacheffe," he says. The curious cuppers file around the glass after him, slurp, and nod.

The rite of cupping has been around for centuries among coffee traders. But now, following a pattern already well-established by marketers of wine, olive oil, and the like, a highly technical evaluation protocol once reserved for industry pros is being pitched to consumers. At the city's indie coffee shops, free public cuppings are regularly offered. Like the in-store wine tastings they mimic, cuppings are intended to showcase everything Seattle's artisan roasters are: small, passionate, aesthetically advanced, socially aware, personal. They're also meant to train us to be the customers these roasters dream of having—customers equipped to appreciate the increasingly elaborate lengths to which coffee purists are going in order to secure the best beans.

Whereas Starbucks first sold the mass market on the romance of Ethiopia and Sumatra, the new breed of coffee merchant is taking it even further. At Stumptown, you don't ask for a bag of "Panamanian" anymore, darling. It's "Panama Duncan Estate," distinguished from Panama Don Pachi or Panama Esmerelda (batch #2). Much as vintners display the appellation and vineyard on their bottles, the artisan roasters are selling their coffees based on the microregion or estate where the beans are grown. Coffee is the new wine.

With one critical difference, though. We all get to open the same bottles of wine and potentially enjoy the same taste experience. But cupping's achilles' heel—what makes it more an exercise in hype than culinary education—is that it's totally disconnected from the way every one of us actually drinks coffee.

three characteristics distinguish Seattle's coffee elite from their Starbucksian forebears and ensure gastro-hipster approval: A renewed passion for perfecting the espresso beverage—the roast, the pull, the froth. An almost religious devotion to freshness. And the pursuit and marketing of estate coffees.

Most of these outfits started up around the time Starbucks hit the 500-store mark. Mike McConnell opened Caffé Vita in 1995; Zoka started roasting beans in the back of its cafe in 1996, Portland-based Stumptown in 1999, Victrola in 2003. The owners, like the staffs, are still young. Their interest in single-origin coffees is even younger.

These cafes and artisan roasters are often grouped under the name "third wave"—a term coined a few years ago by Trish Rothgeb, who spent a few years as head buyer for Seattle-based Zoka, and a D.C.-based roaster named Nick Cho. According to this model of the evolution of coffee civilization, the first wave spread coffee-drinking around the world. The second wave—aka Starbucks, Caribou, et al.—rescued fine coffee from the depths to which it had Sanka'd. The third wave celebrates coffee as a variable, unique agricultural product and tracks every aspect of its cultivation.