Next to me at the counter, this girl and her phone are having a sandwich. The sandwich is made with thick artisanal bread. I see tomato, sprouts, and white goo that, if she’s not careful, might splop on her phone, which is strategically positioned between her plate and her coffee cup. When the phone lights up every minute or so, she left-hands the sandwich, smiles down at the screen, and taps it with her right forefinger. She takes a sip of coffee.
Me too. I’m here for some coffee.
I mean Coffee.
It’s my fourth visit to this coffee bar, Astro, on Michigan Avenue, down the street from what’s left of Detroit’s train station, up the street from the vacant lot that was Tiger Stadium. Astro is in Corktown, one of those places that’s happening in Detroit. It’s old made new, it’s Detroit waking up. At Astro you can get a tight espresso, a perfect macchiato, and a respectable cappuccino. They also serve pour-overs made from the coffees listed on the board behind the bar. Today they’re pour-overing Montecarlos (El Salvador), El Prado (Columbia), La Folie (Guatemala), Karinga (Kenya), and Chorongi (Kenya).
According to 2010 Census data, the average Detroiter (a person sixteen years or older living in the city limits) travels twenty-six miles to get to work. How far does a Detroiter have to travel to get a good cup of coffee? Of course there’s coffee just about everywhere, and by coffee I mean the thin, steaming swill you get at lunch stands, breakfast shacks, convenience stores, and gas stations. Want that to go? Our Styrofoam cups come in two sizes.
But what about Coffee? I checked. Inside the Detroit city limits, 138 square miles, there are tentatively four Starbucks. When I Google “a good espresso in Detroit,” a foursquare.com link takes me to “The 13 Best Places for Espresso in Detroit.” At that page I find the headline has been downgraded to “The 9 Best Places for Espresso in Detroit” (hence “tentatively” above). Another link lists forty-three spots, a few of which I’d certainly try, just because I like their names: Tongues Coffee, Café 1923, Zanie Janie, Ugly Mug. Most of these places are not in Detroit (Wyandotte, Ferndale, Northville, Plymouth, Brighton, Ypsilanti). I like the sound of Conga Coffee until I see this: Mount Clemens. And this: “Now features an Acoustic Guitar Circle for Adult Beginners.”
And many of these forty-three are arguably not legitimate Coffee contenders because they are chains—Biggby, Caribou, Coffee Beanery, Panera, and, alas, Starbucks. These are PC (paper cup) second-wave providers.
Coffee—and I mean Coffee in its espresso incarnation, first-wave Coffee—begins in Italy, in 1901, when Luigi Bezzera invents an apparatus, essentially a boiler, that forces (expresses) hot water through compressed coffee. The machine makes it possible to produce individual servings of coffee in forty-five seconds, “expressly” for each individual. In 1947, Achille Gaggia refines the technology and process, activating, as Jonathon Morris reports, “essential oils and colloids from the coffee, creating a mousse or crema on top of the resultant beverage.” First-wave espresso came to the United States in 1921 (Tosca Caffe, San Francisco) or maybe it was 1927 (Caffe Reggio, New York); first cappuccino came in 1957 (Caffe Trieste, San Francisco).
Years later came PC second-wave coffee. Only it wasn’t a wave. It was a tsunami. Suddenly it became common to see people taking their Grande, “small” in PC speak, for a walk down the street or driving down the road holding a Venti, the twenty-ounce container, probably with stuff in the coffee. A lot of stuff. Suddenly sentences such as these, heretofore unimaginable in English, became common:
I’ll have Tazo berry with cream, plus a shot of mocha.
I’d like an iced mocha cappuccino with an extra shot of chocolate, skim milk, decaf. I can’t stand the taste of coffee . . . it has to taste like hot cocoa instead.
I’m in the mood for a tall nonfat caramel and honey half-decaf/half-regular latte with a little whipped cream on top.
Frappuccino.
Some of this stuff you can’t even say in Italian.
We’re well into the third wave now. Independent providers like Astro, for whom coffee is a business but also very much an art, science, and religion, are coming on strong, growing by 20 percent a year, making up 8 percent of the yearly $18 billion coffee market. We can be thankful.
We can be thankful, for example, for real ceramic cups. Drinking espresso, or worse, cappuccino from a paper cup is like eating steak with a spork. Give me a cup, with a handle, with a saucer, with a miniature spoon. At independents they grind (Astro calls it “shredding”), they weigh coffee shots (an Astro shot weighs a whopping nineteen grams), they monitor water temperature (around two hundred degrees Fahrenheit), they warm the cups. When the independents do it right, they serve a Coffee so dense, with a crema so thick, you can almost spread it on toast.
Astro does it right.
One Saturday morning my wife and I order coffee at Astro. Her cappuccino comes with a Christmas tree in the foam.
I point at the sign. “Miranda, from Columbia,” I say to the barista. “Is that your usual espresso?”
She says no, the coffees come in twenty-pound bags. When Miranda’s gone, they’ll rotate. She hands me my macchiato. There’s a heart in the foam.
“So if we come back next week, or the week after?”
“It probably won’t be Miranda,” she says.
Hmm.
Ten days later, I’m back. She’s right. They’re shredding Owl’s Howl. And it tastes . . . different.
Around the corner from where my niece lives and works in Pesaro, Italy, is a Pascucci coffee bar. Pascucci is a brand, a roaster, a franchise. Kind of like Starbucks. Only different. “Ricky,” she says one day, “you have to try it.” I do. And I say it’s great. When I’m back in town a year later, I try it again. Still great. More to the point: same great. Up the coast, in Santarcangelo di Romagna, my wife and I find a Pascucci bar. It’s a sunny day. We sit outside under an awning, at the edge of the big piazza, and have coffee. My espresso, great. Her macchiato, great.
It turns out the Pascucci coffee bean works, the torrefazione, is located just a few miles from both Pesaro and Santarcangelo. It’s also just fifteen to twenty miles from our apartment in San Marino. I might say to cousins or friends, “Hey, one day, why don’t we drive over to Monte Cerignone and check out Pascucci? You know, have a cup of coffee?” I might say that, and I know what the response would be.
No.
Along with Pascucci, there’s another coffee outfit right in Pesaro, called Foschi. I might ask cousins and friends: “Have you ever been there?”
Part of this is temperament. An American will drive a long distance to go to the source. This explains the American winehead’s willingness to make the very long, albeit scenic, trek to Montalcino to drink wine he buys down the street at home. Part of it is just an Italian’s sense of the old normal. There’s good wine everywhere. The Pascucci bar is a two-minute walk. You go to Pascucci or Foschi or Saccaria or Segafredo or Caffè Nero, all of them roasters, all of them franchises, and every time you go, the coffee tastes good.
I’d say great. A great that is normal.
A few years ago I had dinner with a plumber in Tuscany, at the edge of Chianti country. We started the meal with a cheese plate. On the plate were slices of sheep’s milk cheese, pecorino fresco. It’s a soft, mild cheese. You might daub a little honey on it or just have it plain.
“There’s nothing like this in the states,” I said.
“It’s good,” he said.
I took a bite and smiled. “It’s great,” I said.
He shook his head and pointed to the road we had driven to get to the restaurant. When he was a kid, he said, up that road, next to his house was a farmer who had three sheep. They grazed on a hillside behind the farmer’s house. Every year the farmer made the pecorino from those sheep’s milk. He held up a slice of cheese and examined it. “This is good, but it’s not great. It’s hard to get great anymore.”
In 2008, the producers of Parmigiano-Reggiano formed a consortium to guarantee quality of the Parmigiano cheese. (Mario Batali always refers to it as “the king of cheeses.”)
These organizations are called DOCs: Denominazione di origine controllata, a label you also see on some Italian wine. The consortium regulates ingredients, production, and aging. Cheeses that conform can claim the name Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Some time ago I was reading about the DOC’s impact on the cheese. The cheese is good, the food writer said, it’s very good (I’d say it’s great), but there are no longer those surprise cheeses, the ones that come along every five to ten years, mind-blowing cheeses, for example, that taste of fall or spring. You just get good cheese.
In this case, I’ll take good. Pecorino fresco, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Pascucci espresso. Good every time. I’d say they’re great.
Italians stand and slam an espresso. They may look at a newspaper for a minute and exchange a few words with the barista or patrons. But the coffee? They drink it hot and fast, and then they go. The bars they frequent are down the street from their house or workplace. Americans are more inclined to taste, to experience the coffee, finding fruits, textures, complexities. Here’s the Owl’s Howl roaster description of that coffee: “This blend displays a deep, honey-like body, with notes of ripe berry, chocolate-covered cherry, and sweet candied lemon.” This is coffee you study.
Giorgio Milos, a master barista for Illy brand coffee in Trieste, drank espresso all over New York a few years ago, trying to gauge similarities and differences in the coffee. “Americans,” he observes in Salon, “are creating their own traditions, such as making espresso with single-origin beans—i.e. beans that come from one farm or estate, to highlight the characteristics of that place—while Italian espresso is made from blends that often include some lesser-quality—i.e. Robusta—beans. In Illy’s blend there are no fewer than nine bean types.”
Third-wave is our wave, and this is not your father’s caffe americano. The standard weight of an espresso shot in Italy is seven to eight-and-a-half grams. Astro is pressing and expressing nineteen grams. I’m not sure what they’re up to. It’s a bomb blast. Whatever they’re up to, it’s a step in the right direction. I’ll drive all the way to Astro for a Detroit coffee bar experience, fifteen minutes from work, thirty minutes from home. I’ll take my time and try to learn about flavor profiles. I’ll sip and dream of Italy, happy to be in Detroit.