Guest Post: Todd Carmichael Would Like to Explain

Posted on June 9, 2010 by Mike

Todd Carmichael of La Colombe Torrefaction created a bit of a stir with his two pieces in Esquire, upsetting many people in the industry. Now he would like to explain where he was coming from. The following was written by Todd, are his opinions and his alone, and is not edited or censored in any way. All comments and responses will be addressed by him.

By now I’ve surely pissed off more people, so maybe this is a waste of effort. (By effort, I mean I’m writing this with my thumbs on my phone).

I think the best way to express the meaning behind my articles is to outline the “WAVE” I would gladly be part of, except its not a wave but a platform – waves mean trends, and trends mean fashion, and fashion means  fad etc. You get the picture.

I’ve limited this to seven because the piece that exploded on the coffee landscape was “seven” too. Its just a good number.

This is a platform…

1.  Where an aggressive triple short is called an aggressive triple short (ATS) and not the name of another prep drink long in existence- the espresso. Seriously, you can call it a coconut but its still what it is. Furthermore, the actual espresso is considered valid in its own form, like a latte or a capp etc. If you prefer the ATS, great, if you don’t, great, but when a person orders an espresso, that is what we make.  Recently the “in-house barista” at Synesso refused to make me and JP a single espresso because “he can not make what he will not drink”. So? I hate milk and I still serves lattes! Anyway, when I told him that he wasn’t going to drink it I was going to do that, he refused. He then made me an ATS angrily (No, he did not threaten to punch me in the dick, but he wanted to, I promise). I had just landed on a flight from NYC and well, I was buying a boat load of machines and all I wanted to know was how the machine made a simple espresso, not an ATS,  for my restaurant clients. I drank the ATS  and he can now be seen on the cover of a coffee magazine pouring what looks like tea from a beaker, and I find all of it hard to fathom.

2. Where the cafe owner and roaster pay the same  prices for espresso machines. As high end roasters none of us use distributors for a reason, yet the machine people do, so they by nature have to treat us differently. Why? As a roaster, I pay well under 7gs for the Synesso. – way way way below what cafes are charged – but they are professionals too and seriously deserve a break . This new system will be called the “professionals price because we are not arses”.  In short, we decide to collectively ask manufacturers to stop the racketeering relationship with distributors (they would love for us to do it). Furthermore, the roaster bull about “getting you this at cost my brother” won’t hack it anymore. Anyone who wants to know the REAL cost, email me and I’ll tell you what it is, example  6gs for a La Marz. Linea Padel PID. 17gs for an espresso machine is obscene. Talk about shifty transparency.

3. Titles like SNOB, GEEK and ‘number here’ WAVE are ejected from our speech because they are exclusionary, self inflationary  and are ultimately the demise of any “movement”.

4. We agree that process blending is pretty cool and has a place at the table. The argument for post roast blending is not crazy, not the ONLY  way, and goes like this: peas, carrots and potatoes do not cook at the same rate, therefore, when making stew we cook each ingredient separately, and when someone orders the stew later, we mix the ingredients together. Process blending, however, takes note of the chef and the belief that there is an inherent taste value in cooking ingredients together. With that, the roaster begins with his stubborn bean, and adds the faster cooking beans to the blend as the process progresses, adjusting heat as needed, all very much like cooking. Try it, you’ll freak how good it is.

5. We agree that after the bicycle (and walking!) the greenest mode of transport is public transportation. UPS is an example of public transportation for coffee – that ugly brown truck is  going to your client anyway. It just doesn’t look green, but it beats the private delivery van hands down. There are so many more – sigh.

6) The coffee experience is focused on the person buying it and drinking it, not the one making it. There will be no threat of punching customers in the reproductive organs or saying NO to legitimate requests. We agree to serve customers, not coffee. We are not rock stars, we a service people and purveyors. We will not make easy things appear hard, because cool is making hard things look easy. This addresses the “liquid load pressure breaching”, and finally, the Chef is king  and we will not mislead  him/her with bull talk. (In short, ego maniacal “purist” is just another word for freaking  “douche bag”.

7. Wasting coffee is frowned on. If everyone used the coffee guzzling slow brew funnel 1) we would need to expand the coffee farm foot print on earth by two to three times 2)  It makes the client pay for and waste beautiful product and serves only to “chase the dragon”  3) people have to wait for freaking ever (me, 32 minutes, you know where, 4 baristas, 4 people in line ahead of me) and 4) its only a method – not THE method. Try this, blend for the taste you wish to achieve first, if all else fails…  I’m just saying (I’m bracing for a solid knee capping on that one)

OK – I need to add 8

8. Where the gas burner exhaust in which we roast coffee is regulated and obsessed over as much as pressure profiling etc. Where we all agree to use high pressure gas and we let poison H2s bleed off before we serve anything. It takes more than you may like and there’s some explaining to do.. We insure also that our burners are burning at 100%, and not bathing our coffee in unspent fuel. (This is a personal thing, and just means a lot – and I can explain that another time)

Ok – 9. I promise to not to use words like Jihad for people who threaten violence against me, even if I think its very funny and merited to people who send me photos of me hanging by the neck.

10) and I’ll stop. No equal opportunity blog or discussion forum will allow the advertising of a roaster or cafe (don’t look right). That’s just silly.

Finally, I accept that my writing is annoying and grating and my methods are Simon Cowles and Keith Olbermann in harsh moods, but I don’t deserve death threats or obscene messages on my home phone that scared my wife to pieces. We just became parents of three girls and she’s already a mess.

Related posts:

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  2. Todd Carmichael Insults Everyone Who Serves Better Coffee Than Him
  3. Coffee Chronicles: Coffee's History In America, A Short Primer | Serious Eats : New York
  4. On the same "Third Wave"-length
  5. Gimme's new roaster
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  • sanford b

    Todd,

    I think your arguments here are very well thought out. A blog like Mike's was a good choice for your response and I commend you for taking the time to write it, and I commend Mike for being kind enough to host it. Part of the reason I think we were all so offended was that your initial volley seemed intended for coffee professionals, NOT Esquire readers. I'm not a roaster; I'm “just” a barista. But I'm a barista who serves pour-over coffees, 21g ristrettos, and has tattoos. I've also read or have purchased (and intend to read), every book or professional article about coffee I can find, so you will understand that I was offended?

    I will say that we agonize over the science and taste of our coffee at Comet. We use 21g of coffee for our pourovers (17:1 was still the standard ratio well before the manual brewhaha, right?), and we're getting great, consistent TDS and EXT% yields. I realize that you don't think the refractometer is anything of substance, but I'd also be curious to see if you've actually spent a lot of time with one, and what your thoughts/results were. I think they are fantastic, and I think they make life so much easier. If I'm going to be open-minded enough to accept the possibility of process-blended deliciousness, I expect that you remain open-minded to Gold Cup Standards and the ExtractMoJo software. Not trying to be rude or demanding there, and I'm not trying to say that it is impossible to brew a good cup of coffee otherwise, but everything that I have tasted, has correlated with the science of solubles concentration and solubles yield. If we want to provide our customers with amazing coffee experiences, and we want to provide them consistently, then the Refractoblaster(TM) is a must have.

    I don't have a problem with a single espresso, beyond the fact that I've never had one, and I've never prepared one. I think we're all guilty of that, and I remain optimistic that I could have an excellent one, but it hasn't happened YET. (I have had pretty nasty shots that tasted good with sugar, though.)

    I think your point about updosing and farmland is mis-leading. I could just as easily say that if we all focused on serving great coffee and politely emphasized trying it without milk and sugar, we could reduce the amount of land dedicated to ranching cattle (the “2″ in the “1-2 punch” of rain forest deforestation), sugar cane, and robusta.

    But I think your comment about UPS and your point about the outrageous cost of 'spro bots are both really interesting. I don't know anything about roasting (except for the skillet and the popcorn popper) so I won't touch the other stuff.

    In summary, thanks for the follow up and I'm sorry for threatening to shove coffee down your throat and calling you a weasel. It was knee jerk. I promise to come and have your coffee someday soon and hopefully we can have a good laugh.

    Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a beer to liquid load pressure breech.

    All the best,
    -sanford b

  • Cdaniels

    Todd
    You are a total douchebag…Go cry yourself to sleep.

  • Inglorious

    I think douche bag is two words, no?

  • Inglorious

    Thanks Sanford – I'll take you up on that!

  • Pirate barista

    Some thoughts on 2)… First off, sounds great to a cafe owner, until something breaks. As a distributor I maintain a slim, often very slim margin and it is held in reserve for repairs during the machines warrantee period, marketing the product and service to my customers, etc. Second, you are often paying for a service that is valuable, having a middleman to offer you options and that middleman having the expertise (something that not every distributor has, granted) to point you the right direction with equipment that is a good fit for you and your needs. Also, this is how small manufacturers can offer equipment across the nation. Third, while prices might go down a small, small amount, if end users got the distributor price, the manufacturer would have to increase the overall price due to having to service and field more calls from end users. Lastly, I'm pretty sure I know the synesso pricing structure well, and your implication that there are huge markups on this machine is ridiculous. I hear you that often unscrupulous sales companies take advantage of end users, but this doesn't mean that the mark ups for machines are completely ridiculous etc.

  • Pirate barista

    Dude, does every espresso taste good as a single? I'm willing to bet at least 100 dollars that who ever made you the espresso at synesso (probably Jeremy) was using a blend that tasted best the way he pulled it, and that he didn't use 21 grams. The baskets they like best there don't fit 21 grams very easily. Besides, yiu weren't paying for the coffee were you? You got it as a guest at the factory, made by an amazing professional who doesn't háve to compromise because you weren't a paying customer.

  • http://twitter.com/jesseraub jesseraub

    Holy smokes, a well positioned piece that isn't immediately combative and designed to jumpstart a professional discussion. Valid points here, Todd, and glad you decided to join the conversation as a real person.

    A few thoughts of mine:

    1. Definitions do change over time, and while it's not the traditional formula, what you call an ATS is widely accepted as espresso most places. I can understand why this is a problem for you, and Giorgio at Illy with his Atlantic article, but I'm still not convinced it's something that everyone needs to split hairs over.

    4. I'm not a roaster, but I do believe the best argument about this is consistency for quality. Same reason why it's pretty standard to measure roast level with an agtron, or use ExtractMojo when dialing in a coffee. Neither will replace a roaster's skill or craft, or a brewer's palate, but helpful, scientific tools, like post-roast.

    7. When talking about coffee guzzling, let's look at the ratio for drip/espresso. The golden ratio for coffee is 60g/liter of water, right? When looking at 7grams for every 1oz of water in espresso, the ratio turns out to be 236g/liter. Now I know that that's broken logic — obviously, we're not brewing espresso in 8oz volumes to fill a small cup. But where I work, we use 20g for about 11oz of water for a 300ml yield, making the ratio for pour-over V60 about 64-67g/liter. We also brew our coffee by the cup, to order, in under three minutes. If there's a line? The most you'll wait is 8 minutes. Also? Espresso is great. But there are countless brew methods that all have their own perks. You don't appreciate single cup drip — that's fine. It doesn't mean it's wrong or bad. You personally don't see the value in the cup — to me, it's one of the best ways to taste the coffee.

    Also, to anyone taking this personally into everyone's real life and outside the realm of coffee discussion? You're the biggest douchebag here, and really have lowered my opinion of where humanity is willing to stoop. At worst, this is a shouting match between blowhards (myself included), at best, a professional disagreement.

  • April

    This is fantastic! I loved both your articles in Esquire too, Todd. Why? Because I'm even older than you and I've lived long enough to witness how an industry…any industry can become obsessed with itself. This is only natural and what breeds invention and improvement but at some point (and your point) it becomes hard to improve on what is close to perfection and you end up going backward and feel pretty smug about it too.
    I have my favourite Barista and I think he pretty much is a god but really we are just making coffee here and I like mine with milk. oooooooo!
    ….And congratulations on your girls!! That is what life is really all about.

  • Inglorious

    Thank you April – on both accounts. Yordonos graduated pre-k today, and when asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she said “make BUNA like Daddy”. My girls Mmmmmwwaaaa

  • Anonymous

    Thank you April – on both accounts. Yordonos graduated pre-k today, and when asked what she wanted to do when she grew up, she said “make BUNA like Daddy”. My girls Mmmmmwwaaaa

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