All clear in San Francisco after a suitcase in a tree prompted evacuations in and around the Ferry Building, home to the Good Food Awards, Verve Coffee Roasters account Frog Hollow, Blue Bottle Coffee‘s charming little windward outpost, and various upscale eateries and artisanal snack holes. SF Chronicle reports:

Officers had closed streets, evacuated nearby areas and issued a shelter-in-place order Tuesday after finding the suitcase tied 20 feet above the ground in the London plane tree on the west side of Steuart Street just before 11:30 a.m.

Bomb squad technicians evacuated nearby Justin Herman Plaza, and police closed Steuart between Market and Mission streets, the Embarcadero from Howard to Washington streets and Mission from Spear Street to the Embarcadero. Several Muni lines were rerouted.

Top drawer snark from SFist:

Is this the infamous suitcase stuck in a tree that’s causing Tuesday afternoon’s melee in downtown San Francisco. Caity Cronkhite snapped this shot of the suitcase hours ago, tweeted it, and wrote the following, “This is a suitcase zip-tied to a tree. It’s difficult to come by extra storage space in San Francisco, but come on.” Four hours later, we now have evacuations and major street closures.

The offending suitcase. Is it art? (Via: SFist)

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The venerable Food & Wine last ran a cafe round-up in 2008, and frankly, not much has changed for their 2012 list of Great Cafes in America. The list has doubled in size, which speaks volumes for great cafes that have come up in the last four years, but there’s still some odd ducks and darn questionable omissions, but moreover it gets at this kind of “media-that-writes-about-media” conundrum for your trusty Sprudge Editors. That’s why we’re going to 1. snark and make fun of this list, and 2. advise you (and the editors at Food & Wine, who are no doubt reading this over a nice glace of Chablis) to completely ignore everything we say.

Requisite geek coffee blog snark:

Pbbt. Espressamente Illy must’ve struck F&W as “authentico”. Cafe Triest? We’ll give you its historical gravitas, but have you actually set foot in there recently? The atmosphere is hellish, dimly lit in strange spots, sticky floors, pockets of body odor, questionable pastries, deplorable powder room, and coffee that we’ll charitably describe as drinkable. Tut, tut.

And now, a sincere caveat:

Food & Wine, don’t listen to us. It’s great you make lists like this. It’s good for cafe culture.  There’s some weird choices on your list, but some clutch choices as well, especially Cafe Du Monde, because oh man, the only one on the list to proudly serve low-quality chicory coffee, but my god, it’s so amazing.

Anyway, here’s the list from four years ago:

2008

1. Joe the Art of Coffee; NYC
2. Gimme! Coffee; Ithaca, NY
3. Blue Bottle Café; San Francisco
4. Stumptown Coffee Roasters; Portland, OR
5. Lamill Coffee Boutique; Los Angeles
6. Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea; Chicago
7. Bloc 11 Cafe; Somerville, MA
8. Abraço; NYC
9. 3Cups: Wine, Coffee, Tea Merchants; Chapel Hill, NC
10. Coffee Slingers; Oklahoma City

And the list for 2012:

1. Abraço; New York, NY
2. Alterra Coffee; Milwaukee, WI
3. Blue Bottle; Oakland, CA
4. Caffe Driade; Chapel Hill, NC
5. Café Du Monde; New Orleans, LA
6. Cafe Grumpy; Brooklyn, NY
7. Caffe Trieste; San Francisco, CA
8. Cartel Coffee Lab; Tempe, AZ
9. Coffee Slingers; Oklahoma City, OK
10. Coffeehouse Northwest; Portland, OR
11. Dose Coffee and Tea; Nashville, TN
12. Espressamente illy at the Palazzo; Las Vegas, NV
13. Houndstooth Coffee; Austin, TX
14. Intelligentsia; Los Angeles, CA
15. Kaldi’s; Clayton, MO
16. La Colombe Torrefaction; Philadelphia, PA
17. La Mill; Los Angeles, CA
18. Madcap Coffee Company; Grand Rapids, MI
19. Octane Coffee Bar & Lounge; Atlanta, GA
20. Pavement; Boston, MA
21. Peregrine Espresso; Washington, DC
22. Progress Coffee; Austin, TX
23. Star Lounge Café; Chicago, IL
24. Stumptown; Portland, OR
25. Victrola Coffee Roasters; Seattle, WA
26. The Wormhole; Chicago, IL

We went through all the trouble of listing them like this so you don’t have to go through the Food & Wine’s pop-up slideshow nightmare. If you really want, though, I mean, there’s a list of Coffee Drinks you could check out, including a Chocolate-Raspberry Truffletini. I mean, right?

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On March 9th, Starbucks is dramatically changing the way they serve traditional brewed coffee in every company owned and licensed concept store in North America. During the afternoons, Starbucks baristas will shut down their automatic drip coffee makers brew decaf  and bold coffees on demand, utilizing new manual pour-over bars. It’s a move that will drastically decrease coffee waste. The Starbucks mucky-mucks are taking careful steps to ensure a smooth roll-out, courting the press and coffee schmuck doofus bloggers like your trusty Sprudge.com editors.

We were cordially invited to attend a special Pour Over Demonstration at a Starbucks outlet in West Seattle. We were greeted by a handful of  personable Starbucks representatives and generously given samples of the Pour Over product from Zachary, the store’s resident Coffee Master. Our editorial impressions:

1. The pour-over bar frame looks great. It looks strikingly similar to the TruBru system and Espresso Part’s Drip Station.

2. The pour-over device is made of diaphanous plastic. When asked if they’d considered using ceramic they gave us a stock response about how it’d take extra steps to “pre-heat the ceramic”. The focus here is on speed, as opposed to, say, taking a little bit more time to ensure that you aren’t tasting estrogen compounds from Bisphenol A.

3. The extraction is fast, but is it too fast? The bloom looked stunted, implying that the CO2 release that normally characterizes a pour-over is being sublimated in the name of speed and efficiency.

4. The coffee is pre-ground in air-tight canisters. Again, speed of service trumps all else.

5. They won’t be putting their pour-over systems on display. When asked why they plan to hide their stands behind the counter, they responded that the “theater” of pour-over display was best left to shops like 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea and Roy Street Coffee. This pretty clearly differentiates what Starbucks is going for with their pour-over system (speed, reduced waste) with what Melissa Allison refers to as the “slow coffee” application of pour-overs in specialty coffee houses.

6. The pour-overs at Starbucks taste noticeably better than what they’re serving in their BUNN urns, particularly when comparing a fresh pour-over with urn coffee at the end of its half hour “freshness cycle”.

7. The baristas will not be pre-wetting their Miletta filters. It doesn’t take a Mark Prince to tell you this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Our overall impression? It’s like a custom tailored monogrammed menswear shirt from Old Navy. It’s nice, sure, but it’s still kind of a piece of shit.

Full disclosure: In the course of researching this aricle, your Sprudge.com editors received promotional gift bags from the Starbucks Corporation. We spent our gift cards on beer at 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea and thus far we’ve enjoyed the fabulous samba compilation.

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Brian starts…

I know I rail on this a lot, but I think it’s important.

Isaiah and Garth went to the regional barista competition (SCRBC) the weekend before last, and they experienced the same thing as usual. They really went this year trying to play the game. They changed almost everything about the way we make coffee in order to follow the strict and unbending rules laid out by the… whoever. I’m not sure who came up with these rules. Intelligentsia?

One of the things looked down upon in the specialty coffee industry is the way we tamp. We tamp as hard as we can. Who taught me that? No one taught me that. I started noticing years ago that the harder I tamped, the sweeter the coffee tasted. And I like that. Hard tamp = sweet espresso. I promise you that’s true. I’m not exactly sure why.

At the comp, my boys always get marked down for crema that’s not the color the judges are looking for and the crema doesn’t persist as long as they want it to. They always say our coffee is “too fresh.” I’m not kidding about that. As soon as we get the score sheets, I’ll post them so you can see it for yourself. The coffee is too fresh? Yeah yeah, we’ve been through this. Well, I have a couple theories about all this. And I think as time goes on, you’re going to see that I’m right. Because I learned it, not from Intelli, but from experience and experiments.

Harder tamp, coarser grind, less micro-particles, more control over shots, sweeter espresso.

Sweeter espresso, fresh coffee, less crema persistence.

Should we really concern ourselves so much with crema persistence?

Just drink it when I give it to you.

Nick Cho, experienced USBC judge and “big wheel at the cracker factory”, weighs in with the following comments:

Whether or not “persistence of crema” is a value that the industry should be promoting or not is definitely a debatable point. More and more, you hear about baristas questioning the “status quo” and raising doubt about whether crema is all it’s cracked up to be.

That said, this was Isaiah’s third competition. What’s the point in bangin your head against a wall? Did you want the judges to throw out the published rules and turn the competition into the “United States Hardest Tamp Championship?”

There are published standards and rules for the competition. Nobody’s telling you what you can or can’t do in your shop.

Did any judge score lower because of the hard tamp? I don’t think so. It’s about consistent technique.

I’d love to see a DoubleShot barista make a go of the competition by showing mastery of the rules and standards and delivering on it. Isaiah’s a great barista for sure. I hate seeing the Haterade flowing from what sure seems like sour grapes.

Brian rolls out a full troop deployment in response:

I like the idea of Nick Cho, but in practice, NIck, I find you to be a joke. You don’t listen. You aren’t in touch with reality. You don’t listen. I wrote that twice because I figured you skipped it the first time. I’m sick of listening to you. You don’t seem very smart. Your arguments are extremely lame.

Do they take away on points for the way Isaiah tamps? Yes they do. Do they take away points for our fresh coffee? Yes they do. Did he try to follow the arbitrary rules this time and tamp the same lame way every time? Yes. Did they still count off on points because he polished too hard? Yes.

Nick, until you get your head out of your ass I’m not going to publish any more of your comments. No one cares what you think.

The trench warfare then continued on Twitter. Here’s a snapshot of the battle damage:

Stay tuned. We don’t think it’s over. This kind of back-and-forth forum snark has a rich and storied history in the specialty coffee world, and we can surely expect more fireworks and devastation. Suffice it to say, don’t expect Nick Cho to be visiting Tulsa, Oklahoma anytime in the near future (your loss, Nick).

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