Seattle Weekly recently published a piece on the rebirth of Seattle Coffee, highlighting Andrew Milstead’s company (Milstead & Co) and the folks at Slate Coffee. In it, the reporter reaches out to Kent Bakke (La Marzocco), Bronwen Serna, plus former Seattleites Ryan Brown (Tonx.org) and Trish Rothgeb (Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters).
It’s a real who’s who, representing just another battle in the ongoing war of attrition between The Weekly and The Stranger, “Seattle’s Only Newspaper.” The Stranger’s ample wit and free hand with the experiential essay have been enormously influential on Your Sprudge Editors, as have many of its current and former writers – Dan Savage, Charles Mudede, Megan Seling, Lindy West, Brendan Kiley, and the list goes on. We wish our favorite Seattle publication had not chosen to abdicate any semblance of engaged food coverage several years ago, instead farming out their food writing throughout the staff, but we still love The Stranger. We grew up scouring Tacoma for places that carried this paper, and enjoying a crisp new copy each Wednesday is one of the biggest things we miss about moving to Portland. The Stranger, if you’re reading this, we would write a coffee column for you like yesterday.
But we digress. What’s most surprising about that Seattle Weekly article is not that it’s excellent, as the Weekly’s coffee writing has gotten better and better in the last few years What’s surprising is the total lack of grumpy, nattering tut-tut commentary from the Seattle coffee public that fails to attend this article:
One of the few things you can count on in the world is that, should one endeavor to write publicly about the Seattle specialty coffee world, one must then brave the slings and arrows of outrageous internet coffee trolling. A shop left out that some might include? Expect to hear about it from the 9th overall finisher at the 2011 NW Brewers Cup. Does that cafe you mentioned occasionally carry beans from 4 roasters, not three? A public tsking is afoot. Seattle is well-read, blog-literate, and willing to release the hounds at the slightest semblance of journalistic transgression.
Either Sara Billups has finally written the molecularly perfect, wholly unimpeachable Seattle specialty coffee feature, with nary an avenue over which to complain, or else you Seattle coffee types are just getting bored. The world is waiting for your public ombudsmandry, Seattle, but it can’t wait forever. Read the whole thing here via Seattle Weekly.
