A struggle goes on here, although it's hard to tell by looking around. The Bean Hollow Roastery and Espresso on Main Street in Old Ellicott City drips charm on the worst day, and on the best day owner Gretchen Shuey should charge you for sticking your nose in the door and intoxicating yourself with the aroma of roasting coffee.
That's her behind the counter, tending to the brewers or serving another customer or standing in the back at the small roaster, cooking another batch of Guatemalan, Ethiopian, something. This young women might be seen as a sort of foot soldier, one among innumerable troops resisting the relentless forces of bad coffee. Safely consider this struggle never-ending.
It's those darn beans. On the bush, they usually grow in pairs inside a bright berry roughly the color of a Santa suit.
Harvested, washed and dried, they emerge faded green, offering little aroma or taste. Then they're roasted, and the wonder begins.
For 200 years, scientists have been exploring the bean, as if it were some bottomless ocean trench. Lord knows what all is in there. Some of it's ugly, some of it's so good it should be illegal. Actually, more than once over the centuries prevailing authorities in several places have tried to impose coffee prohibition. Perhaps you'll guess how well that worked.
At last count, researchers had identified more than 850 chemical compounds in roasted coffee. The more sensitive the measuring instruments become, the more scientists find. The more they find ... well, it gets complicated.
From Shuey with her 11-pound roaster to Nick Constantinides with his two 550-pound automated machines at Eagle Coffee Co. in Baltimore, the folks toiling in this field have their work cut out for them.
Common as dirt, coffee is "deceptively simple," says Ted R. Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. Fact is, he says, "We're sort of dealing with a moving target."
This is to say that "coffee is not a stable flavor system," Lingle says. Many of the flavor compounds are volatile; they may change from one thing into another and foul the brew. While some of these combinations produce flavors that the cognoscenti describe with such terms as "berrylike" and "floral," they also can turn "caustic," "creosol" and "resinous."
The perennial challenge is to extract desirable elements and leave the nasty stuff behind.
Coffee aficionados know how easily things can go terribly wrong. How else to explain the appearance of an espresso stand on Interstate 80 in North Platte, Neb., marked with a sign that says "Friends Don't Let Friends Drink Folgers"? The folks who opened that stand last year told The New York Times that they were out to "rid the world of bad coffee."
There's enough of it around. Plug the words bad coffee into a newspaper and magazine database and note the flood of references, if only because so many scenes somehow seem incomplete without it. College kids pulling all-nighters, cops working late at the station house, support-group meetings in church basements. Picture the Mr. Coffee, the white Styrofoam cups, the nondairy creamer. The full catastrophe.
On the other hand, some fabulist came up with the phrase "Perfect Cup," usually swaggering with the arrogance of a definite article: "The Perfect Cup," as if there were one such thing on the planet. A Platonic notion, perhaps, but all the more appealing with autumn here and coffee consumption in these parts beginning its seasonal rise.
Somewhere -- out there. Smell that? Ahhhhhhhh.
Showing good chemistry
What does it take? What does a person have to do to capture this ineffable thing? Much, it seems.
Much, however, is out of the hands of anyone shuffling to the kitchen counter, valiant in robe and slippers, chasing the sublime. Like wine grapes, coffee beans are subject to rain and sun and the slope of the land, altitude and, of course, the soil. The flavor of certain beans grown in India is said to improve with exposure to monsoon winds.
Sure, why not? Why not add monsoons to the array of factors that make or break your morning joe? If it's not the monsoons, then it's something else, some function of beans and heat and water and brewing method and cleanliness and, of course, time. Which is not to say don't even try. Who can resist?
Mmmmmm. Smell that.
When the roasting's done, after she hears the beans "pop" a second time, after she pulls a few beans during roasting to check color and surface oil, Shuey lifts the door of the small roaster. The beans spill out in a fragrant cascade, huffing smoke the color of blue-chalk dust. If only you could capture that aroma in a bottle, like a genie. Better yet, if you could taste it, so that you would not have to ask: "Why does coffee always smell better than it tastes?"
Alas, this is also striving after wind.
If something does not become a liquid, we cannot taste it.
You could look that up, along with other scientific truths that render good coffee flavor the elusive thing it is. We are led in large part by our collective nose in the general direction of that steaming mug of aldehydes, ketones, acids, esters, lactones, phenols and pyrroles, among other chemical groups.
Flavor is a melange of smell and taste, and while some of the aroma is experienced at the roof of the mouth, you're not exactly tasting it. As the tongue itself is concerned, much of the coffee experience is always and inevitably fugitive.
Any coffee addict will say, however, it's not necessarily about the taste. While chemists have been studying coffee flavor since the early 19th century, the history of the human encounter with coffee begins not with its taste or even its aroma but with its psychoactive effect.
One legend says it was in Yemen, another says Abyssinia, or present-day Ethiopia. Either way, the story tells how centuries ago a goatherd noticed that his goats were acting funny, that they suddenly seemed agitated. One version even says they were dancing. The goats were not seen in cafes wearing berets and arguing until all hours about literary theory, but they had apparently taken caffeine in berries, which they were spotted chewing from a shrub.
The berry might have been named for Kaffa, where the plant grew wild, or kawah or kahweh, meaning strength in Abyssinia, where the plant was apparently first made into a beverage. It became known as coffee.
Or "coffee," as certain mavens might designate much of the dreadful stuff that goes by the name.
Asked to recall the worst she's ever had, Isabel Fabara hesitates not a moment.
"Hotel coffee" says Fabara, who owns the One World Cafe on University Parkway. "It's horrible. It's like water."
By "hotel coffee" she means the complimentary in-room stuff: the pre-measured grounds in the foil envelope, the little machine there on a side table, the sad brew Fabara describes with an expression of disgust that requires some imagina- tion to spell. Try this: "Eeeeuuuhhhhh."
Charles Houston of Baltimore declines to mention names while enjoying a large decaf and bagel at the Daily Grind in Fells Point, but he says "places where you get coffee with breakfast, I generally find that coffee weak and sometimes bitter."
Jim Lucas of Baltimore recalls a particularly unfortunate brew served on the Pennsylvania Turnpike as a rest-stop freebie.
"It was just brutal," he says, adding a rhetorical question: "What's worse than the stuff at Jiffy Lube?"
On Cold Spring Lane, the coffee shop formerly known as Daily Grind, now called Urban Grounds under new owners, is decorated with an assortment of coffeepots. From booth to booth to display shelves, check out the array of gear in sundry shiny metallics -- percolators mostly.
Anyone remember percolators? The electric kind, say, or the ones you could load up and stick into a campfire? Now you're talking about a brew that can growl and shoo bears.
David Key, who owns Key Coffee Roasters and the Daily Grind shops in Baltimore, suggests that maybe percolators just got a bad name from misuse. He says, "It's not bad as long as you don't let it continue to perk." That forces brewed coffee through grounds that have been exhausted of virtue, shedding -- among other things -- much quinic and caffeic acid.
These respectively bitter and sour elements emerge as chlorogenic-acid splits in heat. Chlorogenic acids are not only unstable, they're also a significant coffee component, found in greater quantities in robustas, the lower-quality beans. Higher-quality arabica beans contain relatively less chlorogenic and more of the fruit acids that give coffee its best flavors.
Grounds for dismissal
The percolator marks a point on the coffee historic trail, as it was largely replaced for home use during the 1970s by the drip machine, chiefly Mr. Coffee, aka "Mr. Never Mind the Taste Just Gimme Caffeine."
The drip machine was more convenient than the percolator, but it had its own brewing problems that contributed to a particularly dark era in American coffee.
If you thought 1970s fashions were regrettable, you should have tried the coffee. By the time the Me Decade arrived, small, local roasters had largely been bought out by multinational corporations in the 1960s, thus cutting community supplies of fresh-roasted coffee.
And, a severe Brazilian frost triggered a sixfold spike in coffee prices in the early 1970s, prompting big coffee producers to market so-called "high-yield" blends supposedly tailored to extract more brew from less ground coffee.
The early home-drip machines were poorly designed in several respects, says Lingle of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The water spray did not evenly soak the grounds, the temperatures were too low to bring out the best coffee elements early in the brewing and the brewing times were too long, says Lingle.
"What's hard for people to realize, the temperature determines which compounds you extract," says Lingle. As much of the good stuff emerges early in brewing, the longer brew results in "over-extraction," or too much bad stuff.
Ideally, a drip machine brews coffee for six minutes between 195 degrees and 205 degrees.
The equipment has since improved, as has much else in the coffee world. In response to pent-up demand for good coffee, local specialty shops began to appear in greater numbers in the early 1980s, even before Starbucks first broke out of Seattle with its Chicago coffee bar in 1987.
In the last decade, Baltimore has gained a small local roaster in Key Coffee. Eagle Coffee Co. has been in business since 1921.
According to David Key, who turns out beans in two 35-pound roasters, the pursuit of the perfect cup has a way to go here in town. This is to say he's been having some trouble persuading certain restaurant owners to try his coffee. In his view, even some fine restaurants don't seem to care much about serving good coffee.
"I give people my spiel," says Key. "It's almost like I'm trying to sell them better table salt."
It could be that simple, sure. As long as the beans were not over- or under-roasted and have not been sitting too long after roasting or, heaven forbid, after grinding. As long as the burrs on the grinder are not so dull that they cause too much friction, thus heating the grind and dissipating flavor. Provided, of course, that the water isn't too hard or the brewer too dirty. Assuming, naturally, that the brewed batch holds in ambient heat, rather than single-point heat, at between 175 degrees and 185 degrees for no more than, say, an hour. And allowing, in some cases, for favorable monsoons.
The mavens can chart everything precisely by the numbers and come up with an abstract ideal, which still might not qualify as everyone's idea of a "perfect cup."
Who knows, for instance, what the cognoscenti would say about the stuff that comes out of the drip machine at the emergency room nurse's station at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center? Someone opens the pre-measured pack of grounds that were roasted who knows when, dumps it into a filter, pours in water and pushes a button.
Nurse Abbott Bolte says she'll drink three cups of the stuff in an eight-hour overnight shift: "It's not delicious, but it's not bad."
Of course, when she's home, everything's different. Asked her preference, she answers without hesitation: "Taster's Choice Freeze Dried."
Right -- cue the dancing goats.