Bitter Press

Thoughts: The Worst

Esquire, doubtless of it’s attempts to flaunt scantily clad women from time to time, has generally been a magazine that garnered a bit of respect from me in the past few years. From Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso making their list of favorites fairly frequently in food and drink to interesting pieces about cooking from a Thomas Kellar cookbook (with surprise visits from Thomas Kellar), I had found a lot to appreciate in the magazine.

And then they gave Todd Carmichael a column on their website. Todd Carmichael is a mainstay of the second wave of coffee — something I don’t know much about. I can tell you this: the second wave of coffee was in the 1970s and 1980s, when places like Starbucks and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf started up along the west coast, bringing Italian espresso to the States. We are currently entrenched in the third wave, possibly cresting over into a fourth, where the focus has moved past espresso and back towards manual coffee brewing methods based around pour-over or immersion techniques.



Todd, it seems, isn’t a fan. “Listen, the espresso machine was invented for a reason: to be “espress,” a.k.a. fast (and, ironically, to replace the siphon and slow-brew). Listen up, geeks: Drop the slow-brew renaissance and pick up the pace. We have work to get to.”

Yikes. While espresso does happen to be one of my favorite things in the world, completely discounting manual brew methods as a whole means that Todd Carmichael, apparently, doesn’t like coffee as much as he thinks he does. I’ve never met anyone truly in love with coffee who doesn’t respect and revere the depth of flavor profiles achieved in the range from espresso to pour-over to immersion brew methods.

I could go through the rest of his points, but when you start an article out like that, then you’ve already lost any respect that I might have had for your piece. Mr. Carmichael thinks that this piece is some sort of revelatory guide, rallying against a tide of evil-doers in the world of coffee. Instead, he’s proven himself to be an unwavering curmudgeon, resistant to all change. And we know what history usually makes of out-of-touch outliers — it’s easy to see him for his hate-filled article as, well, a crazy person. In the modern parlance: a troll.

And let’s not forget the foray Nick Cho (of Wrecking Ball, currently) made into Todd own establishment: empirical data on an immensely underextracted cup. If you look through the Twitter feeds of the world’s coffee folks, you can see the chain reaction flowing through time and time again of everyone’s dismay that Esquire gave Todd Carmichael a soapbox.

Now let me re-iterate my point: Mr. Carmichael is allowed to develop his own opinions about coffee and share them — he was on the front lines of the second wave of coffee, and has seen a lot in his day. For youngsters like me, it’s great to have a direct line back into the dawn of espresso in America to see where my roots are. But to take to a well established and respected publication and do nothing but spew bile onto the flickering computer screen, well, that’s just inexcusable.

It seems more and more that I’ve found extremely negative and hateful articles written about the current progression of coffee that are baseless and serve no productive point. Every time I try and stare one down, another one pops up. And THAT, Mr. Carmichael, to me, is the absolute WORST COFFEE TREND I’ve ever seen.

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