Coffee: the standard breakfast drink grows up

Nation's Restaurant News, August 19, 2002

"I think that people aren't trained to thinking they have a choice," she says.

Munson, from Dallis Coffee, observes that people who identify themselves as gourmet coffee drinkers don't necessarily know how to distinguish different bean varieties.

"I think [declaring themselves gourmet coffee drinkers] means they can tell the difference between coffees, lattes and cappuccinos, not necessarily the difference between coffee beans from Central America, Africa, Sumatra, what have you. They can tell the difference between coffee drinks, but not necessarily between different kinds of coffee."

Green coffee buyers on the commodity level have distinguished between coffees from different regions for years, which is why Dunkin' Donuts goes to different regions for different components of its blend. Munson has observed restaurateurs and chefs starting to ask: "'Well, what really are the differences between these coffees?'

"So it's only natural that at some point savvy foodies or beverage people are going to want to figure out the answer to that same question."

Gourmet coffee markets and coffeehouses such as Starbucks have been offering coffee from specific regions for a couple of decades. But in recent years some coffee roasters, such as Dallis Coffee, Millstone and Boyd Coffee Co., have been offering coffees from a single estate, much like high-end wines.

Ophelia Santos, owner of Ali-Oli and Vino restaurants in Atlanta, serves an estate "reserva del patron" from Colombia.

"I find that people are a little more conscious of estate coffees [than they used to be]," she says. "So they ask you: 'So where's your coffee from?"'

She agrees with Munson that even those customers who ask might not really know what the answer means, but at least they know to ask. "What that means is that there is a market for further education of the consumer."

But coffee varieties are not as easy to distinguish as types of wine or beer, according to Munson.

For one thing, wine and beer give tasters visual cues. "Coffee is generally almost black, all the time," he says.

In addition, the temperature range at which wine and beer are served is much more narrow than coffee, which can be ice cold or piping hot, and the different flavor components express themselves differently at different temperatures.

"Nonetheless, there are big differences that people do appreciate, often at the first sip, if only self-consciously," he says. "So there are some things stacked up against appreciating coffee on its own geographic terms - appreciating different origins. But I don't think those are insurmountable problems. In fact, our experience in New York suggests that there's a lot of promise in that approach."

He points out that estate coffee has merit from a marketing perspective in that each one of those coffees has a unique heritage, and the story of the farmers who grew the coffee can be part of the selling point. Furthermore, he says, that marketing is based on reality. "There are microclimatic, micro-terror differences between coffees that are also very real," he says.