What had broken Blue Bottle’s nearly yearlong run at the Brooklyn Flea? What was the root cause of this rage and frustration? The answer: pour-over coffee, a seemingly simple but incredibly time-consuming method of coffee assemblage which wreaks destruction wherever it appears, a gastronomical ascot whose chief benefit seems to be that it roughly triples the time it takes to make a cup of coffee and allows consumers to then imagine that they can taste a difference.

It was a little over a year ago that The New York Times heralded the arrival of pour-over coffee in a trend story titled “Coffee's Slow Dance.” The writer Oliver Strand described the method by which pour-over coffee is created—water is poured from a specially made kettle into a suspended cup of coffee grounds, through which the coffee seeps to the waiting cup below (that the specialized equipment needed comes from Japan likely will not surprise you). While allowing that the process might sound "precious or tedious" to some, he enthused that the resulting coffee was, in the intricacy and delicacy of its flavor, like “picking up a drafting pen after only writing with Magic Markers.”

This sort of praise is typical of pour-over enthusiasts. Taylor Janes is a 20-something farmer’s market cheesemonger who designs brass brackets for pour-overs in his spare time. (I know him because he's a former classmate of mine at that bastion of Manhattan liberalness, The New School. Yes, I know.) He doesn’t care that it can take roughly four to five minutes to brew a single cup. “I want it to take longer,” he told me. “From opening a bag and inhaling deeply, practicing my pour technique and watching the bloom, to the industrial handsomeness of the galvanized steel pour station, the observance of and commitment to a morning ritual results in a refined sense of personal satisfaction.”

What is it actually like to drink pour-over coffee? I can’t deny that there is something a different about it—its flavors are richer than is usual in drip coffee, hiding underneath a layer of physical heat and slowly unspooling themselves on your palette in the moments after a sip. For this piece, I sampled several pour-overs at Blue Bottle’s Williamsburg outpost, and on at least one day I was struck with an unusually intense caffeine high that left me vibrating and sweating in my desk chair, feeling like I'd been whisked through here.

The technique had its devotees, of course, long before The Times wrote about it. And in the year since the piece ran, there's been even further advancement in the world of coffee pour overs. The Hario VDC-02W Dripper V60 Size 02 White Ceramic Funnel, an unassuming white cone that sits atop a cup of coffee and serves as a pour-over coffee filter is, at the time of this writing, the top-selling item in Amazon’s “Coffee Servers” category (other assorted pour-over tchotchkes fill up three more spots in the top ten). The Hario VKB-120HSV V60 Coffee Drip Kettle Buono, another pour-over accessory, is a sensually ribbed teapot with a long, S-curved spout protruding from its front, giving it the appearance of a cartoon baby elephant, or an incredibly rare orchid. It also sits atop its category (#1 in Kitchen & Dining > Tabletop >Serveware > Teapots & Coffee Servers > Teapots).

Blue Bottle, the only New York coffee cult name-checked in The Times piece, is expanding, too, opening two Manhattan branches in addition to it Williamsburg coffee bar/roastery/shipping facility. There are now more than a dozen other places selling pour overs in the city: Abraço in the East Village, PORTS in Chelsea and O Café in Greenwich Village. Another is Joe the Art of Coffee, whose new Upper East Side location will feature pour-overs, according to this December write-up:

"Rather than batch brewing in big urns, it’s more theater," owner Jonathan Rubinstein said of the art of pour-over. "The way we’re building this, we’re putting in a window pane as a permanent fixture. And how we’re lighting it, we’re making it a glass stage, for lack of a better word."

A visit to that location a couple weeks ago, however, turned up nothing more than two lonely-looking pour-over filters perched atop rather grimy glass pots. Asked about the gleaming coffee bar on a hill promised in the press, the barista on duty sheepishly said it was “under construction.”

Nevermind the mystique; the actual mechanics of pour-overs are more or less those of a broken coffee pot: hot water slowly goes through coffee grounds, making only one cup of coffee at a time. That is all it is! It's not magic. It’s just kind of a more elaborate, maybe slightly tastier way of brewing coffee. But, you know what? It’s not really suited to pleasing a big crowd, even when it’s the kind of crowd you might think would be predisposed to waiting 20 minutes for a cup of coffee. Because, actually, I do not think that person exists. Granted, wait times for pour-overs can vary wildly—I've waited anywhere from two to eight minutes at Blue Bottle’s proper storefront. But when there's a line, it can take much, much longer—which brings us back, full circle, to where we started: Blue Bottle and the Brooklyn Flea.

Blue Bottle is a fine institution and a great local place to buy coffee, but they found themselves overextended here. The pour over requires many things: time, a reliable electrical system and a patient clientele. Their potential customers, perpetually in a line a dozen or so people long throughout the holiday season at the Flea’s winter home—a stall in the lobby of One Hanson, a heartbreakingly ornate former bank and clock tower built in 1927, that served as Jason Schwartzman’s home and detective agency in the most recent season of the (criminally-cancelled) HBO comedy "Bored to Death"—did not cooperate any more than the building’s 80-plus-year-old electrical system. The official line is that the building's wiring was the real culprit, perpetually shorting out and leaving the outpost with only lukewarm, un-pour-overable water. This left everyone involved a little grumpy, including the staff of Blue Bottle, who told me in exactly the same words, with exactly the same mixture of barely-contained rage for two consecutive weeks, “We’re just having a little… problem? right now, with our… heater. So… it will just be a few minutes.” People stole coffees obviously ordered by other people. Some people just wandered off and never returned, despite paying a bit more than you might expect for a humble weekend-morning cup of coffee. There was strife and discord.

Immediately following New Year's, Blue Bottle announced they would not be returning to the Flea until they moved locations in the spring. They’ve since been replaced by Crop to Cup. Who serve coffee out of nice, big, coffee vats like you might find at a movie set or a PTA meeting. And you know what? It tastes great.

Chris Chafin writes for a few places about things you can listen to, play or consume. Here's his Tumblr, which isn't super compelling. Photo by akpoff, via Flickr.

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The Awl: Why is your coffee so insanely delicious? I swear, this is the best coffee I've ever had in my entire life. Like I want to drink it all day and night.

Jen St. Hilaire: Because... Resistance is Futile! No, but seriously, I'm glad you like my coffee! And I always appreciate hearing people's feedback. There are few things that I think contribute to the way my coffees taste. My roast style and personal tastes are the most obvious things. I roast the beans in a medium or Northern Italian style, which highlights the sugars and flavors of origin naturally present in the coffee, because they aren't overridden by the roast style, as they tend to be in coffees that are dark/overroasted (bitter flavors) or light/underroasted (acidic, bright, sour flavors). I think coffee tastes best when all of those flavors (bright, bitter, sweet) are in balance. My personal taste comes into play primarily in my blend creation. I prefer coffees with flavors of dark chocolate, caramel, brown sugar, maybe a little spice or fruit. So the coffees I select for the components in my blends will usually have one or more of these characteristics which contributes to the blend. For my single origin coffees, my criteria is a little different in that I choose coffees from women-owned/milled/exported farms, regardless of whether they fit my personal preference, but all of them have to be of very high quality.

I try to buy organic when I can, but the way a coffee tastes is always first priority. Both my personal taste and roast style aside, I think what really makes my coffees different from other roasters with similar style & taste is the expertise that I've developed over the 16 years in the industry while working for companies like Espresso Vivace and Ecco Caffe. Doing something really well takes practice, even if you initially have a talent and passion for it. There was a study mentioned in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, Outliers, that collected data about musicians at different skill levels and how many hours of practice they'd put in over the years, to determine whether there was such a thing as "innate talent." Turns out, the study found that musicians who had put in roughly 10,000 hours or more into their field had all reached a level of mastery that the others hadn't achieved, regardless of how talented they had all been when they started. 10,000 hours correlates to about 10 years' time... so, scientifically speaking, it's possible that my coffee simply tastes really good because I've put in so many hours of practice. When it all comes down to it though, I do think there's an unexplainable element of "magic" that happens when someone is doing something they love.

The Awl: You're in a long transition from being a roaster at other companies, to being a consultant roaster, to being a small business operator, so now you have to handle all those pesky things. Why'd ya do it? And why that choice? It's nice and safe being an employee, after all.

That's true, it is nice and safe being an employee, especially when you're younger, or you're not able to or interested in taking such big risks with your career and your money. But working for others was also a necessary part of gaining the experience to become a good business owner. I was lucky enough to start off with one of the best educations in specialty coffee roasting that one could get in the mid 90s—as Vivace's first wholesale manager & head roaster. People traveled from all over the world to our roasteria on Capitol Hill, to see this new-fangled thing called "latte art" and to get a taste of the coffee that was as delicious as it smelled. I learned a lot about roasting and espresso preparation, and specifically, how to tweak my roasts on each of the coffees to contribute just the right flavors to the espresso blends.

I also learned all about the nuts and bolts of running a wholesale roasting business—bean selection & buying, vendor relations, accounting, shipping, systems set up. Later on, when I moved down to the Bay Area, I got to work with long-time Vivace wholesale customer, Andy Barnett, while he was starting Ecco—training him how to roast and consulting with him on his wholesale program, and I learned a lot about the process starting a roasting company from scratch. After Ecco was set up, I roasted there for several years when Andy was away at barista competitions or in Brazil, and then around 2006-07, I began the process of building my own company.

Prior to 2006, I had actually hoped to find full-time work here in California as a coffee roaster at someone else's company, but for various reasons, that plan never panned out, so I literally *had* to start my own company to be able to make roasting into a career. One of the other reasons I wanted to start my own business is that I wanted to have complete control over what I was doing. Good or bad jobs aside, I've always felt a little dissatisfied at not having the authority to make decisions that I knew could have made the product better or the job easier and more efficient. As lucky as I've been to have interesting jobs with some autonomy (currently I still work part-time at UC Berkeley managing a zebrafish research facility, I've worked on crab & fish processors in Alaska, at Good Vibrations, at Lonely Planet, and various juice companies like Genesis, Dharma Juice & Odwalla), I always wanted to have a career doing something I absolutely, without question, loved and would never grow bored of—and something creative. It's not without its risks, as you mentioned—but that's part of why it's exciting for me: important decisions come up all the time, things that could make or break my business. But I get to own all the successes, along with the failures, and feels really satisfying to have maneuvered what could have been a failure into a success. And that's the kind of thing that, at the end of a long, long, long, endless, work week, makes my journey totally worth it.

The Awl: How important is the Internet to your business? You have "pickup available" once a week from your funny shared warehouse down in West Oakland, near where the military hogs the waterfront—and then the rest is wholesale deliveries and individual online orders. How much of your life is about distribution?

The Internet is totally key for growing my business right now, since I don't have a retail storefront yet, and direct sales are where I want to focus, since the profit margins are a lot bigger and I really like being able to give personalized customer service to people who choose to buy coffee from my company. I only have two small wholesale accounts right now, and they're pretty close to where I live, so they're not too much for me to handle yet. But there's another grocery store account in the works, with three more stores, so I'm in the process of figuring out how that'll fit into my schedule without too much trouble. My life might become all about distribution in a hot second!

The Awl: What are your biggest challenges? Is it bricks and mortar-related—like, storage and inventory? Or distribution? Or getting bigger wholesale clients, or more individual orders—or getting enough roasting time?

The biggest challenge right now is just trying to keep my business afloat, and that includes all the areas you mentioned. The economy is pretty bad right now, and with the "c" coffee market prices at an all-time high, I've been paying almost 200% more per pound for green beans than I was just a year ago. Many of the roasters in the Bay Area with a similar product (fresh, medium roast, high quality coffees) have raised their prices over the last year to $1-2 per pound more than what I'm currently selling my beans for. I've raised my prices a little bit, but because I'm still such a new company, I can't risk raising them too high or I risk alienating first-time customers who may not want to take a chance paying a little more for beans from a company that they've never heard of or been able to taste in a shop. Brokers aren't keeping a whole lot of inventory on hand right now because the market is so volatile, so it makes it a little bit trickier for me to get the beans I want, and I have to stay several steps ahead with my green bean purchases to make sure I've got enough in stock.

Then there's the bricks and mortar challenge of being able to pay the rent on the warehouse every month, which is about 90% of my overhead. I'm currently still supplementing a lot of my expenses with my paycheck from UCB, but hopefully, that'll change at some point.

The Awl: What do you wish you'd known before you struck out on your own?

Well.. for one, I wish I would have known that when shopping for loans, the banks don't really care about anything in your business plan besides your executive summary, your investments and your financial projections. Though I'm really glad I spent the time to research and fill out the sections like "SWOT Analysis," I probably could have shaved a lot of time off writing my plan if I'd been a little less meticulous about everything in it.

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The Trenta is named after a town in southern Italy that sorta rhymes with "Venti". It's being test-marketed in the Phoenix area right now, which unfortunately precludes me from running out to get one. (Too bad — I was hoping to later turn the cup into a hat.) From this photo, the cup looks to be taller and more stout than the Venti while retaining the ever-crucial trait of being able to fit in cars' cup holders:

Some have noted that Starbucks is merely trying to catch up to Dunkin' Donuts, which has a 32-ounce "large" size for all its iced coffee beverages, including its super-milky lattes and cloyingly sweet Coolattas. Does this mean that we'll be bombarded with paparazzi photos of starlets clutching Frappucinos that outgirth their femurs?. No^*, say anonymous commenters who claim the mantle of "insiders" on Jim Romenesko's Starbucks Gossip. Apparently in a nod to these more serious times, Starbucks will practice some comparative restraint and allow only your basic iced coffees and iced teas to be poured into Trenta cups — no ginormous iced lattes or super-sized Frappucinos will cross the baristas' threshold. The over/under on how long after national roll-out this "no milky, whipped-creamy drinks" edict will last has to be less than two months, right? Especially since the competition is currently flaunting waffle-sausage-egg-and-cheese monstrosities for those people whose inability to decide what to have for breakfast results in them wanting it all.

^* That's "no" in Italian. House style and all.

[Via / Pic via]

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