In 2007, seven years after Howard Schultz stepped down as the C.E.O. of Starbucks, he wrote a memo to then-C.E.O. Jim Donald, with the subject line “The Commoditzation of the Starbucks Experience.” It lamented “the watering down” of Starbucks, arguing that the “romance and theatre” of making coffee had been lost when, for instance, the company introduced new, super-automatic machines that blocked eye contact between baristas and customers. Less than a year later, Schultz became the C.E.O. again, and Starbucks purchased a small startup, the Coffee Equipment Company, which built a machine called the Clover. At the time, Schultz proclaimed that the eleven-thousand-dollar device made “the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted.”
Coffee can be a deeply personal ritual, which is why discussing what one considers “good coffee” is inherently fraught, like religion or sports. But, at the upper echelons of the coffee industry, it typically means coffee from beans that are high-quality, roasted freshly and skillfully, and interesting—perhaps they’re from a particular farm, like Aida Batlle’s Finca Kilimanjaro in El Salvador, which Kelefa Sanneh profiled in the magazine. It’s then brewed in such a way that it extracts all of the beans’ best flavors, which are often unique to where the coffee is grown, much like the terroir of wine. Ideally, it’s a balanced mélange of bitter, sour, and slightly sweet; overextracting, or pulling too much out of even naturally sweet coffee, usually produces bitter results, while underextracting can result in a sour cup.
Regardless of the method, several factors affect the brewing process. The most important are the amount of coffee, the size and consistency of the ground coffee particles, the amount of water, the temperature of the water, the length of time that the coffee and water remain in contact, and how much the slurry is agitated during the brewing process. When the Clover first began to show up in specialty coffee shops in 2006, it was unique in two ways: it allowed precise, digital control over some of those variables—the amount of water, its temperature, and its contact time with the coffee—and it brewed just one cup at a time, in a process that is sort of like using a vacuum-sealed, upside-down French press. This meant that a shop could, after carefully designing a brew recipe for a given coffee, make that exact cup again and again, ad infinitum.
A marked contrast to the large-batch brewers used to consistently pump out liters of coffee in gas stations, restaurants, and many coffee shops, the Clover was credited with helping to revive specialty coffee’s interest in brewed coffee—particularly single-cup brewing, which allows shops to more easily offer a range of coffees. “It doesn’t make sense to batch-brew a coffee,” said Randy Hulett, a co-founder of the C.E.C. and now the director of Starbucks’s hardware-design studio, in a phone interview. After Starbucks bought the C.E.C. in 2008, though, high-end coffee shops largely abandoned the Clover, turning to manual brewing methods, like the pourover, in which baristas fill a glossy ceramic cone with ground coffee and then carefully pour hot water over it from an elegant gooseneck kettle. But the move to manual brewing, which is inherently less precise, threw into starker relief a somewhat complicated question: are people or machines better at brewing coffee?
This question turns on your definition of “better.” Consistency is perhaps the one universal value at every level of the coffee industry: whether it’s McDonald’s, Starbucks, Waffle House, or Tim Wendelboe, one of the most celebrated coffee companies in the world, all want to deliver, to the greatest extent possible, coffee that tastes exactly as it’s expected to taste, every single time.
Humans are good at a lot of things, like producing objects of great taste and beauty. But consistency is not one of them. In fact, growing concerns about inconsistency and badly brewed coffee, engendered by manual brewing techniques—particularly in busy shops, where harried baristas often can’t take the necessary care to properly brew each cup—are the reason even some of the most elite shops have begun, over the past couple of years, to reconsider fully analog brewing. The renewed interest in consistency has resulted in the emergence of multi-thousand-dollar hot-water dispensers like Marco’s Über Boiler, which essentially dispense a given amount of water at a particular temperature for a certain amount of time, along with flashy, expensive (and, frankly, mediocre) new automated machines, like the fifteen-thousand-dollar Alpha Dominche Steampunk, which brews up to four cups of coffee simultaneously. Some shops, like Portland’s Heart Coffee, are returning to automated batch brewing, albeit highly tuned by humans, to achieve more consistency.
It’s thus little surprise that consistency is one of the major selling points of the Briggo Coffee Haus, a coffee kiosk that has been tested over the past couple of years in Austin, Texas, whose earthy wood appearance belies the fact that warm-blooded organisms are not involved in brewing your coffee. A Briggo machine is, in effect, a giant, cloud-connected coffee robot in a box. Customers can order their favorite drinks from anywhere with Briggo’s app and pick it up later, or simply walk up to its touchscreen controls to order their drink, which then simply appears in front of them, like a whoosh-ier take on the automat. If it works as hoped, that customized drink will taste exactly the same at every Briggo kiosk, anywhere in the world, when the company eventually rolls out the kiosks more widely.
Last month, Briggo’s C.E.O., Kevin Nater, boastfully compared Briggo’s capabilities to those of baristas at Stumptown and Intelligentsia, two of the leading speciality-coffee companies in the country, but “without the human element.” One of the roles of a barista is to tune the shop’s equipment continually to make sure that it is consistently producing the best-tasting coffee possible; the barista typically knows whether the coffee is delicious by tasting it. In the barista’s stead, the networked Briggo kiosks include roughly two hundred and fifty sensors that watch “the results of each of the processes” so that if, for instance, a “shot time starts to go off at all, there’s a process to bring that back in line,” Nater said in a phone interview.
Yet even the most advanced machines, using the most objective measurements, can only infer how well a cup of coffee is brewed—not how it actually tastes. This is because, as a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Food Science and Management points out, the “chemistry of coffee flavor is highly complex and is still not completely understood.” It’s hard to measure what isn’t known, and coffee is estimated to contain a thousand aroma compounds. Even what can be objectively measured about a cup of coffee, its extraction and strength, “cannot tell you how good the coffee is…you do that by taste,” Vincent Fedele, whose MoJoToGo tools are widely used in the coffee industry, wrote in an e-mail. Also, there are situations where “the numbers look right but the cup can often be less than ideal.”
While Starbucks still employs humans who can taste coffee to assess its quality, and Hulett emphasized that “we don’t see robots ever standing in for our store staff,” the company’s approach to brewing coffee in its Clover machines, which will soon be in over five hundred stores around the world, isn’t terribly different from Briggo’s. A barista can adjust the dose or grind of coffee going into the Clover, but the machines are “not designed for partners to change at a store level, because it could be disruptive from one store to another,” Hulett said. Instead, each Clover is connected, through a network called CloverNet, to the Starbucks mothership, from which it receives technology updates and brew recipes for new coffees in real time. The baristas simply follow the directions. In fact, at the one point in the Clover brewing process at which a human comes into play—stirring the wettened coffee grounds—the machine now even tells the barista when to stop.
Of course, reproducing the same cup of coffee over and over, no matter how precisely, has little merit if that coffee tastes like dirt. Briggo’s Nater admitted that “the history of automated coffee is not great when it comes to quality,” but insisted that Briggo’s “system makes great coffee,” in large part because of its inputs: it buys coffee beans that are “very fresh off roast” from a local roaster in Austin, and grinds them to order before it brews a drink. (That said, Nater’s description of Briggo’s coffee as “a nice, balanced blend that has a broad appeal” seems like a promise that its coffee will be blandly sufficient, not mind-blowing.)
But being freshly ground puts Briggo, at the very least, one step ahead of any pod-based brewer like Keurig that uses preground coffee, which often tastes flat, because the freshness of coffee rapidly degrades after it is ground, and may be potentially months old by the time it is brewed. Though Keurig and other manufacturers nitrogen-flush or vacuum-pack their capsules to minimize oxidation, a review of the scientific literature on coffee staleness in the Speciality Coffee Chronicle notes that “even coffees stored under vacuum or low oxygen can show lipid oxidation due to the presence of free radicals in coffee produced during the roasting process.” Even Schultz, the Starbucks C.E.O., whose company now sells both pod and instant coffee, advised Bloomberg Businessweek last year, “Don’t buy preground coffee.”
The ideal experience would perhaps be delivered by a cyborg barista who could use human taste to craft the perfect cup of coffee and then seamlessly employ technology to create perfect copies of that cup over and over. It’s the one that many in the coffee industry are pursuing, as tools and equipment become ever more precise. But for now, in the real world, the question comes down to who you trust more to brew your coffee: a robot, or the girl with a demitasse tattoo.
Photograph by Jim Wilson/The New York Times/Redux.
