Are You a Coffee Snob? 🗣️🍷

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“Coffee snobbery has two faces, one admirable and one less so,” writes journalist and author Michaele Weissman. Which side we see in a cup of coffee depends on much more than beans.

In this week’s podcast episode, a mother-daughter team open up about the family dynamics behind an Italian winery.

How do we even know what’s good?

This month’s reported feature, below, takes us from biology to social class, from 19th century French philosophy to 1960’s Italian kitchens, in search of the answer to what makes a drink “good.” It also doubles as an ode to Washington, D.C.’s independent coffee spots.

Our guest contributor, Michaele Weissman, spoke with some of the greatest minds in coffee while reporting this piece for Modo di Bere. It’s a huge honor to commission articles like this, and it’s only possible because of readers like you.

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“The Woman Can”: Angela and Marianna Velenosi

I interview a lot of Italian farmers. Most speak of vines tended by a single family for a striking number of generations. When I watch Italian winemakers interact with their young children, they often note tendencies suited to particular aspects of the family business: an observant palate, a love of nature, a skill for languages. To grow up and work for the winery can be a compelling destiny, or even a foregone conclusion.

I once asked the child of a famous Barolo producer if he was going to make wine when he grew up. “Lo faccio adesso,” he answered from his car seat, responding to my dumb question with pure scorn. I make it now!

Yet many winemakers I interview share similarities with Marianna Velenosi, who tried out a different career before feeling that something was missing. She then returned to her home territory and her family’s business.

Marianna’s mother, Angela, had a different destiny she needed to transform in order to work in wine. Her family did not understand or support her as she started her company in the lesser-known territory of the Marche. In the 1980’s, few wines were bottled under a woman’s name. It wasn’t until her company was mentioned on the national news that her father was forced to acknowledge her success.

In recent years, the Marche’s white wine grape Verdicchio has become a darling of the world’s wine lists, and Angela’s company has grown significantly. This week’s podcast episode is not only about the Velenosi business story. It’s also an excellent introduction to the indigenous grapes of the central Italian regions of Marche and Angela’s native Abruzzo.

Yes, Pecorino is a cheese, but it’s also a wine, and the grape’s name is related to the transumanza, a migration of the sheep, pecora, and shepherds, from the highlands to the lowlands and back.

Not surprisingly, one of the local sayings that Angela and Marianna taught me had to do with sheep’s wool. These are the local culture stories I live for. Don’t miss this week’s episode!

Listen: S3 E10 “The Woman Can”: Angela and Marianna of Velenosi Wine

Today’s Guest Contributor, Michaele Weissman

Michaele Weissman’s articles appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Sprudge, LitHub, Nosher, and numerous other print and online publications.

Michaele’s most recent book is the literary memoir The Rye Bread Marriage. Her previous book, God in a Cup, is widely credited with putting the specialty coffee industry on the map. This is why Jordan Michelman of Sprudge refers to her as “the legendary Michaele Weissman.”

She is the co-author, with Deborah Prothrow Stith, M.D., of Deadly Consequences (Harper Perennial) an examination of teenage gun violence. A History of Women in America (Bantam), co-authored with Carol Hymowitz, has sold a quarter of a million copies and is still in print four decades after publication. 

Michaele leads writing workshops at Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C.’s beloved independent bookstore, and other venues.

Listen to our long form interview with Michaele about her coffee book and her rye bread memoir on the Modo di Bere Podcast:

Season 2 Episode 9: Michaele Weissman on the Meaning of Bread

And don’t forget to

• Check out Michaele’s website

• Follow Michaele on Instagram

• Buy her latest book The Rye Bread Marriage (highly recommended)

Without further ado, here is Michaele’s reported piece for Modo di Bere Magazine!

Coffee Lover, Coffee Snob

By Michaele Weissman

I tell our accountant, Archie, that I am writing a story about coffee snobbery. Archie had read my book, God in a Cup, about the specialty coffee industry, for which I followed three young coffee buyers around the world. He immediately launched into a complaint about his wife’s Starbucks habit. His wife, he says, cannot start the day without a venti-sized, double-shot, almond milk, vanilla-flavored latte: approximate cost $8.00 a day, plus tip. She skips the whipped cream.

In Archie’s view, a coffee snob is someone who spends thousands of dollars a year at Starbucks. I like Archie, so I don’t tell him that Starbucks’ dark roasted beans and flavor-adulterated drinks elicit scorn from the baristas at the independently owned cafes I patronize. Roasting beans until they turn black or near black, as Starbucks does, burns off a swath of coffee flavors—not a good strategy unless you are roasting commodity-grade or low-quality specialty-grade beans. A corporate behemoth with an anti-union record, selling beans that have declined in quality over the years, Starbucks is cast as the quality Antichrist by many of the hipster-ish folks who work in small cafes featuring speciality coffee.

Paul Scott is the general manager of Takoma Bev Co in Takoma Park, Maryland, one of my go-to cafés. He admits that, when asked to make an oversized espresso drink à la Starbucks, baristas in his shop sometimes take offense.

“Pride in craft does not justify treating any customer rudely,” he says, “but it may explain why it occurs.”

Starbucks workers, Paul points out, spend their days pushing buttons on automatic espresso machines. At Takoma Bev Co and many other indie cafes, automation is unthinkable. Whether pulling shots by hand or serving pour-overs one at a time, baristas like this have a mission: to showcase each coffee’s uniqueness. Doing so requires technical expertise, encyclopedic knowledge of coffee varieties and regions, ongoing training and dedication. These qualities manifest themselves in every drink served.

Cate Razzook, the barista who runs the coffee program at the award-winning bakery and café Bread Furst, another of my local haunts, located in northwest Washington D.C., shares Paul’s high standards, although she offers another take on Starbucks.

“The Starbucks brand is about foamed milk,” she says. “Customers think they love the coffee. But it's the milky mouthfeel.”

Trained in chemistry, Cate migrated to specialty coffee after ten years working in labs. She denies being a coffee snob or any kind of a snob.

“Snobbery is about gatekeeping: you have to prove yourself to be let in.” She believes in meeting customers where they are. Then, if they are willing, she can help them develop their sensory awareness.

“When I started out in this business, I would taste every pour-over. Every espresso. I would catalogue. Notice little details,” says Cate.

“I am an empiricist,” she continues. “I learn by doing.”

Study led Cate to believe that physiology, the biology of taste, counts most when assessing coffee and understanding the coffee-drinking experience. However, she acknowledges that social factors play a part in taste preferences. Where and when you drink coffee, with whom you drink it, and other factors such as the aesthetic pleasure of drinking from a ceramic cup, play a part. But, in her view, “biology trumps all.” In other words, if you develop sensory awareness, you will know what is good and what is not good. “Snobbery has nothing to do with it.”

Peter Giuliano agrees with Cate, up to a point. Peter is one of a handful of people who rewrote the business model of high-end coffee two decades ago. I traveled with him when reporting God in a Cup. Back then, Peter was a minority owner of Counter Culture Coffee, the North Carolina specialty roaster. Scholarly by nature, he now works as the Chief Research Officer of the Specialty Coffee Association, and he is the Executive Director of Coffee Science Foundation. I have never met a more skilled, disciplined or knowledgeable coffee taster than Peter.

“If you can differentiate between Coke and Pepsi, you are able to taste the differences among coffees,” Peter tells me. In his view, you don’t need to be a trained professional to taste and render judgment about coffee.

When reporting this article, I shared a theory I dreamed up with Peter: that coffee snobbery has two faces, one admirable and one less so. There’s the ability to physically discern quality. Some may call that snobby, but I think discernment is a good thing, open to all. The other side, I suggest, is sociological: snooty opinions about a person’s ability and right to pass judgment based on his or her economic status, education or geographic locale.

Peter immediately poked a hole in my theory. “Haven’t you read Brillat-Savarin?” he asked.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was a French philosopher who wrote The Physiology of Taste. Published weeks before his death in 1826, this was arguably the most classic book on the joy and philosophy of gastronomy, and, no, I had not yet read it.

“Brillat-Savarin said, ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are,’” explained Peter. 200 years ago, Brillat-Savarin saw the link between taste and social class. In modern times, this idea has been more fully developed.

I could see Peter’s point. My fondness for single origin specialty coffee from, say, the East Guji region of Ethiopia, and my rejection of Cheetos, a food getting a lot of play in certain disruptive corners of foodie world, are both products of my social class and privilege. Brillat-Savarin was right: social class and taste are connected. That said, social factors are not everything when considering taste, physiological and otherwise. If it were, I would like the same coffee as Archie's wife, instead of sharing the same taste in coffee as the decades-younger barista from my local cafe.

Kent Bakke, former CEO of the Italian espresso machine company La Marzocco, has devoted his life to coffee and coffee technology. After retiring, he founded the Bakke Coffee Museum in Seattle. Italians, Kent points out, are a nation of coffee lovers and coffee snobs. Proud to have manufactured the first espresso machine, thereby creating espresso, Italians believe their coffee is the best in the world. Still, Kent understands that love can be deceiving.

“Here’s the thing,” the American-born Kent explained to me: the classic Moka, a stovetop espresso pot born in the 1930’s, seen in every Italian kitchen and fetishized by Italians as the only way to make espresso at home, had a design flaw. These machines failed to adequately control temperature during the brewing process. They burned the coffee.

“That burned taste is what many Italians came to know and associate with coffee excellence,” Kent said. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, when the manufacturer modified the Moka pot to prevent burning, no one wanted the new machines.

“People wanted what they knew. What was familiar.”

Despite subjective factors like our preference for familiar flavors, Kent is not deterred in believing that coffee excellence is an attainable and worthy goal.

“Achieving coffee excellence is like singing,” Kent, a singer, tells me.

“If you want to sustain a note, you have to be consciously aware of raising the pitch of that note and maintaining it. Quality takes consistent attention to detail. It’s easy to let things slide…but when it is sustained, it is beautiful.”

Talking with Paul Scott, Cate Razzook, Peter Giuliano and Kent Bakke for this piece reminded me why I wrote God in a Cup. The passion and the idealism of many in the special industry inspired me then, and it inspires me now. Coffee professionals, however, are not the only coffee lovers.

Consumers also love coffee, and they can also be coffee snobs. Some believe that the more you pay, the better the coffee must be. There is some truth to this, but the story is not so simple. Coffee beans that cost $100 per pound are not necessarily better than the beans I buy from Counter Culture, George Howell and other high quality roasting companies that cost around $20 for 12 ounces—not cheap, but not too expensive when you brew at home.

The best illustration of this case is Kopi Luwak, the Indonesian coffee selling for $100 per pound. The brand advertises itself as the world’s most expensive coffee. The high price is based not on the care with which it is grown, harvested and roasted, but on its method of production. Kopi Luwak is pooped from civet cats who have snaffled up coffee beans from the forest floor. I’m not kidding. The animals consume the fruity pulpy exterior, after which the beans, which are hard and indigestible, travel through the animal’s intestines, where they are “processed naturally” and then expelled.

In all my years of writing about coffee, I have never heard a coffee professional say a single good thing about the flavor profile of Kopi Luwak. Yet if you spend time online, you quickly learn that some consider it the ultimate snob coffee.

There are grounds to suspect other highly touted, rare coffees with high snob appeal. Jamaica Blue Mountain and Hawaiian Kona are two coffees that derive their value from their provenance—the tiny patches of high mountain land on which they are grown—and their rarity. Bad guys recognizing the chance to cash in have been known to falsify the provenance of these and other high snob-value coffees. (Personally, I wouldn’t order expensive beans on the internet from any roaster I did not know.)

Among non-professional coffee lovers, I differentiate between cost snobs and expertise snobs, who in their own view, and in mine, may not be snobs at all. Take the guy who recently posted this on Reddit:

It’s easy for the coffee-neutral to be annoyed by the Reddit chap. Why, civilians ask, must the lovers of specialty coffee be so damned persnickety? I am not going to deny that other people’s passions can strike one as irrational, obsessional. Annoying.

Still, it has been my privilege to dig beneath the surface of these questions. Bouncing around in jeeps on steep mountain roads with specialty coffee buyers who, hour after hour after hour, never tire of talking about coffee—its range of flavors, its geographic variations, how it is grown, harvested, processed, transported, roasted—from 9 in the morning until they fall asleep, I start to understand.

“This book is a love story,” I wrote in the acknowledgements for God in a Cup. Specialty coffee is not about social status. It is about love for a beautiful product that sprang unbidden from the earth, adding to the pleasure of our days.

Ethiopia, where coffee is said to have evolved, holds a special place in the hearts of many specialty coffee buyers who, for a variety of reasons, were not able to visit until 2004. Yirgacheffe is coffee’s Eden. Here is a passage from God in a Cup where Peter Giuliano describes his first visit to Yirgacheffe.

Peter is a coffee pro and a coffee scientist, a rational guy gifted with discipline and a sensitive palate. He is at home with biologists and physiologists. He is also a coffee poet, his words grounded in his enormous love for coffee, this fruit of the earth. For people like Peter, who care so much about the contents of the cup, their devotion to coffee is the opposite of snobbery. It’s love.

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