By These Pickers and Stealers

I fall from the sky with the lightning into New Orleans, two hours from the funeral.  A bad flight, a flight that causes sudden infatuation with trains. I consider the idea that tragedy leaves echoes,  like shockwaves, creating random unsafe zones in all directions for hundreds of miles, even up in the air, but this thought is cured by the feel of solid ground.

No one meets me because no one knows I have come. Of course, my grandma knows because she is dead and the dead know. This I was told, perhaps by my grandma Dette herself, when I was young. Beliefs like these, beliefs gathered in childhood, have left imprints my adulthood cannot completely erase: God knows and Santa Claus knows. No one else knows I have come. I remain unexpected, and so not missed.

The Louisiana summer air. I feel the weight of humidity before I feel the rain. It is claustrophobic like fevered dreams, like waking from nightmares to blankets and sweat. Now, I am sweating in the rain.

Outside the airport, everyone is moving slow. Careless and slow. It takes five minutes for the air conditioner in my rented car to kill the heat and begin chilling the damp patches around the knees of my pants. My trousers, she would say. Normally, I’d wear tan shoes against a charcoal suit, but not today. Black wing tips.

On the highway I lose the city, its wounds lingering on my peripheral as I watch only the road at first, heading inland. I savor this distance from suffering, give safe harbor to my practiced indifference. I’m not really here. This thought has been negotiated.

 Eventually I will look through the trees as I drive for the brown bayou water and wonder about alligators. This thought, this thought about alligators, embarrasses me. I think about this and don’t think about the funeral, beyond wondering if that is where I am going.

Note to my non-coffee industry friends: This is about coffee stuff. The jargon has not been removed, replaced, or reincarnated. But the links are mostly for you. You’re welcome.

I started pour over brewing at home ten years ago because coffee makers that could approach brewing at SCAA specs were rare in the US and too expensive, at least when combined with buying a decent grinder.  So I opted for a good grinder and a pour over cone, that is, a wealthy grinder and a poor brewer.

My chosen brew method led me to run the photo below on the cover of The Specialty Coffee Chronicle in 2004. It was easy to take artistic espresso related photos, roasting photos, and origin photos. But brewing was not readily photogenic unless you were using a French press and the French press had been overdone. Seems funny now, with all the beautiful pour over paraphernalia that’s available.

I received numerous phone calls and emails about the photo, including one from Starbucks’ founder Gerry Baldwin, asking me who was in the photo and where it was taken. Almost without exception, people were expressing interest in the photo because they felt the industry was placing too much emphasis on espresso, and as a result, the drinks that feature coffee as only an ingredient. Our industry segment was founded on a passion for bringing truly excellent drip coffee to the masses. Our roots as an industry in the US are the Bean Stores of the 1970’s, whose roots are the coffee counters in grocery stores 100 years ago. At Batdorf & Bronson’s Tasting Room in Olympia, WA and similar concepts elsewhere that are essentially bean stores and do not serve espresso, there is a sense of purity (not due to the absence of espresso…it is the sense of purity that accompanies simplicity, I think),  that I believe those who called to talk about the pour over photo were trying to recapture.  At the very least, they saw in this somewhat dramatic pour over photo the potential for bringing a little excitement to brewing and engaging the baristas for whom brewing was often a matter of simply pushing a button.

Even though a number of coffeehouses, like Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Company, had been featuring pour over stations for years, the cover photo was part of a small trend. The man in the photo, who did not at that time serve what most of us would consider specialty coffee, was recruited as a spokesperson of sorts for a company that manufactured pour over stations. He even worked in their booth at the SCAA 2005 conference in Seattle.

Then came the Clover® Brewing System.

If ever the timing for a product launch within the specialty coffee industry has been dead on perfect, it was the introduction of the Clover brewing machine. The Clover machine filled the need expressed by those who had been inspired by the pour over photo. It wasn’t espresso. It required an attentive barista and gave that barista a significant ability to manipulate the outcome. It was slightly entertaining and certainly interesting. It brewed a fine cup of coffee with a somewhat different mouth feel than consumers were used to, and it enthralled second wavers as well as third wavers.

And then, suddenly, surprisingly, and oddly, the Clover was still here but not here, within view but out of reach, inside our coffeehouses already fading. The promise of what the Clover could have been within the specialty coffee industry segment all but vanished. Whatever Starbucks’ motivations for acquiring the makers of Clover might have actually been, and I’m certain they were multi-fold, the effect was to make the barista brewing vacuum (no pun intended), which was a felt but still vague need prior to Clover, feel like sudden gravity. Internet forums lit up with discussions of manual brewing options to address the onset of entropy for Clover machines. It’s not that Chemex, Aeropress, and a variety of cone filter set-ups and materials did not exist before Clover became a collector’s item. But the Clover helped identify and, indeed, helped create a need and expectation for barista-dependent brewing methods.

Perhaps in reaction to the technical complexity of the Clover and its price tag, the vacuum was filled by the simplest and least expensive methods of making coffee. Even if the Clover had not gone so quickly from rock star to rock star in rehab, I think we would have seen growth in the popularity of manual brewing. The market would have forced some perceptual balance between the have-a-Clovers and the have-not-a-Clovers. Much of the specialty coffee industry is still in guerilla warfare mode, where simple, cheap, and effective (i.e. GOOD) is the order of the day. But I don’t think barista-dependent brew methods would have come to the fore as quickly or with as much energy and creativity as they have if it had not been for Clover’s sudden and slow exit, limping away with parts falling off like an “outmode” from the animated movie Robots, for now anyway. I suspect there are still some surprises left in the story of Clover, a rescue, a renewal, a revival, a return to availability…perhaps all of these.

In my mind the Clover was first and foremost a technical response to the true complexity of coffee and this alone held great value. I would guess its appeal as a barista-dependent brew method was unexpected during the initial imagining, though the company identified this selling point early and incorporated it to good effect.  

Manual brewing techniques meet the need for the barista to be engaged and bring enhanced skill and knowledge to the brewing. And when combined with a backstage device like the Extract Mojo they are a suitable response to the complexity of coffee with the added benefit of being arty and crafty and chef-like. I could not be happier to see the popularity of manual brewing and I believe it should play a role in every coffeehouse with the added benefit of providing consumers with the opportunity to enjoy specialty brewing of specialty coffee at home, something Clover could not do.

But something is missing, something the espresso machine has in spades and the Clover has too. With manual brewing there’s no gizmo, no secret moving parts, no ghost in the machine, no hardware, no need for tools. To use and simultaneously ask forgiveness for using a slightly subterranean pop culture reference, there is no steampunk in manual brewing.

We love our heavy iron roasters, exposed group heads, and  lever machines.

Although more Tomorrow Land than steampunk, the BUNN Trifecta has entered the breach and, after overcoming (mostly) the initial knee-jerk skepticism, is finding its place. The Trifecta does not satisfy our industry segment’s seeming need for bent metal, but it does reflect a technical response to the complexity of coffee while providing an active role for the barista in brewing. At the end of the day, or the end of the morning rush anyway, it is always about what delivers the finest cup and does not detract from all the effort that came before. I think bringing the barista’s knowledge and skill to non-espresso coffees is one the most fortunate trends in coffee. I also welcome a diverse menu of brewing methods. Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts once wrote, “A great cup of coffee is more than just a riveting sensory experience. It is in fact a small miracle.” When it comes to creating miracles, it helps to have options.

It’s true, I’m not a fan of Dos Equis the beer but I am a big fan of their ad campaign, The World’s Most Interesting Man. And I’m not alone. Facebook pages devoted to the character have over 200,000 fans combined. If you include the Dos Equis page, where he is the main attraction, it is well over 1 million. The commercials are funny and well made. The entire campaign is a near pitch-perfect execution of the branding brief provided to the ad agency, Euro RSCG:

• Distinctive (other than “Mexican-ness,” a direct quote from the agency’s initial research)
• Desirable
• Premium identity
• Different from other brands
• Cool brand
• Worth paying more for

Okay, this list could be found in almost anyone’s branding brief, but then you look at “anyone’s” advertising and the execution does not live up to the intent.  Few industries produce as much advertising that looks as if it is cut from the same cloth as does the beer industry. The Dos Equis commercials are certainly distinctive and different from other brands. More importantly, they not only bring the brand intent to life, they delivered the desired measurable results.

Although Heineken USA, which owns the Dos Equis brand, first introduced The World’s Most Interesting Man in 2007, they did not go national with the campaign until 2009. Yup, right in the middle of the recession. Sales of Dos Equis in the US went up 27% while the most of the beer industry was seeing declines and it became one of the top 10 selling imports.

There are several things I love about all this, the first being that Heineken went for it during a recession and did not cower behind cost cutting, at least not in marketing the 2X. This, it seems to me, is how The World’s Most Interesting Man would have done it, attack when the chips are down.  But my favorite thing about the entire campaign is that the ad agency, Euro RSCG, appears to be breaking some rules.

Broken Rule #1: They used an old guy in a beer commercial. No, really, they did. The actor is 72.

Broken Rule #2: The old guy admits in the commercial that he doesn’t always drink beer. No, really, he does: “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis.”

I take notes for the specialty coffee industry from Broken Rule #2 because Broke Rule #1 is a bit of an illusion. Yes, the commercials feature a 72 year old man, but he is often surrounded by young women and the ads still capture the younger demographic because The World’s Most Interesting Man is everything 20 something guys actually think they will be and everything 30 something guys hope they will be. This is truly clever, a beer commercial that targets a wide demographic swath without relying on delusion or nostalgia from older men as they watch all the young and fit people having fun at the beach or out at a bar seemingly unencumbered by other obligations, as commonly seen in beer commercials. 

[For a disquieting take on these kinds of traditional beer commercials, check out a public service commercial from the same advertising agency, Euro RSCG, here http://www.eurorscg.com(go to Our Work then TV Showcase and click INPES). And while you’re there watch their commercial for the Let’s Color Project sponsored by Dulux, which is Glidden Paint in the US. Also check out their commercials for Evian, Peugeot, and Canal+.]

The work-around on Rule #1 is clever , but Broken Rule #2 is just plain brilliant and raises questions for any marketer.  The brilliant part is that in the process of making a seemingly negative (but true) comment about beer, they frame the message that The World’s Most Interesting Man has a sophisticated palate and he ranges across a wide selection of drinks. He cannot settle down with just one kind of beverages and he never pretended he would. You knew what he was when he started drinking you.

Who doesn’t want to be so interesting that the answer to the question of what we like to drink might take a long time to answer. It depends. Where am I? Who am I with, kings or presidents? Have I just finished running with the bulls, or writing a novel?

And never mind the fact that drinking the same beer whenever you drink beer is the opposite of interesting. Yes, it’s a damn annoying detail but it is overshadowed by how well, in one brief feint with the marketing knife, they find our soft belly and sink it home. If this were not true, sales of Dos Equis would not have increased as dramatically as they did.

Dude, if you’re going to look this good when you reach retirement and look back on a life full of…action, maybe, then you had better be choosy about your beer. And, we know you know about wine and vodka and stuff too and don’t sit around drinking beer all day, but, you know, when you do, make sure it is as sophisticated as you are…brother.

I don’t buy it. You don’t buy it. But a whole bunch of beer drinkers did. Results.

Breaking the rules, written and lore. Thinking outside the box. Turning the problem inside out. Pick a cliché. For me, it’s about never letting an assumption escape alive. The specialty coffee industry, now well into its adulthood, has piled up its fair share of assumptions and sacred cows (speaking of clichés).   It’s not always easy to recognize them.  But when I do I try, if I have the presence of mind, to ask what if.

Euro RSCG asked, What if we used an old guy and what if he sold a positive with a negative?

Your list will be different than my list, but here are a few somewhat generic, but by no means benign, starters for coffee:

What if manual brewing (complete the question)?

What if barista competitions (complete the question)?

What if coffeehouses (complete the question)?

What if my target market (complete the question)?

What if instant coffee (complete the question)?

What if the supply (complete the question)?

What if China (complete the question)?

What if New York or London or Moscow (complete the question)?

What if Social Networking (complete the question)?

What if the temperature (complete the question)?

What if quality (complete the question)?

It might not be The World’s Most Interesting List, but I could gather a group of coffee professionals who would argue for a month about the most important sentence completion, let alone the answers to the resulting questions.  

What an abundant place we find ourselves in as an industry segment if it is true that we can still argue about the questions before we even get to the answers.  What an empty place if we believe we understand the questions and have our answers filed and ready for the next reporter or grad student or industry presentation.

Lately, sitting in a beach chair on the dirt that would some day be his backyard lawn, David has been expecting, feeling entitled to, signs from God. Not the earthshaking variety, of course. Nothing need be broken, shattered, or set aflame. He’s hoping for subtle communications, something sophisticated and aesthetically coherent within the context of his ambiguous philosophies. He’s dogmatic in his agnosticism, after all, and not up to a serious reworking of his take on the universe.

On a recent Saturday morning he’d slept through the drone of a leaf blower for the first time in his life and considered the possibility that it was a divine gift.

The ability to sleep through a leaf blower.

But then there was his sperm count. If God were going to bestow a gift, wouldn’t it be something useful over the long term, a few extra swimmers in his loins so Anne would get pregnant and he could go back to the snug security of his Jockeys?

The sperm doctor had told him that infertility was on the increase everywhere. Even the monkeys were shooting blanks. Apparently, this was supposed to make him feel better, but it only made him paranoid. Vague paranoia. This is how they wanted him to feel. They.

Since Anne had made sure to tell everyone when they decided to get pregnant, everyone knew they weren’t. So, they bought a house. If they couldn’t manufacture, they were going to consume. It gave them something to talk about with friends, other than how to be productive in the bedroom.

But David didn’t like the attention that came with being the newest young couple in a new neighborhood full of young couples. He wondered what it was about living in newly built homes that made everyone act so…neighborly. Two days after they had moved in, everyone from three houses in every direction had dropped by just to introduce themselves.

“What’s wrong with these people?” he asked Anne.

“Relax. They’re just filling in the gaps.”

“What gaps?”

“The history. This neighborhood has no history.”

David liked this theory and began to refer to what he viewed as the neighborhood’s forced friendliness as Harding Street histrionics.

One of my favorite movies is Funny Bones with Oliver Platt, who plays a character that desperately wants to be funny but isn’t. What’s worse, he’s living in the shadow of his famous comedian father, played by Jerry Lewis. In one scene, the father explains to his son, “There are two types of comedians, a funny bones comedian and a non-funny bones comedian. They’re both funny. One is funny, the other tells funny.”

I think there are magic bones magicians and non-magic bones magicians. Both can fool you and both are entertaining. One makes you say “how did you do that?” The other makes you say, “who the fuck let you out of your bottle.”

This is an important distinction and has something to do with why magic is on my mind lately.

Asking “how did you do that?” is a common response to watching a magic trick. But when you’re watching a magic bones magician your initial response is not “how did you just trick me?” The most common initial response is disbelief, which actually means your very first response is to believe. You question your senses and even your sanity. You don’t wonder what the secret is or what is happening that you can’t see. You wonder when the seams at the corners of reality are going to be sewn back together.

When you watch people watching a magic bones magician, they do things like reaching out to the person next to them to steady themselves, or scream, or simply walk away. They almost always have a physical reaction, bending over, crouching, jumping, spinning, as if they need their body to help them absorb the force of the impact. One of the most innovative things about the street magic David Blaine filmed for TV in the 1990’s, beyond whittling the magician’s presenting premise and need to talk down to almost nothing,  was to focus on these types of reaction.

If a magic bones magician is performing for a large audience, the applause comes slowly because people must remember themselves, where they are and the appropriate social response. They gasp; they look at their neighbor to see if their neighbor saw the same things and they wonder if they are dreaming, then they applaud.

The non-magic bones magician may be very skilled, a master technician, even a true sleight of hand artist and a talented entertainer. But almost everyone in his audience believes that if they knew the secrets, owned the proper accoutrements, and practiced; they could do the tricks too.

The magic bones magician makes you ashamed that you ever even owned that Mark Wilson magic set when you were seven and makes you vow never again to pull a quarter from a child’s ear.

When I was in high school I had the good fortune, by pure happenstance I think, to not only work at a magic shop but to meet, hear lectures from, and on occasion receive personal instruction from a group of magic bones magicians. You would not recognize any of their names. If you are a professional magician, you would recognize them all. You know, I never recovered from that.

Good magicians (whether it is in their bones or not) walk a tight line of dynamic tension between your need and their own, your need for wonderment and their own need to travel secret passages that are near meaningless apart from the presence of those who do not know they exist.  The fact that they are willing or actually desire to provide you with wonderment is what sets them apart from con artists. The fact that they have these secrets, some of them surprisingly profound in their wider implications, sets them apart from jugglers or acrobats or flamenco guitarists.

If there are tiers to these secret passages, and I believe there are…at Chilean miner depths, then I suppose I never saw more than a few top levels. But I have never forgotten what I saw there and the things I learned.  Most of the time, I keep these things neatly tucked away and don’t think about them much. Maybe I even avoid them.

I generally stay out of magic shops, but if I should happen into one I am overwhelmed with the feeling of loss. It’s not really the feeling of personal loss, it’s a feeling of loss around the emptiness inside most magic shops. The secrets are not there. You can buy every trick in the place and learn them all and you will be a collection of paraphernalia and moves and people will ask you how you do it but no one will reach out for a shoulder to steady them when they watch. If you’re a magic bones magician in waiting, my guess is the first clue will be when you set aside the objects acquired from the magic shop and carry the principles you’ve learned to other things and other frames.

The feeling of loss I experience in magic shops is only personal to the extent that there is nothing in those places for me to recapture. Even if I decided to return to a proper study of magic, the things that I want to understand are not found in magic shops or on YouTube, and they most certainly don’t involve a deck of cards.  Some of them are found in books, but only if you know how to read between the lines and past the last page.

Still, I am a great fan of all sorts of magic, whether it comes from the bones or not, whether it is corny or stupefying, as long as it honors the places and people from which it came.  And I appreciate anyone willing to walk that line of dynamic tension. I don’t care if you’re dressed like Fred Astaire in evening attire and putting together and pulling apart giant metal rings that serve no earthly purpose outside of a magic act, or if you’re dressed like a 1980’s glam rocker, I’ll watch if you’re willing to stand up and declare you’re a magician.

But my favorite magic is magic that happens along the way, magic with very little premise beyond circumstances that appear to be a part of going about our everyday lives.

Years ago I was walking down the street with friends. I took the stir stick from one of their coffee cups and made it disappear right in front of their eyes. It vanished. It was as gone as gone can be.  They all started cussing and looking around for the stir stick.

That must have been eight years ago but those people still talk about it. They had never seen me do a magic trick before then and they have not seen me do one since. The satisfaction of that moment, when everything was right, was worth forgoing a manufactured repeat.

That trick was taught to me 30 years ago by a magic bones magician. That day was not the only time I had done the trick, but I really think it was the moment for which the trick was taught to me and, I have to admit, probably the only time the teaching was earned.

I was disappointed to find the method, which to my mind is something like a haiku poem in its beauty and simplicity…even in its meter, described in a recently published book of magic, but that is how it goes.  I’m sure it is not its first appearance in a book and I know it won’t be the last. For all their talk about keeping secrets, magicians love to write books and a stunning number have been published over the last 300 years. Despite this, very few secrets have taken up permanent residence in the public consciousness.  I think the only real secret of magic that just about everyone believes they understand is the concept of misdirection.

The gap between what most people believe misdirection to be and what it is in all its fullness as used by magicians is part of the pact we (ye ol’ laypeople) make with the performers. We don’t want to know, we really don’t.

The 2006 movie, The Prestige, openly presents a great secret of magic as part of the narrative, indeed, as a completely overt theme within the movie. But it is easy to capture only the implications that float on the surface if you don’t ask the second and third questions and then ask those questions again outside the context of viewing the movie.  But most of us won’t ask those questions outside the context of a given scene, let alone the context of the movie or while watching a magician in some other place and time.

That is the gift, after all these years, which was given to me by my brief but very intense career in magic and by the magic bones magicians I met.  I learned to ask another question. Then, ask another question. Then, ask another question. Long before the poet Rilke taught me to love the questions over the answers, I loved the wondering of how magic happened more than I loved the knowing. I think this is why I would always pick a magician’s biography or a magic history over a how-to book. One is full of questions and the other is all answers.

The one question I never ask is, How did you do that?