I just found out about this so-called "Fourth Wave of Coffee" at Salon.com, of all places.

http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/02/09/fourth_wave_coffee_slayer/index.html

Aside from the Serious Eats blog post looking like Slayer propaganda, I'm thinking this whole "Wave" business has gotten out of hand. Gosh, I'm behind the times! Stuck in the Third Wave!

Happy Brewing,
Wayne

Am I alone in the belief that pressure-profiling has been around since the days of the first lever machines? I don't have anything against Slayer (in fact, we'll hopefully have one in our soon-to-be cafe), but I think attributing a whole new "wave" to it is a little over the top. I don't really subscribe to the ideas of "waves" in the first place, though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

If I understand it correctly, the "fourth wave" isn't so, because of partial pressure profiling being available on a machine.

It has to do with the real Direct Trade coffee buying practices(not FTO certified), offering the customer a higher quality coffee, and preserving the coffee as much as possible, from the Farmers level on up. The fact that the coffee is Fresh, the espresso sweet, the milk froth done proper, are things that are a given, not what the "movement" is based upon. It takes "third wave", and goes a big step further.

The Slayer Machine isn't what it is, just because it has partial pressure profiling. It's such a great machine, in one regard, because of the coffee's it allows one to use. Because by using this partial pressure profile extraction technique, the extraction is completely different, allowing for almost a sort of full-immersion brewing of the coffee("pre-brew"), and then extracting the coffee from the basket("brew"), and still preserving the varietal aspects of such a coffee(post brew).

Ya know, the SeattleCoffeeGear Youtube videos tend be a bit, well, Ill leave it to you to find a word(s) to describe them.. but the 3-part video where they took a trip to Slayer and got to hear about what the guys were doing, would explain a lot of what they're doing. Also, reading their site might clear up some things.

Direct trade and auction coffees were said to be part of the third wave -- i.e. creating a level of the coffee market one rung higher than Starbucks. This had three elements:

• Using coffees so rare they couldn't be used in a mass market.
• Professionally trained roasters and baristas who would make a career in specialty coffee (as opposed to the two week corporate training course for part timers at Starbucks.)
• Reaching out to an audience who is more interested in the coffee than in the foam and syrups.

In general, I have a hard time seeing a high quality level defined by solely by production technology. On the contrary, I think there may even be an inverse relation between equipment tech and product quality. Mostly, the more mass the market, the better and more precise the equipment. For instance, more technology goes into making a McDonald's French fry than all the dishes in all the 3 star kitchens on earth. High end markets are about ingredients, skill and taste. Reliable and precise tools are important, but secondary to everything else.

another_jim wrote:For instance, more technology goes into making a McDonald's French fry than all the dishes in all the 3 star kitchens on earth.

Outrageous.
Never heard of El Bulli? The Fat Duck? Harold Mcgee?

I've heard of them all, have the books, and ate at many of them. Have you ever toured a food processing plant? Or even bothered to watched some of the food tech shows on the cable channels? The technological sophistication and scale are, quite simply, at a different order of magnitude.

Look at the direction the technology goes: Herve and Adria became famous by adapting industrial food technologies to the restaurant kitchen; but I know of no CEO collecting million dollar bonuses from ecstatic stockholders by deglazing pans in a ketchup plant.

The technology used in hand fabrication is never as complex or sophisticated as that of mass production, since the whole point of mass production is substituting high tech for skill and brains. Now, if that substitution makes for a better product than handcrafting, the handcrafted version dies out. For instance, even billionaires don't drive cars hand built in a smithy.

But in many cases, especially where one deals with foods or other agricultural products, mass production can do low cost and decent quality products, but it cannot do the very highest quality. In these areas, the handcrafted versions thrive because they are better.

If the Slayer machine is like a solid hand tool, rewarding skill and giving the person using it more control, it will find acceptance at the best cafes. If it is like a system, making great shots at the push of a button, Starbucks will use it and Intelly won't.

Identification of major sea changes (trends aka "waves") is always best done retrospectively.

I spend a lot of time (my day job) looking at major business / economic / technology trends and paradigm shifts. I think it's obvious to all of us that the Slayer in no way represents a major change in coffee. I also would argue that it doesn't presage any major change. It's an incremental and evolutionary step within one ongoing trend (and many would argue that it's more of a "Newton" moment than even an "iPad" moment).

Predicting where the next major trend is going to come from is difficult if not impossible, but I think that many of us would put odds on it being in the direct interaction between roasters/cafes and producers.

another_jim wrote:If the Slayer machine is like a solid hand tool, rewarding skill and giving the person using it more control, it will find acceptance at the best cafes. If it is like a system, making great shots at the push of a button, Starbucks will use it and Intelly won't.

At one point in my career, I was privileged to work with some intensely clever people on tools that were in the end widely adopted. One of the things we concluded was that tools could be divided into two broad categories. The first were tools designed to allow someone of minimal skill to produce a standardized product as quickly and cheaply and with as little variation as possible. An assembly line, or the technology in a McDonalds plant, would be an example. One of the little-discussed characteristics of such tools is that they actively penalize any level of skill beyond the required minimum, because they offer no outlet for it: a great welder on an assembly line quickly goes crazy. The other broad category of tools are those designed to allow a very skilled user to produce something that would otherwise be impossible. Those tools can be simple or complex: I would argue that both a Leica rangefinder and Photoshop fall into the latter category. Certainly the intent of the Slayer is to fall into the second grouping; how well they succeeded, time will tell. And yes, I found the Salon article a bit silly, and the author's note at the end in which he goes back to the idea of coffee as a commodified drug-delivery system somewhere between tiresome and offensive.

Best,
David

Crosspost
http://www.coffeegeek.com/forums/espres...ral/468308

Well, much as I appreciate fine machinery like the Slayer, clearly one new machine does not constitute a "wave". And paddle groups are, as we know, not even exclusive to that make. Anyway... in my own comment at Salon, I used the alternate cliche "espresso going vino" to describe how things are progressing. The wine analogy suffers less, I think, from the association with intellectual pretension (for ex., the "New Wave" of film, the various schools of modern art, and the 1st-3rd Waves of Feminism) and instead keeps the subject concrete and familiar.

How the world of wine differs from that of coffee is also important to note. After centuries of applied science and endless tinkering, not to mention skillful marketing, consumers can now take for granted a wider selection of consistently good vino than ever before in history. By comparison, in ancient times even the rich drank what we would now consider plonk.

With coffee we're still in a peculiar transition period, which at times does resemble ideological movements, due to progress so rapid that the general population has barely begun to take it in. For them, it's as if their wine choices had changed overnight from just "red" or "white" to the whole range of varietals, sorted by country, vintner, and vintage. The last thing they need is some "effete snob" jargon to describe how they're suddenly behind the times.

One other factor that distinguishes coffee from wine is how the wine-making process is mostly remote and out of sight. Consumers only need to read labels in the store and pull corks at home. Whereas with coffee, the last stage of production always takes place in our presence. The sense of involvement is greater, and of course, as the investment grows, so does the potential for failure & embarrassment. Generally people do not seek that sort of risk with their cuppa java, and who can blame them?

OK, I'm done for now. Whoever writes or talks about coffee, I beg you, stop the Wave business! It makes me seasick!

Happy Brewing,
Wayne