SEATTLE–”Listen, this is important. Before we pour, you have to be sure the foam and the espresso are the same consistency,” Jackie McCallum says. “They both have to be silky smooth.”
McCallum is jovial and patient as she shows Cindy Strohmier of Duvall, Wash., how to make a heart-shaped pattern atop a latte at Caffé L’Arte, but there’s a hint of an intensity that might serve her well at an international barista competition she plans to enter next fall.
“Let’s face it, I’m a coffee nerd,” McCallum says after a demonstration for a caffeine culture walking tour in central Seattle.
A coffee nerd? Well, at least in Seattle, McCallum won’t be lonely.
The Pike Public Market on the waterfront is said to be the clear No. 1 tourist attraction in Washington state, but caffeinated creativity seems to infuse everything about this area.
And it goes much deeper than the fact that this city is where the global Starbucks empire (including its Seattle’s Best division) got started.
The Sky City restaurant at the Space Needle, a lasting symbol of the 1962 World’s Fair, has shaken off its “Denny’s in the Sky” reputation with an acclaimed and popular new local menu that includes braised short ribs that have been marinated in coffee for 24 hours.
Go into Oliver’s at the Mayflower Hotel and bartender Patrick Donnelly will insist you try his trademark cocktail, an espresso-based concoction called the Seattle Flatliner.
Big with customers of the Cheese Cellar at Fisher Plaza near the Space Needle and at Beecher’s near the public market is something called Barely Buzz, a hand-rubbed coffee-and-lavender-flavoured creation that took the American Cheese Society’s top honours in 2007 and 2008.
“It’s actually made in Idaho,” says Dennis Nelson of the Cheese Cellar, “but a lot of its popularity stems from Seattle. It’s a perfect fit here.”
There’s also a long list of confectioners and dessert places that work with coffee. The Chocolate Box, which doesn’t make its own products but selects and markets what it considers the best of the Seattle area, will soon open a bar dedicated to matching wines with chocolate and coffee-based foods.
Despite all the caffeine, Seattle drivers seem unusually patient and courteous. The coffee shops also seem to be friendly places where strangers are more than willing to engage you in conversation.
One morning at Seattle Coffee Works, near the market, upon learning that a Canadian was present, a group of sports fans wanted to know about the chances NHL hockey might replace the departed NBA team.
The next morning, in a Tully’s – a Seattle-based coffee chain that hasn’t expanded beyond the West Coast – there’s intense discussion among people reading newspaper coverage of a decision by big local employer Boeing to shift much of its 787 Dream liner production to South Carolina.
There’s anger, but also expressions of confidence that creativity and coffee will deliver new jobs and wealth.
“New inventions will create new work. You’ll build on the fact that this is Mircrosoft town, Starbucks town,” says Barrett Young, a software designer and “caffeine junkie” visiting from Los Angeles “for business and pleasure.”
Young tells a tale about Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz discovering a great cup of coffee in New York made using something called a Clover machine.
Upon returning to Seattle, Schultz apparently told an assistant to learn everything about Clover technology and arrange a flight so he could check it out first-hand.
“Turns out, he didn’t need a flight,” Young says. “They could get over to Clover (in Seattle’s Ballard neighbourhood) by cab. There’s lots going on in this town, but a lot of it revolves around high tech and good coffee.”
Starbucks has since bought the fledgling Clover operation and is rolling out the new machines in various locations.
Caroline Hinchliff, who guides a coffee and chocolate tour for an outfit called Savor Seattle, tells a similar version of the Clover story. Hinchliff is passionate about coffee and big on her city’s history and its role in pop culture.
“It’s a shame, but there is no Café Nervosa,” Hinchliff says of the spot where the Crane brothers would have meet in the TV sitcom, Frasier. “For Niles, it was `grande half-caf latte with a whisper of cinnamon,'” she tells a group of eight from Boston, Mississippi, Alaska, Toronto, northern California and locals from the Puget Sound area.
Hinchliff says there’s no consensus on how coffee became so deeply rooted in Seattle’s culture.
“Some say it’s because we have so many Scandinavians,” she says. “They can’t get enough coffee in Finland and Sweden. Some people attribute it to the amount of rain we get – the need for a pickup with the lack of sunshine.”
She has a picture of a Filipino coffee-bean stall at the market more than a century ago, but says that as late as the 1970s, it was the lack of good coffee in Seattle that inspired a trio of locals to found what we now know as Starbucks.
As for the future, she says she’s certain there are lots of new ideas and ventures in the works, pointing to Seattle Coffee Works, a collaboration of local roasters, and to small independent shops, which are everywhere throughout Seattle’s up-and-coming neighbourhoods.
“We have people coming from all around the world for coffee,” she says. “I can’t be totally certain about the past, but I’m sure there’s a great future.”
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