"This level of coffee connoisseurship is new here, but why has it taken so long for us to catch on? Everyone knows that the Bay Area has pioneered most food categories: We make some of the best wine and most beautifully whiffy cheese in the country, and while the rest of the world is just figuring out what "organic" means, many of our progressive farmers have already deemed their practice 'beyond' it.

"Although Oakland functions as the port for all green beans arriving on the West Coast (and considering that coffee is the second largest commodity market in the world next to oil, that's a lot of beans), SF has long had a reputation for being an undiscriminating 'drip town.' (Or that's how Eileen Hassi, the perky 29-year-old who co-owns Ritual, bluntly puts it.) Especially when you compare us to the Pacific Northwest, home to such revered cafes-cum-roasters as Victrola Coffee Roasters in Seattle and Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. Indeed, Joel Pollock, Stumptown's head roaster, says that he's thought of SF as a city offering only "really, really dark roasts and having no true interest in single origin." And when I ask Erna Knutsen—the grand dame who's run the SF-based importer Knutsen Coffees for the past 21 years (her beans end up at Thomas Keller's restaurants) -- what she thinks of her hometown's brew, she says this: "I'll give you a clue. I sell very little coffee in San Francisco."

Read the entire story in 7x7 San Francisco here.

Labels: coffee, media, san francisco