fancy schmancy coffee

This weekend I'm in SF (sunlight! my apartment! omar! good food!) and I have been drinking all the ritual double lattes I can get my grubby little hands on. Saturday we were at the City Beer Store, and ended up wandering over to the new Blue Bottle cafe at Mint Plaza to gawk at their fancy coffee machine.

For those of you who don't know, SF is turning into pretentious coffee central. and this is with just coffee, not espresso. Blue Bottle was well known for having great coffee, but they only had a dinky little kiosk in Hayes Valley, so Ritual generally won out in the cafe wars. Blue Bottle just opened their new place in Mint Plaza, and they have a 20K Siphon Bar Coffee machine. Just in case that wasn't clear, I mean 20K as in 20 Gs. $20,000. This site has some excellent pictures and videos of a 20K pot of coffee: laughing squid.

So I went, and we ordered something Columbian. It was gorgeous. The presentation was lovely, and the server brought it with some caramel candy he thought would "pair well" with the coffee (seriously?). Despite my misgivings of paying $13 for a small pot of coffee (people are starving in africa!) it was fantastic. so good. I went to Ritual the next day to try their Clover machine (much less visually impressive, but only 3K 11K) and was not as impressed.

On another coffee note, I bought one of those little french press things for $2 at a garage sale, but I have no idea how to obtain, grind, or properly store beans. Take that coffee industry!