The Man Who Rates Espresso: SFist Interviews The Shot's Greg Sherwin

How long have you lived in the Bay Area? What was the impetus for moving here?

I've lived in the Bay Area since 1989, just a few months before the last big earthquake. I moved here to attend graduate school at a joint bioengineering program at UC Berkeley-UCSF.

What's your day job?

By day I manage an engineering team that develops and operates one of the most popular Web sites & services on the Internet (at about 60 million unique users per month).

How and when did your obvious love for coffee start?

I started drinking coffee when I was eight or nine years old. I used to tag along with my mother on errands to the local A&P market or local savings & loan branch where we lived in Chicago. Back in the 1970s, it was somewhat customary for business to offer free coffee to their customers. So that's where I developed my original taste for it, as crude as it was at the time.

Of course, quality-wise, it was nothing anyone would intentionally seek out. So you have to fast forward to about 1990, when I visited places like New Orleans' Cafe du Monde -- where I started to realize that there was a potential for better, or at least more interesting, coffee. But the real transformation happened on trips I made to Italy in the mid/late 1990s. Starbucks was already growing like a weed nationwide. But when I got to Rome, I quickly learned from the locals that there were some families divided over the best coffee shops in town the way that some families are divided over politics. When I learned to compare the merits of the espresso at, for example, Tazza d'Oro, it opened up a whole new world to me of what was possible.

What's the origin/story behind the site? How long has it been active? Do you have any idea how many people use it as a resource? (because I think more people should!)

The site goes back longer than it was a site. Originally, I started focusing on comparing the merits of some of my favorite espresso places in the world: Sant'Eustachio in Rome; Caffe Artigiano in Vancouver; Intelligentsia in Chicago (ed. note: which is served locally at Specialty's); Zoka, Victrola, or Vivace in Seattle . . . But then I knew how much San Franciscans loved their coffee. I also knew SF's long coffee history, going back to Hills Brothers and Folgers and leading up to Alfred Peet and the genesis of Starbucks. But what I couldn't understand was why so much of San Francisco's espresso is so, well, poor.

Thus I made it a personal quest to find the best espresso places I could find here. Meanwhile, I also read stories of people who embarked on OCD-like quests of walking every street in New York City, for example. I thought, " What a great way to find good coffee ... and to discover a lot of neighborhoods at the street level that I wouldn't otherwise venture into." Of course, knowing the places to avoid can be equally important. And I felt that a citywide survey would be a good way of introducing coffee lovers and coffee shops to a greater (self-)awareness of what great coffee could be.

To do the survey right, however, I felt I needed to have standards in order to make any useful apples-to-apples comparisons. So I borrowed a lot of the tasting criteria (though few of the "slurping" techniques) used by the SCAA for cupping coffee. And I focused specifically on the single espresso as a coffee "yardstick". The espresso is complicated enough to require good skills, equipment, and beans to do right (in contrast with drip coffee) -- and yet so many places universally serve it. Of course, most people like some volume of milk in their espresso drinks, but I refrained from that given all the non-coffee variables associated with adding milk.

That's how this obsession began in the summer of 2003. By the end of that year, I had accumulated a database of over 200 places -- averaging about two espressos a day, every day. Besides being highly caffeinated, I also considered putting it all in a book form. I wanted to put together the guide that I had wished I could buy myself. But after several book proposal rejections from publishers who catered to the local food, beverage, and lifestyle market, I essentially decided to self-publish. That meant finding a way to get my database on the Web -- something I'm all too familiar with in my day job. The first real prototype site was launched early in 2005. I say "early" because to this day I still don't feel it has yet even made it to the "beta" stage yet. The focus has been on the ratings, so the site, at www.coffeeratings.com, has only just started to add features like a blog, for example. (Meanwhile, it's still lacking basic navigation!)

I am honestly not all that sure how many people use it. Though I really should peek at the logs more and find out. It's a labor of love, so that hasn't been my main motivation. But I do get a number of interesting e-mails and made a number of good contacts through the site already - if that's any indication. The people who "got" what I was doing seemed to love it, though.

How often are the ratings updated -- are they fairly current?

I typically add a couple new places each week. That's just in SF proper. I'm also accumulating a pretty decent list of places I've been to throughout the Bay Area, let alone the world. But the SF focus ensures better completeness and the opportunity for more frequent updates.

As for how current they are, each of the over 400 entires has a date when I first reviewed them. If I've revisited them at least once, the most recent revisit date is also listed. I make a point of revisiting favorites to keep them honest. Also, I sometimes receive e-mails telling me about places that have really declined or improved, and I try to make a point of revisiting those.

Of course, the big issue I've had to face is that one person, while offering a consistent baseline standard for reviewing, can only do so much. I've considered adding user reviews in future versions of the site. But unfortunately, most Web-based implementations of user reviews end up like high school "Battle of the Bands" contests -- they end up less about quality and more about popularity, which can be very different.

Your cafe and restaurant ratings take very specific criteria into account, as you've indicated. You use espresso, for instance, as the baseline benchmark for the quality of a place's coffee. However, I'm wondering if your favorite places to go for coffee are actually necessarily the "highest rated" ones.

This is, of course, a great question. There are some places that excel at espresso and, say, a regular cup of joe. Take Cafe Organica and Ritual Roasters; they both take relatively painstaking approaches to making the freshest french press coffee. But other places may not follow the same rule.

I had to pick a yardstick, and to me espresso represents a greater challenge with a wider variety of variables and approaches that a place can take. And just as I don't trust a pizza place that cannot make a decent cheese pizza, or a Thai place that doesn't make a decent pad thai, as a general rule I haven't had great coffee at places with lousy espresso. There are places with lousy espresso with pretty decent coffee, however. Cafe Abir being a good example.

What are some of your favorite coffee resources/books/references/Web sites?

CoffeeGeek.com is excellent (ed. note: we whole-heartedly agree). Mark Prince has really done a lot for good coffee on the Internet. And in the online days before there were blogs to replace Usenet, I used to follow alt.coffee a bit.

When you get down to the bean, Tom Owen of SweetMaria's fame is pretty legendary also. His reviews of coffee stocks on the SweetMaria's Web site (www.sweetmarias.com) are some of the most educational "marketing" materials I've ever read.

On the subject of beans, Kenneth Davids' "Home Coffee Roasting" is a great reference. And while I've read the David Schomer books, I'm still particular to the out-of-print "Espresso - From Bean to Cup" by Nick Jurich when it comes to technique. But in general, I like just about any coffee book that isn't dead-weighted with recipes.

What do you think about the descriptor "bacon and eggs coffee"?

What I like about it is that you don't really have to explain what it means. It's rare that phrases so short can be that sensory.

And for the record, I love bacon & eggs coffee. People get the impression that I am an espresso snob. And make no mistake, I am. But I also have friends who fear having to make coffee around me when I come to visit. The fact is that I love coffee, first and foremost. If I only loved the narrow range of coffee that could be made with the highest standards -- with fine-tuned equipment, the best ingredients, and an outrageous level of skill -- I could rarely enjoy coffee. You could then make the case that I didn't so much love coffee -- rather, just some freak of nature derived from it when all the planets aligned just right. That and how could I put myself through so many overextracted SF espressos!

Favorite method of home brew?

Honestly depends on my mood. When I'm not making espresso, which is often, I like French press and vac pot. But just as often I will make a Moka pot on the stove -- or even coffee from a Neopolitan stove top maker. And yes, even drip filter coffee. So besides espresso, I guess you could say I like the variety.

Aside from coffee-related institutions, are there any Bay Area gems you'd recommend to our readers (restaurants/bookstores/parks/whatever)?

Some of the lesser known things about the Bay Area that I really enjoy:

* Sutro Bath ruins and Seal Rocks -- It's amazing to think what this place once was in its heyday. Adolph Sutro's mansion looked down on this interesting plot of rock at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, where a variety of amusements and interesting buildings once stood. Even today, it's an interesting place to climb around. Though I will risk sounding like a local when I say that I miss having the Musee Mechanique there ... not to mention the rock wall that you could once climb from the edge of the bath ruins to one of the nearby rocks in the sea that was removed in the early 1990s over safety concerns.

* The Chinese New Year's Treasure Hunt -- Every year I look forward to this annual charity fundraiser that involves SF history, exploration of the city's tiniest details, and the surrounding mania of the Chinese New Year's parade.

* Street opera singers, Robert Close and Litz Plummer -- You know there's something special about San Francisco when you can regularly listen to the sounds of street opera -- even if they are pop arias -- at the end of Maiden Lane or while dining on the sidewalk in front of Il Massimo Lounge.

* Portuguese Festas, or Holy Ghost Festivals - Half Moon Bay, San Jose, Benecia, Vallejo, Sausalito, Moutain View, Fremont, Hayward, Petaluma... they are everywhere. And unless you or someone you know has family that immigrated from the mid-Atlantic Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, chances are you had no idea they even existed. But every summer, these communities are taken over by large traditional festivals involving crowned queens, a parade and procession, marching bands, and Portuguese meals offered freely to the public through charitable donations. Though you do have to venture out into the Central Valley to catch the festas with the benign form of Azorean bullfighting.

Finally, what's the future hold for you in terms of coffee and the site?

I guess a lot of that is yet to be determined. I've made a number of interesting, and some surprising, contacts since I've "went public" with the Web site. It's hard to say where it will lead. But I already had some interesting job offers I never expected. ;^)

Well, thanks so much for letting SFist interview you, Greg! Rest assured, SFist will keep its readership up-to-date on your doings about the coffee scene. Folks that want to check out Greg's latest thoughts and activities should definitely visit The Shot.