Restaurants
Comparing Vancouver's Coffee Beans
By Timothy Taylor published Oct 10, 2012
Siphon or French Press? Organic or fair trade? Vancouverites have much to choose when it comes to coffee - but do they taste good? Timothy Taylor reviews some of Vancouver's top coffee houses
It will have escaped nobody's notice that Vancouver is a top-ranked city in at least three categories. We're always high on those "livable city" lists. We have the most expensive real estate on the continent. And, of course, we're also among the urban zones most addicted to the roasted seeds of an epigynous berry found on Asian and African shrubs known as Coffea arabica.
Yeah, we love our joe in this town. We're boffo for coffee. Two Starbucks per intersection never struck us as ridiculous. That's Vancouver in a nutshell or, in this case, a roasted endosperm.
Of course, most of us also realize that our relationship with coffee hasn't been static. We weren't born this way. Don't anybody try to claim that Jack Khatsahlano greeted our city forefathers with high-altitude, shade-grown juice served out of a gold-plated Belgian vacuum coffee siphon. My point being that fine coffee isn't in our blood. It's a choice we've made, socially and economically. And as such, it offers a portrait of, if not who we are, then at least who we think we are.
I found myself considering all this over the past month as I sampled my way through a list of cafés and fine bean roasters recommended by my most ardent coffee-loving friends. But I found it brought into crystal focus while sitting in the boardroom of the Doi Chaang Coffee Company on W. Hastings Street. John Darch, the company's founder and 50 percent owner (the other 50 percent is owned, notably, by the Akha hill tribe in Thailand who farm the beans) had just served me up a cup of their single-estate espresso, and our conversation had turned to civet coffee.
You may have heard about this stuff already. The civet, a svelte mammal whose musky body scent is used in perfumery, also happens to be a bit of a coffee fiend. Only, they eat the fruit. The cherry, as it's known. What emerges from the other end of the civet then, in due course, is the seed of this fruit-the coffee "bean"-neatly de-fruited by that point and (connoisseurs maintain) enhanced in flavour as is only possible by exposure to the enzymes in a civet's digestive tract. It's coffee scat, essentially. But what Darch wanted me to understand was that Doi Chaang's particular brand of civet coffee scat was special. Sold at $55 for 50 grams, which works out to $1,100 a kilogram, and carried by both Harrod's and Dean & DeLuca, Doi Chaang's civet coffee isn't made using farmed civets who are force-fed coffee cherries and whose poop is then combed for seeds. It's made by wild Thai civets who rove the coffee plantation nocturnally and voluntarily, eating in the manner and pace of their choosing.
"Garbage in, garbage out," Darch says of other brands. "Our civets are choosing their own cherries. And of course that means they choose only the best!"
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