Restaurants
Comparing Vancouver's Coffee Beans - continued
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's a great story. (I've been telling it ever since.) And perhaps that is the key point here. Coffee these days is very much about having a great (and, ideally, heartwarming) story. Google any of the major players in Canadian independent beans these days-Kicking Horse, Salt Spring Coffee, Ethical Bean, Doi Chaang-and you'll find such consistent language it's hard to believe they weren't centrally coordinated. And I'm not talking about the product being just "organic" or "fair trade," either, which should be considered the bare minimum to enter this field.
I'm talking instead about other initiatives intended to humanize these companies to the point that they don't sound like corporations at all. More like nonprofits. These are companies touting projects to build schools in Central America (Ethical Bean), or to recycle coffee grounds and bags (Salt Spring), or to funnel financial support to the Canadian Nature Conservancy and local food banks (Kicking Horse). Doi Chaang, whose founder gave half the company to the Thai tribe where he sources his beans, is perhaps only pushing farther down the same virtuous avenue. Did they have to? Not legally. But to make a mark in coffee, it was a very savvy move.
"Of course people won't buy crappy coffee," Darch says. "But nobody has a story like ours."
And as if to underscore that point, he describes how sales of Doi Chaang's coffee "struggled" for the first two years. Not because of quality. Critic Ken Davids, whose ratings in Coffee Review have become the Parker Points for the beverage, tells me that Doi Chaang coffee is in the top 10 percent of coffees he has "cupped," rating around 89-91, where your typical cup of Starbucks is 83 to 84, and Folgers instant crystals come in around 60. No, the struggling was story-related, in the sense that not enough people knew about what Doi Chaang was doing. Sales only exploded following the airing of a Global TV documentary on the company's "Beyond Fair Trade" partnership with the Akha. In one year sales tripled and the company hasn't looked back.
Which is a curious market feature, when you think about it. We don't refuse to use Hootsuite unless Ryan Holmes builds a school in Honduras. We don't boycott Burrowing Owl if they neglect to build their brand around high-profile environmental donations. Why, then, do consumers demand that people in the coffee industry-both wholesalers and retailers-commit to making the world a happier and more egalitarian place? What the hell is in this stuff other than caffeine, some kind of ethical, high-minded pixie-dust?
Doubtful. I think the answer is, in fact, more scientific and less flattering to us individually. It's Batesian mimicry.
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