more than 60 points is the margin by which “sexyfoam” three-peated as champion. still as humble and aw-shucks as ever. cracked up the judges with his banter, poured milk into his cappuccinos from both hands simultaneously, dropped his extra coffee on anyone who would take some, took a detour to greet old friends, walked out with another trophy. that’s lem — a fusion of both crowd-friendly pure smoothness and judge-friendly pure skill. and he used established, no-nonsense coffee — counter culture’s la forza espresso blend, and the ethiopia shakisso. the latter, carted home to the blogbar this evening and pulled in tiny quantities on the old-school lever machine, reminded us of malted rose hips.

this blog was so busy minding the mastery and watching his utterly worry-stricken lady that we failed to take copious notes. here, in photographs, is your champeen and your duly proceeding finalists. corrections/elaborations welcome in the comments.

lemuel's way with a grinder is, more or less, to tell it what to do with powerful forehead mind-vibes, deity-like.

lem: “in the hole, i say. the spro goes IN THA HOLE.” lem’s girlfriend: “argh.”

lem concocts a drinkable thing. lem’s girlfriend thinks, “argh.”

lem pours his drinkable thing. has plenty of time to think idly, “hope the girlfriend isn’t too ‘argh.’”

2nd place: atlanta’s chandler rentz blew through his routine with a gruff assurance and elevated his shop (aurora coffee) and coffee company (batdorf & bronson) in a hurry. notable: flash-lit orange peels over his signature beverage. major piece of flair for chandler.

3rd place: octane coffee’s dale donchey was demonstrably disappointed with third place. he expected to win. notable: a signature beverage that not only included tobacco-smoked blood orange, it also took something like 11 minutes to make in round one. and he still finished within the 15-minute limit. gratuitous, this blog says.

4th place: greenville’s shannon hudgens might have easily tiptoed into third place if he had told the judges to stir his signature beverage — a drink, as it happens, that kept drawing raves. a sipping chocolate without a bit of chocolate in it, only espresso and mascarpone cheese. at what point, this blog wonders, is shannon no longer the darkhorse wunderkind of the southeast, but rather a thoroughbred heavyweight? to, ah, mix some metaphors.

5th place: a crowd favorite, that dustin mattson. all snappy fingers and redneck-hipster-geek and “let me just caress this mixer while i’m waiting.” also of octane, but recently of greenville. also with a fiancee full o’ nerves who is TRYING TO LOOK CALM.

6th place: dave delchamps, of 1000 faces coffee, had more niceness than kipper the dog. without question a classy, independent barista who happened to roast his own coffee. a two-time finalist with a trail of admirers.

the southeast’s motley posse, circa 2010. this was before anyone had won yet and knew whom to hate/love/glare at.

traveling to france seems to be the only trip this blog can’t contort into a coffee trip of some type.

but, ah, we will now strenuously avoid our annual tome on the deplorable state of coffee in france, just as this blog has tried to avoid the coffee itself this trip. abetting this effort: a stash of counter culture single-origin selections and one heavily distracted airprort TSA agent, who quite clearly targeted our airplane carry-on for scrutiny because of the nefarious-looking device within it. the fellow, however, was called away, and so we whisked the bag from under him and now drink fine siphon brews in a small franco-german village near strasbourg.

mouths have dropped, of course. eyes have widened at a brewing method so novel to most home brewers, yet already so ubiquitous in snobby circles stateside. weeks into this visit, the thing is still a spectacle. but instead of getting wound up in the mechanics of the thing, like stirring methods and coffee-to-water ratios, the recipients (mostly africa and europe-dwelling family members) tend to wade into a gradual exploration of what flavors this device has to offer. when it comes to new and wonderful coffee, in other words, they tend to take a long, warm bath in Taste instead of fiddling with the faucet and body washing aids.

failed metaphor alert! and yet, it seems kind of funny from this side of the pond how “scientific” the american approach can be. how ruthlessly mechanical, how very cause-and-effect this blog’s brewing debates and saturday experiments tend to become. south carolina drinkers always want to know how the danged thing works. they then tend to offer an instant opinion on how you might make it better. there is, of course, much to be gained from a methodical, scientific examination of coffee extraction. there is also much to be lampooned in the pontifications of a coffee drinker who wants to wax profound on every cup instead of just serving something excellent and getting out of the way.

but then, we’re in gothic cathedral territory. the stones for the local marvel were carved from the rocky hill beside our village. scientific prowess was required. but the point wasn’t to prove those methods, but to get to something else that transports you. the means was never the thing. this requires a sort of investigative vulnerability; it precludes a swaggering hubris.

so let’s apply this broadly, using absurd generalities, shall we? let’s! there seem to be numerous european coffee personalities who embody investigative vulnerability. they seem to be much respected for it. a significant slice of the americans, meanwhile, seem to carve entire identities out of something transient — a brewing method, a passing innovation, a staunch position in an argument. they are then loved or loathed, and sometimes both. exceptions are of course on both sides. but who’s counting? CI always categorizes simplistically!

alas, a caveat: it could be that an overly large sense of introspection and contentment is why french espresso continues to be so horrific. cultural navel gazing = deification of the mediocre and all that.

to compensate, this blog will now go measure its siphon burner flame height and correlate it with drop times in dry, northern french climates.

P.S. this blog, of course, normally uses the butane burner for its siphon heat source. getting that thing on board an international aircraft, however, was clearly a nonstarter. thus, the alcohol burner seen here, which required a sort of, ah, vulnerable investigation into the bowels of the fench supermarche’, in search of what they call “alcool a bruler.” #success.

with winter upon us, the thing now obliterates all sensible views — and elbow room — around the coffee bar. which prompts a sort of indoor seed/cup dilemma: stash the tree to maintain a diverse brewing bar, or favor the tree and shelve the second (syphon) grinder? on the one hand, only one of them is aliiive. on the other hand, only one delivers warmth.

question is, would this be your fault? should you, as a parent of eclectic tastes (no, really!) be embarrassed? most disturbingly, is this cause for intervention by the department of social services?

… not that we frequent these establishments, really. but still, it would appear that they somehow register more strongly on the grade-school psyche than both bruster’s ice cream AND sophia’s house. this blog dearly hopes you do not tell anyone about this.

here’s what it’s like walking into jason dominy’s lair, an urban charlotte warehouse space not technically owned by jason dominy, but, you know, “owned” by jason dominy. at least, that’s what his raucous, all-night tenure at the microphone seemed to indicate.

shrouds of black denote the cool space. light ropes = party time! people clink their wine glasses around and sip and “sonicetoseeeeeyou!” for now, but OH THE MAYHEM of which they are capable. the DJ — surfer, magazine cover boy and former southeast barista champion lem butler, once dubbed “sexyfoam” by a cast of puppets — is clearly a favored part of the arrangement. he is in the action, as central as the pallet of cake, and the beats go shunk-a-junk and loudness happens almost before the place is fully populated.

“daddee,” the blogson says, all fixated on the moat of candy-capped cupcakes, “can i have one?” but in the din it’s all vowels, no consonants: ” ‘an i ‘ave uh?” “sure,” we scream, certain he couldn’t have meant a longneck, and then, oh, hey, a person we know! and another one! wow, let’s have a red-faced convo in which we laugh and shout and then shout the same thing again! and isn’t it funny that it looks like your tongue is in my ear! and oh, ow, i was trying to get my point across, not really butt your head! ha! wha?

these sorts of parties are great. maximum thoughts communicated in the briefest of primal screams. “rad!” someone says. “yup!”

that there was serious dilworth money plowed into the catered spread, no question. that a far-flung crowd from indiana to florida had made a substantial trek for a weekend of happy southeastery, absolutely. that the concept of a latte art throwdown, eye-rolled by some, was totally novel and awesomely radulous to much of the crowd, yeah. that this blog, being petrified in fear of the raging, all-or-nothing aurelia steam wands, was inevitably the first to be called upon to demonstrate these milky arts to the masses, of course it was!

“allllllll the way from greenville, south carolina,” the voice bellows, all mad-lib and no subtlety, “it’s the blogfamily mafia!” a phrase of indeterminate meaning, but oh, dominy was just getting started. as one listened to his full-throated commandeering, one almost felt compelled to gasp for air on his behalf. such a vent of exuberant, hysterical hyperbole, that dominy. in his verbal arts, atlanta’s octane coffee became “THE premier cafe in the entire southeast.” a possibility, yes, but maybe we could argue about it first? ben helfen was “the man i want to marry” or something equally stunning, and the crowd — the entire crowd, congealed as a single personality — was dubbed the “second most important person to me, after my wife.” whew, gasp. a party full of best men! the PARTY is your best man!

this colossal optimism, this overwhelming exuberance, of course, was a huge hit and an endearing thing for those present and, in the end, a sort of mascot for charlotte and southeastern coffee. lots of love and glee, very little of that west coast cynicism or angst.

turns out the latte art bash went something like three hours long, and this blog had told the son, “don’t worry! we’ll leave as soon as i lose!” hehe, yes. which ended up being in the final round, when we finally choked on a simple heart-topped rosetta and handed the entire 30-person competition to a very deserving chandler rentz of atlanta’s aurora coffee. by then the blogson was asleep on a table next to a longneck, and we had foolishly allowed ourselves to muse about that grand prize baratza vario grinder.

sigh. a reliably underwhelming bridesmaid, that’s what this blog is. always game to make a stab at it, never a real threat to take the prize.

not that second-place prizery wasn’t quite a haul. tamper, syphon, pitcher, scale, coffee, pallo tool, magazine. shamyeah. and to think, this blog hadn’t really used full-blast commercial steam before, always coaxed those big twisty steam wands to a relatively tame speed. the aurelia, with its snap-on steam lever, robbed us of all that comfort. which, hey, is like a prerequisite for artistic expression, no?

we left as dominy was, uh, chest-bumping(?) lem and making his way to the espresso machines. and hey, was that a bon jovi-m.i.a. mix that just left us newly deaf?

unlike last year, when this blog’s reaction was sort of bewildered bemusement, the result here was quite a head ringing. quite an expression of the coffee vibe in this part of the country. quite a night.

i SAID, “quite a night! quite an expression of the …!”

those coffee and crema boys check out the latte art wares. “is this how you shake it, yo?”

noted: this image does not denote cause and effect! the blogson, having rooted for his blogfather to pour winning latte art, ultimately resigned himself to the reality that doing so means we may. never. leave. and thus deposited himself on a table, next to some random empty.

hard to know why latte art competitions persist, when nearly all the highbrow participants seem to be rolling their eyes, playing halfheartedly along and, hey, winning cool stuff! maybe that’s the answer.

just in time for all the conflicted self-loathing, this blog has managed to pour itself into contention a couple times on real-life, beefy, tubular commercial steam wands. now feeling like a conflicted member of the club: “meh. latte art. we do it sometimes. to stay awake.”

but now with coffee and crema’s polished monthly bash on hiatus until next year and our trips to atlanta all used up for awhile, there’s hardly a good pour-off for us to pretend not to want to enter! except maybe that charlotte jam thing.

vital hipsterish questions when considering attendance: will this crowd be, you know, overeager? will they hate themselves enough for doing this milky thing that they do? do they have a totally ironic superhero logo and cheesy, self-flagellating graphic design? will there be mullets?

regardless, this blog advises you not to commit too early. it’s bad form, like shaving daily.

we can pour teh latte arts, just not take teh pictures.

It’s hard to know which came first, the malady or the remedy.

Whole chunks of my life first came to be anesthetized by coffee at roughly the same time as I was losing whole chunks of my life. Patience, appetite, wit — anything that required reservoirs of energy to be deployed or restrained — all ebbed. Malaria was feasting on the underwire of personality, and the slow rot of immovement gradually set in. Most remarkably, I never noticed.

Doctors tell me I may well be able to blame the stealthiness of this metamorphosis on coffee, which had begun at about the same time to fill all neurological voids, sparked by a countertop full of hissing Capresso machines in our college newspaper office. Here was the Great Personality Putty, that which gave me what wasn’t there even as I failed to notice what had gone missing. Here, too, was a life space, caused by a disease, in which profound habits formed. Vigor would rise or fall, and like a swelling theatrical score the shift of gears would cue the thought, “I should like a cup of …”

And so a tide of caffeine obscured the underlying erosion of TSH and T3 and cortisol. The shoals of life, my adrenal system and hormonal infrastructure, were cracking up. Ten years in, at the limits of self medication, the debilitation was so thorough that a good night’s sleep suddenly began to require 12 hours. Waking up was not unlike a Lilliputian encounter in which one wonders how his limbs came to be strapped down. Dinner became an egg. To work was to exist, barely. Nothing sandbagged a day faster than a sip of wine.

As with all dominating health concerns, the medical remedy boiled life down to a corrective routine. A rehabilitation cycle. A green pill and a half-hour’s absorption and, ah, espresso shots for an immediate lift. Only coffee, once the great sustainer, then obscurer of the problem, was now a part of the rehabilitation, so it also lost its mysticism. Once a fertilizer of ideas, it was now a thin topsoil required for basic life. Exquisite single-origin beverages were reduced to their mechanical function, which was to connect neurons. I wouldn’t have said so, but delight vanished.

More than physical exhaustion, this may be the reason this space has been so silent. In a world where consumption plays such a defining personal role, it turns out no volatile foodstuff can possibly live up to the expectations one places upon it — the identity derived from it. Stripped to its essence, coffee becomes a neuron booster required by life’s tiniest transitions. This is disillusioning, of course, but in a constructive way. It ultimately freed me to enjoy the stuff quite “simply.” No fuss, no dissolved solids. Just a steaming cup of autumnal pine nuts. Maybe a hint of muscadine.

This is not to say that one can get that cup of hot muscadine juice without a proper amount of fuss, but it’s one thing to cram coffee algorithms into your head; it’s quite another to dip your head in a bit of coffee. Perhaps the clearest expression of this at the moment is the syphon brewer, all glass and curvature and open flame. It requires a command of stirring and flame tending, of course, but with an opulent visual accompaniment and nowhere near the surgical demands of an espresso machine. And when you’re done, you get your coffee out of a hot glass orb and you drink your muscadine-fig cider just like it is, and you begin to notice that your head and your musculature and life itself is being salvaged.

is panama’s famed esmeralda — now the subject of frenzied annual auctions and ever-escalating price records — the andy warhol of coffee? it’s a stellar, genre-bending, tell-your-neighbors kind of revelation, a cup this blog once offered to foldgers-only co-workers in full confidence that it would, in a sip, change their view of coffee. true.

but it’s also not 40 times as tasty as the ever-popular ethiopia idido misty valley, as the staggering price tag might indicate. in fact, this blog’s totally randomized aggregator of online esmeralda chatter (poaching mostly from twitter!) reports that tuned-in coffee drinkers overwhelmingly thought this year’s crop less amazing than past versions. (these people would be knowing and perceptive, but not *professional* cuppers. the point here being what serious coffee drinkers thought, as a proxy for specialty consumers, not what the credentialed cuppers said they should think.)

and so what’s to account for this year’s record-shattering price of $117 per pound — the same year most well-known western specialty buyers appears to have pulled back in the bidding? (for reference: 2008 prices)

to a dull and obvious blog like this one, ‘twould seem to be the marketing of esmeralda, as the world’s most expensive coffee, that confers this value. the name, the price, the growing notoriety, at some point, add to what pure taste is worth. the ever-higher auction prices could be spawning ever-higher auction prices!

which may not be bad for specialty coffee in the short term — we’re pretty sure this blog has previously argued somewhere on these interwoven nets that the notoriety and rising prices will surely benefit high-end coffee in general. but what if the Brand — the esmeralda cachet — is the herald of numerous future estate coffee niches … in which value is increasingly divorced from taste? in which marketability IS value?

warhol was, of course, a shape-shifter and cultural wizard with the acuity to pierce the consciousness of even magazine readers and soup-can buyers. but what he left in his wake is undeniably the commercialization of art — or even commercialization AS art.

it’s hard to not to be happy about sky-high esmeralda prices. it is, after all, an extraordinarily subtle and delicious coffee. but this blog wonders if the phenomenon doesn’t end up kick-starting an uneasy trend, at least for those devoted to taste as a measuring stick.

p.s. this blog is fully aware that pieces of this idea bubbled up on twitter WEEKS ago, and even on the slow-plodding blogs. so what? sometimes it takes us YEARS to come up with the right analogy!

p.p.s. yes, this blog was able to dip its amateur schnoz into this year’s top lots. our faves: the $27.50-per-lb caballeriza and $29 san jose, though the reserva DID offer some of the most delicate little twists of lily and lime we can remember detecting on our own …

UPDATE: further evidence that the esmeralda’s price can’t possibly be all taste-based: sweet maria’s is now selling one of last year’s top mesmeralda lots at less than half the original price — while claiming the beans “are fresh as they day they came in!” given the scrupulous storage method, this is probably true. so, what has changed from a year ago?

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why should this blog explain to you the formative concepts behind this beverage — the infamous coffee and a donut — when its inventor pulls back the curtain so much more … dashedly!

it’s an off-duty reporter’s dream, really: loll on the free bar at the world barista championship, drinking james hoffmann’s liquid genius and jotting down juicy, irresistible quotes as he slings beverages for a small gaggle. he’d used this drink, of course, to help win the u.k.’s 2007 barista championship, and it had long bewitched us for its sheer madcap-ness: morning coffee + fresh baked krispy kremes, in entirely liquid form. hoffmann still says it ranks as his favorite signature beverage evar.

he also said a few other things!

* “Signature drinks need a sense of humor.”
if you don’t have Sense of Humor, substitute seven feet of british barista.

* “Everyone likes it really, because it’s stupid.”
if that were true, everyone would have LOVED that wasabi mocha from the 2005 southeast regionals.

* The barista competition “is a game. It’s not about being a line barista.”
this blog’s line barista has certainly never liquified a donut on our behalf.

* “This signature drink is always something I really enjoyed, even though it is a very wrong thing to do to coffee.”
turning hot krispy kremes into vomitous porridge, one could argue, is also a very wrong thing to do to a donut.

* “The fat in here is really ruining the foam.”
also, our languishing fatty pancreas.

stunningly enough, james also shared the recipe — foolishly opening the door for this blog to home junkie-ize the inspired madness. lacking a centrifuge, which we understand is the donut liquification Tool of Choice, we were reduced to mashing a dozen of the yeasty air-jetted tubulars with milk, then mashing and separating, chilling and straining, straining and chilling, for nearly three days.

breakfast grows less, and less, and less, appetizing.

the resulting milky liquid — or as we like to call it, “jus de bon-bon” — was somewhat greasier than the stuff james served us in atlanta, but still mostly devoid of the largest deep-fried globules of sin. chilled it, steamed some, poured it into a single-origin shot of rwanda gkongoro nyarusiza espresso, and …

meh. the initial eye-popping taste of perfect donut essence quickly melted into disappointment with how it paired with our coffee. tasted sort of muddy, like a burnt coffee frappe someone had tried to rescue with donut syrup. ration adjustments helped, but the beverage didn’t sing until we tried it with shots of toscano, pulled fairly short (25 seconds) on the gb5 at coffee and crema.

the donut actually hits you first and last. you think, “whoa, oven baked.” then spicy chocolate espresso in the middle and a loooong, lingering lipidic pastry aftertaste, doubtless from the fat. there’s something deeply disconcerting about the method it took to properly steam the stuff — loud and slurpy and nukey. there was also some reflex within this blog to add as little donut juice as possible, when in fact it was a larger portion that settled in and felt balanced. something like two parts jus to three parts spro. something tasted almost wintergreen up top, and something else tasted almost like baked peaches down low.

but perhaps we’re splitting hairs. the customers guffawed and slurped mightily. the home-bar visitors sat and marveled and asked for another. and this blog’s sacred container of liquid bakery is well nigh spent.

monument to james.

today’s package of tree pulp brought immortality to the much-discussed underdog swan pour and added significant value to last week’s latte art hoedown — a feature written by a true outsider with a talent for processing the insanity she witnessed. if the live twittering was your fix, and after-blogging your chaser, then lillia’s piece is your hearty course meal.

web version of the story here. more photos, we hear, are floating around the ether. related review of shannon’s new forest park shop here.

UPDATE: key quote, from octane’s helfen:

“Respect the swan, dude,” Helfen says still shaking his head. “You gotta respect the swan.”