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In a recent Chicago Tribune<\/a> article reporter Nick Kindelsperger and Ipsento Coffee<\/a> founding partner Tim Taylor visit an undisclosed diner to once and for all determine the objective quality of diner coffee. Using a refractometer, National Coffee Association<\/a> and Specialty Coffee Association<\/a> TDS recommendations, and some \u201c[scribbled] down equations,\u201d Kindelsperger and Taylor determine that diner coffee is weak\u2014powerful weak<\/a>\u2014and terrible. And they couldn\u2019t be any more wrong.<\/p>\n The thing is, they aren\u2019t wrong. By all quantifiable specialty standards, even at their most generous, diner coffee just doesn\u2019t measure up. But I\u2019ll be DAMNED<\/em> if I let anyone besmirch the good name of diner coffee. Yes, according to specialty coffee rubrics it isn\u2019t as good as specialty coffee, but doesn\u2019t quite seem like a fair test, now does it? According to the Zac scale, none of you jabronies are as Zac as I am, so I must be better, right? No? Sounds like an unfair \u201ctest\u201d everyone who isn’t me is doomed to fail at, you say? I never thought of it that way.<\/p>\n And here are some more \u201cfacts\u201d for you: diner coffee has brought more people into specialty coffee than any specialty coffee has, maybe all specialty coffee combined. And when I say diner coffee, I mean specifically the stuff that has sat on the heating element for at least two hours, served at 3:00am in an 24-hour greasy spoon where everyone still smokes inside\u2014including the grizzled septuagenarian server with the heart of gold\u2014even though it\u2019s waaaaaay illegal, the sort of place where you leave you smelling like death and with a stomach ache from drinking at least eight cups of coffee. THAT is diner coffee. And if you want to get really<\/em> real about which is “better,” the number of times diner coffee has met or exceeded my expectations far FAR FAR<\/strong><\/em> exceeds that of specialty coffee.<\/p>\n There is a whole generation of coffee professionals\u2014of which I consider myself one, assuming coffee journalism falls under the coffee professional umbrella\u2014for whom drinking diner coffee was \u201cbeing into coffee.\u201d That was our starting point. It wasn\u2019t Instagrammable eight-tier tulips or being a barista because it was now the \u201ccool\u201d job, or hell, even because your favorite shop home makes their own vanilla syrup for their lattes. It was diner coffee. Burnt, crusty, loaded with more and more cream and sugar as the night progressed to gird the stomach, diner coffee. Mwah. Perfection.<\/p>\n I weep for the next wave of coffee professionals, whose introduction to the whole show are shops that close at 7:00pm. Coffee doesn\u2019t stop when the sun goes down. For many, that\u2019s when it all gets started. Yeah, maybe we all have that a-ha! moment with a natural that really turned us on to specialty coffee, but you know what started that whole journey? It was probably a cup of blueberry flavored coffee at the \u201cfancy\u201d diner, the one with like 20 different options that you could mix and match and everyone had a \u201cfavorite,\u201d probably a blend of no less than three different flavors. Half vanilla, quarter Irish cream, quarter cinnamon, and juuuuust a splash of hazelnut for me.<\/p>\n I understand the point of the article. Kindelsprenger and Taylor are trying to show the \u201ccoffee is just coffee\u201d crowd that there is, in fact, a difference between pre-ground commodity grade coffee and specialty coffee, and to do so in a quantifiable and scientifically repeatable way. It\u2019s a laudable goal and I don\u2019t begrudge them for it. But once you start calling diner coffee \u201cterrible,\u201d well, now we have a problem. So just remember, if specialty coffee is seeing more devotees than ever before, it\u2019s because it is standing on the shoulders of giants.<\/p>\n You\u2019re not as tall as you think you are.<\/p>\n Zac Cadwalader<\/a>\u00a0is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.\u00a0Read more Zac Cadwalader\u00a0on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Image \u00a9 Adobe Stock<\/em><\/p>\n The post In Defense Of Diner Coffee<\/a> appeared first on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source: Coffee News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a recent Chicago Tribune article reporter Nick Kindelsperger and Ipsento Coffee founding partner Tim Taylor visit an undisclosed diner to once and for all determine the objective quality of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,41],"tags":[63,45,65,47,61,49,59,55,57],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1267,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/1267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}