Regarding coffee I have always suggested Arabica should be likened to White wines and Robusta to red wines based on acidity and body alike.
Coffee education will always be a harder sell than wine for a number of reasons. Most people hide the true taste of coffee with milk, 89% of UK consumers drink instant coffee at home, and there is not enough quality fresh coffee available in our supermarkets.The situation is just like the jam driven Auzzie Shiraz that supermarkets push us to buy.
Am I wrong? Are most consumers happy with what is put in front of them on the supermarket shelf?

Thanks Tristan for bring up the wine debate. As you can see from my rant it is something I feel strongly about.

If you like good wine the chances are you like quality coffee, free range chicken, quality olive oil, Italian and spanish cured meats, cooking with fresh herbs and growing your own vegetables.

Food and drink education either snowballs as you get older it just depends how many tastes you wish to encounter in your life.
More please!!

RE: Matt Skinner, I take the quote to be describing a huge timeline, which i’m sure you agree does make more sense.

However, he is wrong about it being ‘just a drink’, the Mesopotamian’s valued it very highly, but that was only really due to its scarcity.

As far as the rest of the quote goes, it wasn’t really until the Romans came along that winemaking really came into it’s own (the Greeks would water it down with seawater and add spices) and things like soil and climate were taken in to consideration.

If we are looking at long timelines coffee has evolved in a similar way, being entirely exclusive to Arabia right up until the middle of the 18th century. As we know it wasn’t being drunk until around 9th Century, but I believe it has gone on a similar, albeit quicker, journey to wine ever since.

Your point about the final link in the chain is a good one, but what I am trying to get at is that the barista is just that, one part of the chain. The consumer who demands a great cup requires that part of the chain to be just as great as every other part. You could argue that the final link in the chocolate chain is the guy who puts the wrappers on. If he messed it up there would be complaints and he would need to sort himself out before his factory closed down, but people would only complain because they know that the wrappers aren’t supposed to be inside out or whatever.

When a barista serves a bad coffee it is entirely the fault of the customer for not demanding more, or worse – not knowing that there is more. Mr. Customer is the slave driver to a certain extent, they are the ones that need to whip the industry in to shape and they will, simply by having a preference for something tastier.

Less about you and more about me!

Mind if I vent my irritation at Matt Skinner here?
Unless his timescale is huge he seems to be missing the point of the development of wine. It was never just a drink, it’s been well known, understood to an astonishing degree and cultivated along historically precise lines in very specific countries, regions and even terroirs for centuries, millenia even. The French, Italians, Spanish, Germans and Austrians have shaped much of their very culture around wine.

The regions that were good for wine were good for well known & well understood reasons. The great producers gravitated to and developed in the great regions in unison. The grapes developed in regions that suited them, a process of evolution where unsuitable varieties failed and others thrived. It didn’t become understood, it was implicit.

He’s almost commenting as someone discovering viniculture and viticulture for the first time, fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of it. His pearls of wisdom are possibly relevant to the new world producers and the nouveau consumer (including the Brits who necked all that Liebfraumilch) but laughable in any country with a wine history and embedded culture.

The parallels between coffee and wine are there, but it’d be more interesting to theorise on the ramifications to speciality coffee, using what we know of how wine has developed recently.

Wine, like coffee, cheese, ham and chocolate, to name a few products with similar parallels, is dominated by a lot of mediocre bilge. The unusual aspect of coffee is how it’s final process is usually in the hands of non-specialists. No matter how good the bean, processing, roast, blend or any other factor in it’s excessively long chain of production, the final extraction is critical and cannot be centralised and to date has proved almost impossible to mechanise.

I’d like to think this is why coffee relies so heavily on brand. The folks at Illy would like you to think their brand is a sign of sure quality, however we all know that 95% of premises that serve it do it all wrong…