Blue Bottle: still the best

In the past couple years, several new coffee roasters have opened in San Francisco to challenge the supremacy of Blue Bottle coffee. Do any of them measure up?

In a word, no.

Ritual Coffee roasters provides a more traditional coffee house experience, and makes a darn fine cup of drip coffee, and I've been very happy to buy their beans. But their espresso drinks aren't that much better than Peet's.

Trouble Coffee Company wins points for their rungi-chungi attitude and atmosphere, but despite serving primarily espresso they didn't impress me with the flavor of my double-short shot, despite the correctness of the barista's technique. I was -- gasp -- forced to add sugar to cut the bitterness of the Italian-style coffee cup I was offered (and yes, I've had coffee in Italy).

On the other hand, Blue Bottle not only does amazingly well with regular coffee and espresso drinks, they also offer a number of specialty coffees which are not only terrific coffee, but theater as well.

Here's a Blue Bottle staffer making the individual vacuum pots Blue Bottle Cafe is famous for.

Since it was a warm day, I ordered the Kyoto-style cold-brewed coffee made with the elaborate contraption at the head of this article. This was an amazing experience, worth more than the $4 I paid for it. Most iced coffee tastes like what it is ... hours-old cold leftover coffee. Kyoto Iced Coffee, which is drip-extracted cold over eight hours, tasted like a really, really good cup of hot coffee, with all that flavor and aroma, only it was cold.

So, my challenge to my readers is this: find me better coffee than Blue Bottle in the Bay Area. You'll win dinner (or a month's worth of coffee) and a lauditory column in this blog.