Explaining Canada in two cups of coffee
for the Canadian Tourism Commission, Feb 2010
Canadian brands for two hundred please, Alex. (No, Mr. Trebek, you yourself don’t count.)
PetroCan gas stations. Roots clothing. The venerable Hudson’s Bay Company and Canadian Tire multipurpose stores. You’ll pass them all on the way to the summit, where sits the most resonant, the most personal Canadian brand of all: Tim Horton’s.
“Timmy’s” is as Canadian as hockey. (Horton was a defenseman, for the Maple Leafs among others, before launching his coffee’n’donut business; he was killed in a car crash at age 44). The budget combo is the unofficial national dish, contemporary pemmican, and it speaks to the traditional Canadian character traits of thrift and quick dispatch and bedrock reliability. Timmy’s awesomely consistent drip coffee is so much a part of the middle-Canadian routine that Canadian servicemen in Afghanistan and Iraq have asked for, and received, it by the carton. Soccer moms have run on it for whole seasons. Timmy’s coffee is quite simply the taste of home.
But not for everybody.
There is, you see, more than one Canada.
Tim Horton’s coffee says Canada to many Canadians east of the Terry Fox memorial in Thunder Bay. Here out West, not so much. The difference between the stuff Timmy’s pours and what a lot of people go for on the Coast tells you all you need to know about a pretty significant cultural rift. Not the one between French and English Canada – the original “two solitudes”—but between East and West. No, let’s nail it down further: between Vancouver and everybody else.
Out here, we don’t really get donuts. We do get coffee: we just do it differently. Oh, we have Starbuck’s – so much so that you could argue that Starbuck’s is the true brand of Vancouver, even though it’s of course not Canadian at all. But many connoisseurs plug in at local shops like J.J. Bean and 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters for the java equivalent of the local boutique microbrew. If you can get a barista in one of these places – in The Elysian Room, say, or Wicked Cafe—to pause for a moment as she tunes the espresso grind to account for the barometric pressure that hour – she’ll tell you about the Third Wave revolution.
“First Wave is instant coffee,” explains Phil Robertson, who trained as a barista at Wicked and Caffe Artigiano in Vancouver. “Maybe gas-station-coffee, too. It’s coffee with a purpose: to keep you awake.
“Second Wave starts to be about taste.” All those sweet, milky concoctions with names like Italian motor oil, from beans ground on-site. “But you’re masking the flavor of the coffee,” he adds, “so it’s still not all that good.” The coffee in Second-Wave cafes tends to be dark roast. That’s because consistency is king, and overcooking the beans produces a consistent taste, no matter where the beans come from or in what season. You can argue over where Tim Horton’s falls on the continuum between First and Second Wave (there’s no dark roast; consistency comes instead from the pre-portioned, pre-ground coffee packets that servers empty into the brewers). But it has no claim at all to Third Wave.
“Third Wave is about purity,” says Robertson. “It’s about the taste of the coffee. The roasting process is entirely different.” Third-wave coffee vendors like to “go to origin” –visiting the farms directly (and thereby bypassing the green coffee brokers, whose volume can compromise taste). “Third Wave is understanding at an agricultural and processing level what makes coffee good.”
Third Wave is a homegrown Coastal religion, at least in North America. Its apostles are popping up all over, now, but virtually all of them learned the trade from someone who learned their trade in Vancouver or Seattle before taking their mission into the Timmy’s-quaffing hinterlands.
Robertson is one of those apostles, and before I go on further about him and his own little startup, I must tell you that he is my nephew. That makes me either shamefully biased and unreliable on this, or perfectly positioned to give you the real goods. Because I have watched his metamorphosis from a First Wave guy in Calgary quaffing Timmy’s to stay awake in engineering classes at the U of C (the early years) to a patron of Starbuck’s and its ilk, until he received The Calling. It came one day as he stood in line at a pancake breakfast at the Calgary Stampede and heard the following exchange:
How’s the coffee?
It’s good. It’s not bad.
Cue the lightbulb. “It hit me that for most people, coffee is good if it’s not bad.” Which was stupid.
Phil became a student of The Bean, making pilgrimages to Seattle and Portland and eventually individual farms in Latin America. He quit his job developing cell-phone technology, moved to Vancouver and basically dived into pure laine coffee culture and didn’t come up for six months. (During this time I met up with him once; we hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years and we went for a long, slow walk around Trout Lake—and all we talked about was coffee. At Christmastime he schleps home an enormous box full of coffeemaking paraphernalia, including his own beans, grinder and water supply, and he French-presses individual cups for us, narrating the provenance of this one or that one back to the farm of, say, a Guatemalan guy named Jorge. He’d watch us drink it the way a priest watches a parishioner dissolve a cracker on his tongue, looking for signs of life, flickers of reception.) Phil volunteered at the Canadian barista championships, created a spreadsheet to help with the scoring. And then he packed up and took everything he’d learned East, across the granite curtain of the Rockies, where he and his pal Sebastian Sztabzyb –also a former electrical engineer—hung their shingle in the Calgary Farmer’s Market. Almost immediately they got some rapturous press, and soon there were twenty-minute lineups.
But the enthusiasm was from a relatively small group. For real coffee was – and still is – a hard sell. In truth, most people don’t much care for the taste of coffee.
“Taste by definition is acquired,” he says. “We like what we’ve always had.” Over time tastes shift, but it’s a grindingly slow process. Most people who go to coffee shops still want a pain-jane latte—and Phil knew he’d better include it on the menu if he didn’t want to go back to making cell-phones. “We offer sweet drinks and milky drinks as a way of getting people interested.” Then they start weaning the customers off the adulterants. “Eventually they drink coffee without milk (unless it’s a cappuccino). Ironically, we make less money on that kind of coffee, but then we have a customer for life.”
Not everyone appreciates the Henry Higgins routine. And not everyone turns out to be like Eliza Doolittle, ripe for re-education.
“There are people who say, ‘Make me a great cup of coffee.’ So I do —I taste it to make sure before I serve it. And they try it. And then they say, “I still like my double-double at Timmy’s.”
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