Coffee Continued

I was planning on writing this bit as the final paragraph of my previous post, but it got a little long. Rather than consign it to the trash, I'll put it here.


Complications

The proliferation of cafes in recent decades is, of course, the product of coffee's Third Wave, begun in 1990s Seattle and spread across the country. Starbucks had a big role to play in this movement, and I'll spare the usual coffee-snob-hating-on-Starbucks routine to share two stories that happened during my coffee tour.

1) As I walked through the swanky Rittenhouse Square district, I passed three or four Starbucks. Inside, at the bar along the window, sat a man who I assumed was homeless: scraggly beard, dirty clothes, two bulging plastic bags tightly at his side. He swirled his paper Starbucks cup, smelled it, and sipped. His face lit up. I realize that's a cliche, but it's the only way to describe it.

2) The back alleys of the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood have their fair share of loading docks, dumpsters, and shadowy corners, and in one of them sits an old facade. Tiled and bricked in an art-deco style, faded yellows and greens barely overcoming the dust, it bore the sign "Rittenhouse Coffee."

These complicate my understanding of coffee. Apparently, crappy corporate coffee can transform someone's day . I doubt that the homeless guy would have smiled any bigger had he sipped on my pourover of Maragojipe microlot or my Sidama Macchiato. And apparently the past had its own coffee waves, come and gone, leaving behind artifacts like Rittenhouse Coffee, which has not (surprisingly enough) been revived by the current interest in 1) all things coffee and 2) all things vintage. Which leaves us with: When will our current coffee phase end, and what difference will it have made? Will Starbucks remain, making people smile, even when skilled baristas and single-origin coffees have fallen by the wayside?