I went back to Michigan recently and found myself slightly out-of-step with how my friends remember me. Having kids has changed a lot of my tendencies, and even altered my beliefs somewhat since my life has come to revolve around them. My friends remember me as an arch-iconoclast. Someone who was rigidly against a lot of what others took for granted, and constantly on guard against hypocrisy. Which, of course, I’ve had to relax somewhat. Nearly everyone marvels at my possession of a smart phone. “I never thought you’d get one!” they gasp when I take it out to look something up or show pictures of my kids. In truth, neither did I, and I often think of getting rid of it—as I suppose anyone aware of any spiritual aspect of life must, but the material side tends to overwhelm the spiritual obligations with concreteness. I’d love to return to the forest, to communicate by letter from my log cabin, but I don’t think anyone would write back, much less come and see me. I’ve sent a few letters in the past year that I’m still waiting for replies to.
I don’t really think of the smartphone thing as being excessively hypocritical. You need one of those things to navigate the modern world. As I still wish to belong to the world, I don’t worry about having one; I can always turn it off or leave it at home, though admittedly, I do those things very seldom.
The way in which I’ve defied my friends’ expectations in the last decade—as well as my own—is that, when I was younger, I avoided buying things from multinational companies as much as humanly possible in the US.
Before having kids, I didn’t feel I needed a car. Getting around places like Chicago, Lansing, San Francisco by bike is not only easy, but fun. And I seldom had to move anything that wouldn’t fit in my backpack. Maybe once a year, I’d rent a car and take a roadtrip. This relative support of big oil, I could live with for the pleasure of seeing friends, and the freedom of movement afforded by a car, but for daily life, I never found it necessary.
I also used to buy most of what I needed second hand. I could spend an entire day looking for a new pair of jeans in the thrift shops and, if I didn’t find anything, it wasn’t very important.
Some of these changes have nothing to do with having kids; I just got lazy. When I realized that H&M (for all their horrible labor practices) had cheap and decent-looking clothes that fit me. I just started shopping there. I have to admit, I never liked thrifting, but the west has such a surplus of clothes, it makes the most sense.
But I don’t think I ever would’ve bought a car if it weren’t for kids. We bought our first car used for a few thousand dollars just before our daughter was born. Then we bought one new car a few years later and, when that grew too small for the family, we bought another. I hate driving around town, I hate buying gas and fueling so much of the bullshit in the world by being another human who requires the stuff to live. I’m aware that before I had a car I supported oil through so many other aspects of my life (like buying anything for one), but at least I didn’t buy the stuff directly from the pumps on a regular basis like I do now. At least I still ride my bike to work.
But these are all minor transgressions against my past self when compared to my patronage of Starbucks. I think that one still leaves the homies scratching their heads and asking “could this even be the same guy we grew up with? Didn’t he hate Starbucks with a passion?”
I grew up in Jackson, Michigan in the 1980s and 1990s, and I watched a homogenization occur in that time. The downtown which was only local business gradually shutdown, emptied out, and the crowds sought the comfort of the predictable in the ever-growing row of chain fastfood places by the highway, or in the bland predictability of the malls.
While we may have had McDonald’s, and Gap, we weren’t white collar enough for a Starbucks until the early 2000s. Even then, they put the thing way out where 127 intersects 94. I imagine that at least half of the clientele are people driving between Detroit and Chicago and, espying a convenient coffee break, pull off.
The lack of Starbucks in my day-to-day didn’t stop me from hating the company when I was younger. I saw Starbucks as the ravager of my most adored of small businesses: the independent café. When I first discovered cafés and coffee as a student in junior high (circa 1995), they were all independent. Theatre Coffee downtown was where I sat on Friday evenings with the all-girl Goth set, drinking cinnamon French sodas and thumbing through the Anne Rice paperbacks that stocked the complementary bookshelf, to Café Royal in East Lansing where I went on my first dates, drinking pint glasses of resinous, obsidian-dark coffee like no one roasts anymore, to Café Gourmand in Chicago’s South Loop where I first discovered my student persona, studying hour after hour and frequently getting up to have my cup refilled. And anyone who knows me has heard me reminisce on the beauty of Theios, which, to be fair, was more of a diner, but I never did anything but drink coffee there.
These places—as important as they were to my development— are all long gone now. Like so many other great cafés I discovered in these United States. How many of them were plowed under by Starbucks (or other more regional chains, for example in mid-Michigan, ugh, Bigby) is hard to say, Theater Coffee was probably gone before Starbucks even left its roost in Seattle, killed by the crushing economic despair sweeping over the rust belt in the 90s, when downtown was quickly emptying and becoming synonymous with crime. Honestly, I can’t imagine what the people who started Theater Coffee were thinking. It existed at a bad time in a bad place, but it introduced me to a very important concept, and I will always be grateful to those risk-taking owners for that. Café Royal closed and became Espresso Royal and, in its upgrade as it moved out of the parking complex in downtown East Lansing, acquired too many people studying, you couldn’t even get a seat in that place. While the original was drafty, dirty and usually nearly empty, they had the best coffee I’ve ever had, so smoky and oily, it was like a tire fire, and it set the standard for coffee for ever after.
And now, I never go into a local café and find anything darker than a medium roast. Coffee snobs (who influence everyone else) having declared that anything darker than the subtlest of roasts is “burnt” and should be beneath one as the accident of chain coffee (read: Starbucks) that everyone naively accepted.
The preponderance of lighter roasts being marketed as though a revolution against corporate coffee tastes. The little guy is taking the bean back to its rightful place of tasting like juniper, citrus, honey and all kinds of other crap. They are freeing our palates from what Starbucks has forced upon us for years.
This argument has become completely ubiquitous. I see it from Michigan to California. Very few independent roasteries do a true dark roast, like the one Café Royal had in 1997, so afraid are they of seeming to support the Starbucks sacrilege. What is overlooked here is that coal black coffee was the revolution; at least the one I grew up with. In the 1990s, most coffee was a watery broth kind of stuff you got at Denny’s, made to be drunk four or five cups at a time as the waitress came around and refilled.
It was the midnight, coal roasts that started to crop up at the small artsy places with the dumpy couches, and ashtrays perched all over the place. Dark roast coffee was a challenge to the existing banal order of watery medium roast. It said, “look, this can be done another way where we really tap into the heart of this bean, bring out those beautiful oils and, yes, burn them because they taste good like that!”
I came of age in cafés that served these blackhole roasts. Airpots lined up on the counter with hand-drawn caricatures of people in berets reading “French roast”, pint glasses with carboard coffee sleeves, and the first taste of bitterness. I can’t help it, I’m nostalgic for it, but what happens when I go into a new café and inquire after it? Either I get a “dark” roast that’s on the lighter end of medium, or my taste is scoffed at as too plebian. “Go back to Starbucks” being the implication when the barista smiles and shakes his head.
What a shame that our beautiful revolution was so co-opted as to eventually become the sole name in coffee and, therefore, be something to rebel against in turn! I took it for granted when I was younger that dark roast coffee would forever be hanging around in an oily haze in every little café.
But revolutions, if they are successful, eventually establish the standard to be rebelled against, and, as Starbucks, and (to a much lesser extent) Peet’s made dark roasts the inescapable standard, they were also fomenting discontent. The old couches, the pint glasses, these things became anathema to a new generation of café proprietors who, instead, opted for Edison bulbs, air plants, white paint, wood and glass. The lash back took the comfort out of coffee, declared it to be coddling. A little café in the SoMa of the early 2010s looked like a laboratory with people drinking coffee out of beakers while coffee molecules were painted on the walls.
Again, the intention was freeing the soul of the bean. Only now, the bean was imprisoned by the oils which oozed from it and burned in the erstwhile revolutionary process. The new generation of rosters turned down the temperature. They tried less and less heat for shorter and shorter periods of time, and they had some weird eugenics thing going on, too. Believing in the “purity” of certain types of beans. Never mixing them and putting “single origin” on everything, as if mixing beans had somehow polluted their stock, making them less, rather than more.
I learned to avoid these coffee laboratories, after all, they were really easy to spot which such thematic décor. I got tired of getting patronized when I asked if there was anything dark. I never believed in tasting the terroir of the bean, reading two paragraphs about it on a notecard while I waited for it to be brewed through a lengthy (and showy) pour-over method. It always tasted like some kind of broth to me, like it was salty somehow. Meanwhile, the proprietor would be leaning over the counter, eager to see if he had convinced you in the perfection of light roasts, but I could never lie. They’d turn away in a huff after I delivered my verdict: “ ahh, it’s ok”.
At this point in coffee history, these kinds of “light roasty” labs were popping up in cities, especially in gentrifying neighborhoods, but they were not yet the standard. There were still many cafés of the old type that proudly served smoky, black coffee. You could tell which was which quite easily by the smell, and the smell of the dark roast places is such a romantic smell to me, hinting as it does at a warm interlude on a cold afternoon. A place both for physical warmness, but also to warm the heart with the kind of strong coffee that clings to your clothes when you exit to the cold afternoon. The light roast places smell like so much fresh paint and the sourish smell of beans not long roasted.
It was just a few years ago when I realized what happened. That the fringe of light roast places in North Oakland, Detroit, and Pilsen, established the standard for “independent coffee”. I never walk into a new independent café and find a legitimate, oily, black dark roast on the menu anymore. On the positive side, the politics of roast preference have died, and I also don’t get a lot of flack for this preference, most places are happy to have a “dark roast” only these are generally way too light for my preference.
So, despite my incredible antipathy for Starbucks as a kid, they preserved something too important to me to be let go. Dark roast coffee isn’t just a flavor to me, its youthful memories preserved in coffee amber. All the places where I sat hunched over a laptop, leaning back with a paperback. All the places, I set my backpack on the floor. The places where I mused, and others around me mused, the places I met like-minded people and conversed with them. The only place I really felt comfortable going on a date. The warm place removed from the cold and the empty place in the summer with the light hitting the floating dust motes. Dark roast is like a perfume to me that stirs memories of someone long-forgotten and, in its absence from local cafés, I am unable to give it up, at least as long as some place is still serving it, even if that place still embodies the corporate greed for expansion which I think makes the world a less interesting, homogenized place. I would much rather buy the coffee I want from a local place, but can’t choke down something I don’t like to stay true to my ideals, so, I guess in the end, it is just taste that wins out, leaving not only my friends, but even myself scratching my head and asking “who the hell is this? Is this the same kid who used to wear the ‘Starbucks, Fuck off Get out of My Neighborhood’ shirt?”
I can only answer, “it is, but I wore that shirt without realizing just how unrecognizable the world would become in middle age, without realizing the importance of memory in or preferences, and without realizing just how much I dislike light roast coffee. However, the ideal is still there, and I look forward to a time when I get act upon it again.”
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