The place is crap.

Claiming that Inversion makes good coffee is like claiming that George Lucas makes good movies.

I personally am insulted that the Houston Press chose them as the Best Coffee Shop in town. This atrocity betrays the vast chasm between actual knowledge and knowledge required and involved in this award. It’s simply an affront to coffeedom.

But since I’m not reviewing the Houston Press, I’m reviewing Inversion Coffee shop, i’d get back to the task I’ve assigned myself.

While there isn’t any reason to review the place; I should perhaps to so for catharsis: The atmosphere of the store was unappealing, there were no girls (except for the two young giggly butches behind the counter who make crappy coffee), only men eying me like ‘new meat‘, there was nowhere to sit, except outside; 10 feet from Montrose traffic, and the coffee was lousy.

I forced myself to finish it and I left.

Post Script:

To all the Inversion customers who get all pissy about this blog, I moderate this site & I do not care what you think and your comments will not not be posted to the site. Considering that all of you go out and pay money for such lousy coffee, you obviously cannot separate their inability to create decent coffee from the other aspects of that establishment.

I will gladly allow any intelligent comment that challenges my stated opinion about the establishment and its coffee, or highlights some of the place’s merits that I may have missed.

What about Startbucks? Does Starbucks deserve a review in my site? No. But Starbucks cannot be denied their footnote in history.

But what about Starbucks, I hate Starbucks, and yet as I write this nasty little piece about Starbucks, I’m sitting at one right now drinking a water to wash away the bad aftertaste of pandering to the general public. I just finished a barely above mediocre double espresso, my drug of choice and what I use as the measuring stick of a good café that was made by a cute girl who probably thinks she works for the best company that has ever used up soil in the world. Actually, the coffee wasn’t made by the girl, all she did was press a button, and like magic the machine gurped out a couple of ounces of brown liquid. Kind of reminds me of my old 85 Ford Bronco I drove in college, but that’s another topic.

Unless you live in Outer Borneo, you would know that in their relentless pursuit of meticulous consistency, Starbucks has perpetrated the worst crime conceivable by any true blue Red-Blooded Marxist (not that I would ever claim to be a Marxist, I’m a shameless lover of free-market capitalism); they’ve displaced their workers with automata. You’ll see that instead of those boxish maroon and dark grey la Marzocca’s that were standard equipment in the early days, every station has been converted into a temple devoted to the two streamlined boxes, that now lord over the Starbucks realm.

But before I get too far away, I’d better account for my accusations of crimes against Marxism. This will cause some to chuckle, because this free market capitalist is going briefly give some badges of merit of Marxist philosophy: Marx wrote that one of the detriments of industrialization is that people become removed from the craft of their labors. Before a trade is industrialized, a craftsman labors creatively and skillfully at making his ware. Once industrialized, the craftsman is reduced to becoming an attendant, or wage slave using the same specialized movements, to the productive automata, or a cog in the machine. So this what Starbucks has done. Their mission is to delver the same coffee in Vidor, Texas, that they do in Seattle. Are they serving jam to pigs? no, but what they have successfully done was remove the human factor, and thus a significant margin of error from their production. In addition, to removing the lowest common denominator, they also removed most of the highest common denominators also. So now their coffee can never be really bad, but it’s lost the potential to ever be really good too.

Sounds pretty flimsy you think, “Starbucks makes the best 1 and 5/8 equal, 108 degrees, nonfat, nofoam, light caramel, 3 pumps vanilla lattes in the world”. Well maybe so, but as I mentioned before, I use the espresso a measuring stick. Frappuccinos and flavored coffees don’t count, because you don’t need good coffee for those to taste yummy.

So back to my tirade, there’s a digression again, my apologies. In addition to removing the human factor, and turning my espresso into a mass production, or removing the artisanship of my coffee, Starbucks has also gotten away with lowering the quality of bean. That’s why they roast their beans so much darker than everyone else, it doesn’t bring out more flavor, but it masks the inferior flavor of inferior beans. The end result, Starbucks makes better frappuccinos and lattes, (so they sell more milk), and their margin of error is reduced and they get by with a lower quality bean.

In the beginning, Starbucks specialized in selling predominantly varietals in store. To do this Starbucks had to use a high quality bean. Now with their light note and other novelty coffee, the quality have gone down, and since most of their products are more milk than coffee, no one really notices or cares, except for those like me who actually like coffee.

Starbucks is following the same historical trends that have always dominated the coffee trade; at one point there isn’t room for growth, so you have to start digging for continued profit growth. We’ve already seen that with each Starbucks popping up across from Starbucks, like Burger-King opening up across the highway from McDonalds. Once that terminal growth point is reached, and you have market saturation, now what?

You open new markets; Starbucks in ghettos, Starbucks on highways,

After all markets are exploited, you slash costs, change human resources, cut pensions health plans, make employees clean their own aprons, etc., lower pay, get rid of the small size.

Now what, you only have 2 more avenues to increase profitability; lower the quality of product, which we see already, and revolutionize the manufacturing process, thus replacing the baristas with coffee machines.

It’s an insipid irony that Starbucks claims Fair Trade Practices, but at the same time is reducing their baristas, their people, their labor, their artists, to mindless machine attendants. Remember that next time you feel compelled to tip.

My first thought on walking into Antedote coffee is that I’m walking into Notsuoh all over again, except that it was decorated by my grandfather, who was a shop teacher and avid junk collector.

Then I thought to inquire who roasted their beans. They went with Big Bend, out of Marfa. I had to struggle to hold down a chuckle that would betray my coffee snobbery. But it seemed appropriate anyhow that they would pick coffee roasted in new uber-hip, artsey, small-towney Marfa, Texas.

My first espresso wasn’t really good, but at least it wasn’t horrible. My second coffee answered all questions conclusively; the girl paused and replied, “what’s a macchiato?” I suddenly had one of those moments that clairvoyants have in airports before boarding a doomed airplane. I saw that my future consisted of a cremaless dead espresso with a plop of sudsy foam on top that I would be desperately trying to mix together with the dead coffee. My prophesy was right, but I forced it down.

It’s sometimes hard to place what went wrong with an espresso, here I would first take a look at their gaskets, and then see if their beans had any oil at all on them. The coffee was lifeless and had must have undergone some sort of freeze drying preservation process.

In spite of this, I think that Antedote will succeed. It’s full of the same hipsters that drink over at Poison Girl and Brasil, people that don’t really care about their coffee, but go because that’s the place they feel cool about being seen at. It was Notsuoh poseurdom all over again but lacking the “no questions asked, no questions answered” vibe that I was into at that age.  The owners are trying to reproduce that same successful formula from they copied from Notshouh and used at Poison Girl. It’s one of those coffee houses that are not about the coffee, but the scene. To tell the truth, I was expecting something more original.

Antedote represents all that is slackerdom in coffee, and if I was their high school teacher, they would get a C-.

Hands down, Max Gonzalez runs one of the best coffee houses in town, at least in the top 3. It’s hard to say best because great coffee shops require the right blend of personality and coffee.

What makes Catalina so good is because of what I would call their “brutally honest pursuit of good coffee”. I enjoy making the trip to Catalina so I can talk coffee with Max or Ben. And even though I’ve began to see that Max and me enjoy a good debate on which blend is the best, I know that I’m always going to get one of the best cups available in this town. What’s also great about Catalina is that Max isn’t afraid to push the envelope or take risks with his coffee. So I might come and learn that they’ve changed their blend yet again in their relentless quest for the best espresso.

Of course, my humble opinion is that espresso taste better when you use less Central American coffee and more African. So sometimes I think that Catalina is on the bright side. But it’s Max’s joint and your going to drink what he thinks is best.

Catalina has built a good punk-rock coffee shop vibe. There’s little pretense or snobbery happening, unless your less cool then me that is (just kidding), and if you like coffee, or are just not a jerk, you’ll fit in. Also I’ve noticed that Catalina is one of the last places on this green Earth that allows it’s employees to play their own music. I’m sorry, but there’s just nothing less cool than the mainstream alterno-corporate-light-punk-crap that is piped through their satellite music boxes. Max, don’t forget that coffee shops are a blend of coffee and personality.

I think that the only thing I could say I don’t like is the early hours. Catalina closes shop at around 10. There have been a few time when I was really wanting a late night coffee, made the trip, and was turned away empty-handed by a locked door.

The bottom line is that Catalina sets a high standard that most coffee shops can’t meet.