Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzz | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. In the 1980s people in America mostly got coffee from machines, in their home or office. Few humans were employed making coffee ("barista" was not really a job title in the 1980s and if you told people it would be in the future, they would probably think you were crazy).

View on HN

I know what you mean, not sure why others are brining in spurious arguments. Coffee shops in the 1980s were donut shops, mostly with truckers sitting around.

Well it's gone full circle now, as Starbucks (and a lot of other chains) use machines to make the espresso part of the drink at the touch of a button.

The barrister is still responsible for steaming milk, but I only assume that is because the sounds and smells of that are what make the coffee shop atmosphere.

There's a fair amount of skill involved in pulling a good espresso shot.

Fair enough, though a well adjusted Super-Automatic Espresso machine can reliably and reproducibly get you 90% of the way there hundreds of times a day. The majority of customers wouldn't be able to distinguish that last 10% anyway. Have a barista on hand to adjust the Super-Automatic daily, to account for changing bean freshness, and you're pretty much good to go.

What about variance in tastes of customers or even variance in bean itself (beyond age).

How can a barista accomodate the variance in taste of a customer when pulling an espresso shot? The barista can dial in the pressure profiling, how long to pull the shot, and the grind size. For a given batch of beans, based on the type, level of roast, and age, there likely exists a sweet spot for those parameters that most baristas would agree upon. My understanding is that this is what baristas do anyway - adjust the machine for the beans available today, and then just crank them out all day long. A super automatic (or future versions) that's dialed in daily could achieve pretty much the same thing.

AFAIK, the barista will try to pull the best espresso out of the beans that they have. I'm not sure variance in customer tastes can be accomadated at this level, beyond a ristretto or an americano.

There is which is why I’m finding that the Costa machines here in the UK are consistently better than the humans are.

I never had a coffee from a Costa machine, but purely from the looks of it, and my experience with similar looking machines, I wonder: does this really produce espresso (as in say 16grams of fresh ground beans in, water at proper temperature and pressure of like 6 or more bars, yielding something like 32grams of beverage) or rather something which can best be described as 'strong coffee'?

Good question. I’m not sure I care if I’m honest. It tastes pretty good and keeps me alive :)

Your metrics for an espresso seem incredibly trivial for a machine to exactly reproduce, yet wildly open to human error and deviance.

Yes that's pretty much spot on. Making espresso with a manual lever machine isn't too hard too mess up, especially not in comparison with pressing one button or filter coffee. Yet it's apparently not that trivial to make such a machine, and keeping it working for hundreds of cups a day: prices of those are easily well over 10k$.

Sure but espresso varies, change the bean even the age of the bean and the recipe needs to adjust. Not to mention not everyone wants the same experience every single time, and not every person wants the same exact espresso that the last person had.

Starbucks is selling an experience and it's central to this experience that there be a human putting a little TLC into what happens, whether it's a friendly greeting, a product recommendation, remembering your name and writing it on the cup, etc. The key is literally for there to be a human involved, because we get emotional satisfaction from a positive interaction with other humans.

There's nothing new in this discussion -- we've been automating away manual labor since the Industrial Revolution. We end up creating these human touch jobs with the resulting productivity gains (this is the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the value isn't in the muscle anymore, it's in the relationship).

In fact, thanks in no small part to capitalism's ruthless efficiency, loneliness and isolation are at record highs. The demand for a little TLC has never been higher.

We'll have fewer pizza makers but more people whose job is essentially to make you feel good.

From my experiences with coffee machines that produce cappacinos, the act of frothing milk seems to be one of those tasks that is much more difficult to automate than I would have thought. I've had a few that were passable, but none that are remotely as good as a decent human made one. The actual coffee on the other hand seems to be easeir to automate.

It seems like this is a matter of fashion and it could easily swing the other way? Why couldn't a machine make excellent coffee?

They can. People pay up for the experience.

I think the key to this is to hide the robots from public view. Crank out pizzas, but not with the machine in human view. Have someone visibly handing them out. Let buyers assume the pizzas are made by artisans out the back.

Of course it can. One of the best machines for making coffee is the Technivorm Moccamaster (the thermo pot version). It's been in the market for decades, lasts for decades, it's easy to clean and together with a good grinder and fresh good beans, it produces a perfect mug of coffee every morning.

does this follow the trend for (or perhaps presage) an increasing emphasis on “user experience”?

Coffeehouses have been a thing for over 500 years now, so you must be pretty old.

or just American.

"Philadelphia’s first coffeehouse opened in 1703, and by mid-century half a dozen operated within the city limits"

https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/coffeehouses/

Pedantic. In the 1980s there weren't many in America, now there are Starbucks'es and others throughout.

They were a thing in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Maybe more of an urban or hippie thing.

I know the term "coffeehouse" was a cultural touchstone in the US because it was used in titles of books published before the 80s. Sorry I don't remember specifically, but this "nothing existed until Starbucks" is ridiculous. Starbucks came out of somewhere. Coffeehouses came from Europe to the US, before and after the American revolution.

I'm tempted to just call out the absurdity of arguing this point, but instead I'll just air-drop a factoid: if you Google "https://www.statista.com/statistics/196590/total-number-of-s..., you'll find a graph showing approximately 1,650 specialty coffee shops in the US in 1991, and 31,490 in 2015.

I'd link directly to it but the site forces you to pay to see the graph unless you clicked on it from a Google search results page, which is bad and evil. I can't find a better source.

Starbucks has something like 15,000 locations in the US, half your latter figure. They could have a million stores and it still wouldn't mean they invented coffee.

They were pretty rare.

Even in NYC, a coffee shop was mostly a Greek diner. While it may reveal my Irish working class roots, I never saw espresso made or consumed outside of an ethnic Italian restaurant in Arthur Ave until I was like 17.

Last week, I had a mediocre latte from a Starbucks at an I95 truck stop adjacent to a cotton field in North Carolina.

Pedantic. The world is not America. Actually, the U.S. not America either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com