“You’re not necessarily compromising quality with batch brew,” Gilman says. That said, with machines like the Ground Control and Starbucks-backed Clover Vertica, businesses can produce more coffee with tighter accuracy. At a certain scale, it’s smarter to make a batch of coffee, which expresses a coffee’s flavor and body in a different way than a manual pour or by an espresso machine. If we want connoisseurship, we want pour-over and smaller brew devices.” Relevantly, Blue Bottle, which was a leader in the manual coffee boom, began selling 16-ounce coffees somewhere along the line - presumably, since the company wanted to, you know, make money. If we’re going to demand 16-ounce coffees, shops would move toward batch brew. “It’s like the slow food movement,” Gilman says. Creative director Evan Gilman is a fan of the grande size and says the 16-ounce coffee is only a rarity in San Francisco due to a boom in hand-made coffee about 15 years ago, around the same time pour-over coffee went supernova. In Oakland, green coffee-buyer Royal Coffee operates the Crown, a shop where 16-ounce coffees are en vogue. Travel the Tenderloin’s Coffee Shops With a Yemeni Coffee Savant “So, to me, the latte tastes more like warm milk,” Alkhanshali says. Like Valle, the Monk of Mokha says a latte ought to be made with less milk than is required to fill a 16-ounce cup. “I would also argue it’s a big money maker.” That said, he doesn’t opt for that order as a customer. “People in SF do sell it,” Alkhanshali acknowledges. He points to Equator Coffee as an example of a specialty shop that sells 16 ounces, and he says a friend who worked at the business sold a ton in that size. Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the owner of coffee importing company Port of Mokha, doesn’t see any reason why shops shouldn’t sell larger cups. The quality argument is legitimate, but it’s not black and white. “I love a Big Gulp, don’t get me wrong,” Overstreet says. If specialty coffee is about appreciating origin and craft, he feels a big, watery cup dilutes that experience both literally and philosophically. He says specialty coffee is like wine, which makes a 16-ounce coffee akin to boxed wine. Bryan Overstreet of Coffee Movement takes a similar approach. Her espressos pull at about two ounces, and 10 ounces of milk provides the flavor and body she and her customers prefer. Ana Valle of Abanico Coffee Roasters sells nothing larger than a 12-ounce cup, and the El Salvadoran roaster and shop owner says it’s because the coffee-to-milk ratio gets out of whack in anything bigger. Some folks say that at its best the 12-ounce-only regime creates uniformity in an industry where discerning customers want the best flat white possible. But the fact remains: many upscale coffee purveyors not only do not sell 16-ounce coffees - they reject the idea of ever doing so despite these trying times and the simple fact that a larger option would undoubtedly satisfy caffeine-deprived customers. Throughout the Bay Area, offerings, of course, run the gamut. “Who needs 16 ounces of anything besides water?” “It was part of an era full of rules,” Maguire tells Eater SF in a text. Maguire’s indifferent about whether or not the 16-ounce size appears on menus she feels the preference for smaller cups is leftover from a prescriptive era of specialty coffee in the 2000s and 2010s when businesses including Bay Area-grown Blue Bottle and Ritual went from shops to nationally recognized names. Java Beach and Beach’n both sell 16-ounce coffees, brewed with Buffy Maguire’s Lady Falcon Coffee beans. There are a few places to get 16 ounces of the black stuff out near the beach. But in San Francisco’s fancy coffee shops, that’s simply not the case. As the name, “medium,” might indicate, a 16-ounce coffee is about as common a coffee order as they come - something you’d expect to be able to order just about anywhere. Taking stock of the overall lack of availability, it’s easy to get the impression no Bay Area specialty coffee shops sell 16-ounce coffees - which is weird, given that 16 ounces constitutes a grande-sized drink, or a medium for those who don’t speak Starbucks. One also can’t get a grande-sized drink at Andytown Coffee, where sizes top at 12 ounces, nor at Blackbird Book Store + Cafe, which brews Four Barrel beans. Now that Giulietta Carrelli’s Trouble Coffee is gone, there’s one fewer place to get a 16-ounce coffee on Judah Street in the Outer Sunset.
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