Meet Andy Schecter

Andy Schom… er, Andy Schecter

Andy Schecter is a familiar face—and a familiar avatar—on home-barista forums like CoffeeGeek and alt.coffee, and he regularly contributes (as much as anybody “regularly” contributes) to Portafilter.net. A kind, funny man with an easy laugh, Andy generously agreed to be among the first people to meet the new Press Pot: “I hear I’m right after Andrea Illy and just before the Pope.”

After the jump, Andy discusses how he discovered a love of coffee by not wanting to be killed in a Moka pot accident, what his ideal home-café setup is, and why crema is not gross.

Am I remembering correctly that you live in New York state?
Rochester, yes; I am in the great north wasteland.

Are you from around there?
Actually I grew up in New York City—in Queens, if that’s still considered the city. I left when I went to college, but I still have a lot of relatives in the city. I come down a few times a year to visit them, and when I do I try to sneak off and visit coffeeshops. For a while it wasn’t that hard keeping track, but now there are so many so-called third-wave coffeeshops that I am way, way behind, and I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up at this rate. They’re sprouting up like weeds.

What is it you do, Andy?
I am co-owner of a business called Northern Soy, and we make tofu. Our brand is SoyBoy.

Wow, how long have you been in the soy business?
Thirty years.

What got you interested in working with soy?
It’s something that I feel strongly about, and something I’ve been doing all these years. It’s very much a challenge still—a big challenge—but it’s been very good to me. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1971, and when you’re a vegetarian, tofu just naturally becomes one of the staples of your diet. So that’s how I started.

That’s interesting to me because I feel like soy is still kind of mysterious in a way—relatively little is known about it and new studies are constantly coming out. Kind of like coffee, in that regard.
Maybe. The general public’s perception is probably a lot different than the perception of the people who have studied it and are involved in it.

Well what got you interested in coffee?
I was never really much of a coffee drinker, but about eight years ago my girlfriend really liked coffee. She had one of those little Moka pot things, and we messed around with it occasionally. I was always afraid it would explode and kills us both! The release valve would clog, or something like that. [Laughs] So we tried to make espresso that way, and sometimes we’d to go to Starbucks and we would get one of those milky things—it seemed like a treat. For some reason, we decided to get our own espresso machine. So we went to a local place that did a lot of kitchen supply stuff, and we bought a $200 Krupps espresso machine. [Laughs] It was a total disaster. It was just a joke! It wouldn’t work—and it couldn’t work, because we were using preground coffee in it, and nobody told us that wasn’t going to work. So we went back to the shop where we had gotten it, and the owner was very anxious to help out, but he had no clue either because he wasn’t an espresso person. I called Krupps’s customer service, and they were absolutely no help. I was familiar with Usenet, and I searched and I found alt.coffee. I started posting, and very quickly I realized that this Krupps machine with preground coffee was a losing combination. I returned the Krupps, thank you very much, and I went out and bought a Rocky grinder and a Rancilio Silvia the next week. That’s how it started, and I got really fascinated with the whole process. That was all in late 2000.

You’re a regular on the big forums and message boards, and of course your David Schomer–inspired avatar is pretty recognizable. Do you know David at all?
I’ve met him twice, actually. I met him in Seattle both times. I met him at Vivace once, I was introduced to him there. And then I saw him at his booth at the Seattle SCAA show.

Did you get an impression of what he was like?
I don’t know what he’s like because I haven’t socialized with him, but I think he’s a pretty driven guy and I think he’s worked very hard on a lot of different skills. Obviously we know he’s worked hard on his coffee, and I think he’s worked very hard on his business skills to make his cafés as successful as they are. I suspect from things I’ve heard that he’s worked very hard on his personal skills. Like for many of us, myself included, a lot of the dealing with the public stuff didn’t come naturally to him. So he had to work at that. I have a lot of respect for David for all those things—and, of course, for the bolo ties.

Do you think that Professional Techniques is still one of the most relevant texts we have?
Well, there aren’t very many other texts. In many ways it’s very dated, his book. I think there’s a lot of good information in there, and I suspect that there’s a lot of misinformation in there—stuff that David thought was important, and over the years some of the information in that book has been superceded. Aside from that book, there’s Scott Rao’s book—and of course, I really like that book, having had some input in it. [Laughs] I think it’s an excellent book. And there’s Illy’s scientific almost-textbook. I don’t know, what else is there in book form about the technique of making espresso coffee? Aside from Scott.

Handbook was really in-depth in a way that I don’t think I was expecting.
[Laughs] Scott’s a pretty deep guy. I first met Scott in Atlanta and I didn’t know who he was—somehow we met at one of those after-party kind of things—and he had some just really interesting ideas and he had a lot of experience. We really hit it off. It’s always interesting and a pleasure for me to talk to Scott about coffee kinds of stuff.

A lot of that book is pretty scientific. Do you think that making great espresso is more of an art or more of a science, or a little bit of both?
I think you need both, or the espresso’s really going to suck. I think… I don’t know if you took any science courses in college, but you probably had some coffee out of a Mr. Coffee machine in some science lab and it was probably pretty bad. And I think I remember taking a drawing class in the art department and there was some pretty bad coffee there, too! [Laughs] I think you need both, I mean, I’m sure you need both: You need to have the artistic temperament to experiment with what is aesthetically pleasing to your palate, right? And you need to have imagination to get there. But at the same time, if you don’t understand some of the basic principles of how changing parameters—volumes and proportions and things like that—affect your coffee, I think you’re at a huge disadvantage and you’ll miss out and struggle unnecessarily. If you think of the Illys, they’re obviously very scientific in their approach, but they also have a heavy emphasis on the art of what they’re doing, and it seems like that’s what it takes. Especially with espresso. Espresso couldn’t have been created without the work of hundreds of engineers and scientists just to get the technology to the point that the beverage was even possible. Much more so than brewed coffee, espresso is a product of technology. To have espresso without technology is an impossibility. That’s the wimpy answer: You need both. It’s both! It’s Obama and McCain! [Laughs]

Speaking of espresso, a colleague of mine has said recently that she has a theory: “Crema is disgusting.” I wanted to hear what you think of that theory. How do you feel about crema?
“How do you feel about crema!” [Laughs] God, that’s so weird. How do I feel about crema? I feel great about crema! There are so many ways to answer that question. I mean, some people would say sex is disgusting! You know, crema is part of what makes espresso espresso. It helps deliver some of the fragrance to your nasal passages, and so much of what we know of as flavor is delivered through our sense of smell. Espresso without crema is not really espresso. I am baffled as to exactly what is disgusting about it.

Well, I think she’s exaggerating to prove a point, that crema is overpowering and strong, and can be quite different from the rest of the drink’s body, that maybe it detracts from what would otherwise be a more balanced taste experience. I mean, there are people who refuse to so much as jostle their cup, let alone stir a shot, but it’s true that that first crema-full sip can be quite pungent.
I started stirring my espresso sometime last year because there was a post by Pete Licata where he talked about blending it all together. I always stir now. I find that it does bring more of a balance. But I know some people like to do one layer at a time, they like the taste to evolve in that way. Mostly I like to stir it up and get the total taste, “What is this espresso like?”

Speaking of making espresso—stirred or not—what would your ideal home-café setup be like, if money, space, time, and practicality weren’t a consideration?
Not that different from what I have, actually. I still have that original Silvia; it’s been highly, highly modified, so it doesn’t make coffee anything like the original Silvia did. It’s extremely accurate temperature-wise. I believe it’s as accurate as any commercial machine out there. I’d like to be able to start out in a higher temperature and then ramp down to a lower one. Also, I think I’ve made one cappuccino in the past year because it’s such a pain to steam. My ideal espresso machine would also look better than mine does, because it’s just a little Silvia with wires and cables going all over the kitchen counter. I look at it every morning so I don’t even see all that crap, but most people who see it for the first time are kind of horrified. I’ve posted pictures of it on the Web, and quite a few people have thanked me for posting them because they have a story like, “I told my wife I wanted to spend $1,500 on an espresso machine and she said no way, and then I showed her the picture of your counter and my wife said spend the money so our counter doesn’t look like that.” [Laughs] Some people ask me when I’m going to get a real espresso machine, and I don’t think I ever will. I might break down and get one, but I enjoy the control and fiddling that I can do with my machine so much. Just about any machine out there is so full of compromises that it doesn’t seem worth it. There’s not many people as into the espresso thing as I am who bought a Silvia eight years ago and still use it every day.

Aside from what you’ve made at home, what was the single most incredible or unforgettable coffee you’ve ever had?
The single best brewed coffee I’ve ever had was pretty unexpected. I attended SCAA in Atlanta, and at the very end Don Schoenholt took amateur alt.coffee people around to introduce us. We went to the booth for coffees from Guatemala, where had a bunch of various regional coffees in air pots, and who knows how long ago they had been brewed. So a bunch of us took a few moments and we tried a sip of the coffees in their air pots—they must have had six or eight Guatemalan regions represented. I popped a couple squirts of a Cobán into a paper cup and I took a sip—it literally blew my mind. It was so intensely fruity, it was like a riot of fruit on my tongue. I was used to the intensity of espresso, and a lot of brewed coffee seems very subtle and a little bit obtuse to me, but this was every bit as intense as espresso. There was so much going on in that cup that I was flabbergasted. And I’ve had some Cobán since then and it hasn’t been in that league. And to think that this was just sitting around in an air pot and I drank it in a paper cup, it blew my mind.

And espresso?
The best espresso I’ve ever had was one I actually wrote about it on Portafilter about a year ago. I went into Gimme! Brooklyn and there was a barista there named Peter. I asked for a straight espresso. He worked it and worked it and threw out a couple of shots because they weren’t good enough. He pulled me this tiny little ristretto that was just amazing. It had incredible body, eat-it-with-a-spoon kind of body. It was really smoky, and it had this spicy kind of tang to it. It was just amazing. I don’t pull that style at home—20 grams in a triple basket, very restricted—and he just nailed it. It was just spectacular. I’ve never had anything quite as remarkable before or since then.