July 17, 2012--Coffee

With an tinge of criticism, a friend pointed out that I seem to spend a lot of time writing about coffee.

True.

Be it of the diner kind or my newest favorite--cortaditos at the Smile on Bond Street in New York City--I begin the day with coffee. The caffeine and the chance encounters with friends and interesting strangers get my heart rate up and my mind on alert.

But up to now I have never mentioned Starbucks. Though I remember many years ago stumbling upon the original on Pike Place in Seattle, I was not that impressed with the coffee. And as a java snob I hate drinking coffee from a paper cup.

Now there are more than 11,000 Starbucks stores scattered across America and another 4,600 worldwide, including in Qatar, Cyprus, and Oman. In-sourcing, outsourcing, however you want to think about it, Starbucks is everywhere, challenging Coca Cola and McDonalds as our best known export. But still I stay away. Maybe in part because of that mass marketing.

But this may be about to change because something I read recently has made Starbucks more interesting to me.

I learned that someone is taking note of which Starbucks products are kosher enough for even orthodox Jews to drink. I've been going to the Website kosherstarbucks.com to see if my ultra-faithful brethren are allowed (or forbidden) to drink Breve Vanilla Latte or the Orange Mango Banana Vivanno.

This is of cultural not religious interest to me because I am far from kosher (yesterday morning, for example, at the Bristol Diner I had a side of bacon with my blueberry pancakes and New England Coffee); but I am interested in situations where religious practices pervade usually secular aspects of our lives. And beyond that I am interested in knowing how anything containing orange and mango might still be considered coffee. Kosher or traif not withstanding.

Uri Ort, who established and maintains the site as Starbucks keeps coming up with new concoctions, does not recommend Caramel Brulee Latte but says that Iced Salted Caramel Mocha is, as far as he can determine, kosher.

kosherstarbucks.com also enables those interested in keeping kosher, as we ungrammatically referred to it back in Brooklyn, to discuss their own concerns. For example, there is a chat-group devoted to the classic Frapucino. If you join it you will find enlightening back-and-forth about Farpucinos made with soy milk. It is apparently not kosher because the soy milk they use is reconstituted from powder and the powder is not kosher. So lactose-intolerant folks probably need to stick to basic black coffee, assuming it's available.

But even if you can handle milk products, some chat-group members raise the question as to whether or not the steam pump itself used to froth the milk needed to make Frapucinos is kosher. Maybe not, some claim, since it may not be hot enough to wash off any non-dairiness that in some way might be clinging to it; and since it is strictly forbidden to mix milk products with meat products, the steam generated may contain a mix of both milkhik and fleishik, which is as unkosher as it gets. It's more traif than lobster.

Things are even more complicated as they always are when rabbis get involved.

For example, Rabbi Sholen Fishbane, the kosher supervisor for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, has made his own careful study of Starbucks. He is a self-described Starbucks maven and to do his research visited more than 50 Starbucks in the U.S. and Japan. This resulted in his 2011"Guide to Starbucks Beverages."

He gets right to the is-it-hot-enough debate. Though Starbucks' dishwashers use water that is 180 degrees--hot enough to make things sanitary--is it hot enough to dissolve any fleishik that might somehow be clinging to Starbucks otherwise milhkik utensils or equipment?

No, he says, the fleishik might still be present; but (there is always a "but" when it comes to rabbinical findings) though there might be a tiny speck of unkosher grease on the rag used to wipe the steamer wand and it might wind up in a Skinny Cinnamon Dolce Latte, the milk is still kosher because the volume of the milk is more than 60 times the volume of the grease. A ratio which is generally deemed to be kosher enough.

Thus, my dear-departed grandparents would find it heartening to know that if I were inclined to slip into a Starbucks to sneak a Gingerbread Latte I would be keeping kosher. They can, though, remain at eternal rest since there is absolutely no chance of that ever happening. Among other things, though I crave my guilty pleasures, I'll never drink coffee with anything gingerbready in it and I insist on having my coffee in a real cup.

About the bacon the other day, well, that's another matter.