Shoot ’em up (Image: Aeroshot)

After marvelling (and despairing a little) at breathable chocolate and bacon inhalers, only the latter of which turned out to be an April Fool’s joke, we were curious as to what the next breathable wonder to hit the market would be. Enter the AeroShot, a lipstick-sized tube containing four to six puffs (about 100 mg) of calorie-free, lime-flavoured caffeine. Developed by the same Harvard scientist who created Le Whif inhalable chocolate, the device is being promoted as an alternative to the oh-so gruelling task of drinking coffee or energy drinks: “pure energy” with “no liquid to slow you down or fill you up.”

Those claims have spooked some people. The product’s recent launch in the U.S. (it’s not yet available in Canada) rekindled worries about the hazards of pairing alcohol with caffeine. “Aeroshot is nothing more than a club drug or a party enhancer designed to give the user the ability to drink until they drop,” U.S. Senator Charles Schumer said at a press conference. He has a point—studies apparently show that people consume more alcohol when it’s paired with energy drinks. Still, to be fair, Breathable Foods, which makes the Aeroshot, is warning users to cap their consumption at three tubes per day and scrupulously avoids mentioning any late-night applications on its website. So who exactly is the product for, then? “Athletes, college students or any of us passing long days at the office.” This is starting to make more sense all of a sudden.

• Skip the Coffee Cup and Inhale Your Caffeine Fix [Associated Press]

The TAS651, one of the models being recalled (Image: Tassimo)

Canadians who like their cuppa joe produced through futuristic robotic labour will be upset to learn that nearly a million Tassimo coffee makers are being recalled in Canada, as well as about 800,000 units in the U.S. In case you’ve never used a Tassimo, the machines uses “T Discs”—small containers filled by one of the partner brands with coffee grinds, tea leaves or other stuff—to make single servings of hot beverages. Tattooed baristas might hate them for their prepackaged, pre-ground coffee; armchair environmentalists might direct their scorn at the packaging that goes in the trash with every cup. But the latest round of haters is more likely objecting to the burns they can cause. According to the Toronto Star, in the U.S. there have been 140 reports of the machines “dousing people” with scalding water. In 37 of those cases, the victims suffered second-degree burns. Apparently, the discs can explode during the brewing process, spraying hot water on the unlucky brewer—or, in one case, a two-year-old girl. Full details of the recall are available on the Tassimo website. If indeed this is the beginning of the robot uprising, it seems it will be well caffeinated. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »

Like us, you’ve probably pondered Starbucks’ complete and total domination by asking, rhetorically, “What’ll they serve next, beer and wine?” And the answer is yes—that’s exactly what they’ll serve next (in limited markets in the States). But while Starbucks is expanding into booze, Tim Hortons has been muscling into the Starbucks market with outlandishly sized coffees and espresso-based drinks. Sure, their espresso might “smell like aluminum” and their latte might taste “tinny,” but the move is a clear encroachment on Starbucks’ turf. Not to be outdone, Starbucks seems to be trying to woo some of Tim Hortons’ customers with its new blonde roast. In a promotional video, one of their roasters says the new offering is perfect “for the person who always wished that Starbucks had a roast like this.” In other words, writes Jessica Allen at Maclean’s, it’s perfect for the typical Tim Hortons customer. It’s a subtle play, but if Starbucks tries to sign Sidney Crosby or appeal to sleepy Canadian nationalism, we’ll know what’s going on. Read the entire story [Macleans] »

Starbucks vs. Tim Hortons cup sizes (N.B.: Starbucks’s trenta size not included, since it’s only for cold drinks)

In news that’s already sending shock waves across the nation, Tim Hortons announced today that it’s introducing a new, larger coffee size: the mammoth, 24-ounce extra large, which will appear in stores January 23. To accommodate the new name, the old 20-ounce extra large has been renamed large, the old 14-ounce large is now a medium, the old 10-ounce medium is now small and the old eight-ounce small is extra small. If this is a cash grab, it’s not a blatant one: consumers will pay the same price for the same amount of coffee (e.g. a new small will cost what an old medium used to cost). No word yet on retaliatory measures from Starbucks, whose puny 20-ounce venti has now been definitively outclassed (and no, its trenta doesn’t count; it’s only for cold drinks).

Coming soon to the Path: latte art (Image: Zack Simone from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

In this season of giving, it’s only fitting that Toronto’s favourite coffee son, Sam James, would announce he’s taking pity on the poor downtown cubicle jockeys who’ve had to shuttle between Starbucks, Timmie’s, Second Cup and Timothy’s to get their fix. Starting February or March of next year, he’ll be opening up a second Sam James Coffee Bar in the Path beneath the Sun Life Financial Building at 150 King Street West. He first expanded from his original Harbord Street location with last year’s tiny Coffee Pocket on Bloor. Yesterday he told Post City that the new downtown location would preserve his signature bare-bones, no-seats vibe, and would be equipped with a pair of customized La Marzocco Lineas to handle the volume of traffic he’s expecting. He also took the opportunity to vent a little about the sterility of the financial district’s retail landscape: “The financial district in New York City is crammed with businesses; in Chicago, Intelligentsia has locked down the financial core. And Toronto’s financial district has nothing, but there are a ton of people who are looking for something good.” Read the entire story [Post City] »

Bulldog owner Stuart Ross at his downtown coffee shop (Image: Meaghan Binstock)

Monday marked the arrival of the new line of Tim Hortons “premium espresso”–based drinks we told you about a couple weeks back. Nestled in next to the iced cappuccino machine at Ontario locations is a new spaceship-like contraption that spits out everything from a simple espresso ($1.19) to cappuccinos ($2) and fancy-flavoured lattes ($2) using powdered milk. With one press of the appropriate button, the drink comes out, coffee, milk and all (there’s also a happy face made out of sprinkled cocoa on top of each beverage). To mark the occasion—and satisfy our curiosity about the stuff—we asked Stuart Ross, the owner of Bulldog Coffee and a champion barista, for his professional’s opinion on Timmy’s latest creation. What followed was a lot of confusion and some less-than-smiley faces, starting with the espresso. »

Screen shot of the app’s home screen

Starting today, Toronto’s latte-sipping elite will be able to get their caffeine fix that much more quickly with the Canadian release of Starbucks’ new iPhone app. The app works in concert with the coffee chain’s Starbucks Cards, allowing users to load the card’s value into the phone and then tap the phone at stores to make payments. It’s also possible to reload the balance using a credit card, practise building a “virtual beverage” (presumably to allay front-of-the-line anxiety) and search for jobs at nearby branches. The service was rolled out in the U.S. earlier this year and will be available on Android and BlackBerry phones in the future. And while we have our doubts about whether mobile payments will actually be any faster, at least the new app might cut back on customers prattling away on their phones while at the front of the line.

See you latte; Tim Hortons executive chairman, president and CEO Paul House (Image: CNW Group/Tim Hortons Inc.)

Tim Hortons, that Canadian bastion of par-baked doughnuts and extreme folksiness, announced yesterday that it will soon be making espresso-based coffees available in 2,500 locations across Canada. The drinks, which include lattes, cappuccinos and espressos, will be selling for significantly less than at their competitors: a 10-ounce latte is priced at just $2, compared to $2.95 for 8-ounces at Starbucks.

While Tim’s has served cappuccinos for some time, they’ve always been made with a powdered substance. Apparently they also experimented with the real deal at a few GTA locations in 2005. The chain is now upgrading to genuine espresso, albeit run through an automatic machine as at Starbucks’s. Customers will also get real steamed or frothed milk, but without choosing from among their competitors’ tens of thousands of possible drink variables like decaffeination, fat and lactose content, foam or temperature.

While luxury coffee seems like an obvious route for expansion (even McDonald’s started selling the stuff), we admit we’re a little wary: Timmies has made its fortune on inexpensive, quick food and drink, and we’re not sure how well a premium product like espresso will do. For a glimpse at the potential harrowing future, consider the “lasagna” the company started offering last month. Ontario gets the $2 latte on November 14, while the rest of the country will have to wait until mid-December.

• Tim Hortons tiptoes into Starbucks territory [National Post]
• Tim Hortons to take on competitors with its own espresso coffees [Ottawa Citizen]
• Tim Hortons ramps up coffee chain wars [CBC News]

The coffee display at Manic Coffee (Image: Renée Suen from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

On Tuesday, the Toronto Star reported that Starbucks had raised its prices for coffee and other beverages across the country by anywhere from 10 to 15 cents for a grande bold (16 ounces). This comes after Tim Hortons raised its prices back in April, which interim CEO Paul House attributed to the increasing cost of coffee thanks to a fungus that destroys coffee plants in Colombia. We decided to survey several local coffee retailers to see how a shift in the market is affecting their business. Check out whose prices went up, whose stayed the same and what innovative measures are being taken to offset costs, after the jump.

First, a little primer on prices (skip down if economics makes your head hurt): coffee is the second-most-traded commodity in the world behind crude oil, with two of the most common types of beans traded in financial markets—Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is traded in the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Robusta is traded on the NYSE Liffe Exchange in London. Because of this, pricing can be affected by the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, as well as by basic supply and demand and weather conditions. It is also positively correlated with other commodities such as cocoa and sugar. In May, coffee prices hit a 14-year high.

Here’s what the local shops told us:

• I Deal Coffee in Kensington confirmed it has indeed increased prices to offset increasing costs. “Bean prices have shot up, milk prices have shot up, energy, fuel—all those things just started eating away at the bottom line,” says manager Ian Jones. I Deal Coffee increased the price of a 12-ounce coffee from $2 to $2.25, but Jones says margins are still lower than they were a year ago.

• Then there’s Manic Coffee on College Street, where prices were raised in April but have since been dropped back to remain competitive based on neighbourhood pricing. At Manic, a 12-ounce cup of coffee is $2.

• Leslieville’s Te Aro kept the price of its brewed coffee the same, but the shop’s roasted coffee bean prices have increased noticeably in the last six months—a response to the price of C futures. Depending on the type of coffee, current prices range from $16 per pound to $22 per pound, up a dollar from previous costs.

• At Crema Coffee’s Bloor Street location, brewed coffee retail prices stayed the same, but a bag now costs $16 to $22, up from $14 to $21 in the last year.

• Similarly, Dark Horse in Riverside hasn’t increased the cost of its brewed coffee in five years, but the price of bag of coffee has recently increased from $12 to $18.

• At Sam James Coffee Bar on Harbord, prices haven’t risen—yet. Owner Sam James says he expects some sort of price increase to happen, but he notes that coffee futures are unpredictable: “I’ve heard that prices are going up globally but also that prices went down last week because of inconsistencies with oil,” James said. For James, pricing also depends on the roaster he buys his beans from—since those charges haven’t increased, neither have those at his shop.

• Things are noticeably different at The Common in Dufferin Grove. Sure, prices have stayed the same, but owner Ed Lau told us he’s made a few other adjustments to offset costs. “We’re experimenting with not having glassware because the labour [to wash them] is so high,” Lau said. “So we only have to-go cups, and it averages out that a week’s wage is almost 5,000 to-go cups.” This is the first time in its five years that The Common hasn’t had glassware, but rising coffee, milk and rent prices meant making changes in order to keep the cost of a cup of joe down to $2. “I think it’s a good deal and it’s something that’s important,” Lau said.

• Ezra Braves, proprietor of Ezra’s Pound told us it can be difficult for independent coffee shops to raise prices. “Often the perception is that an independent business has less of a right to raise its prices, and because the relationships are more personalized, there’s always a face to engage with in terms of pricing.” Ezra’s Pound increased its prices recently by about 10 cents, with the price of a hand-brewed cup of coffee now costing from $2.85 to $3.85. “Considering the love and labour that goes into making a cup of coffee the price is fairly inexpensive,” he said.

We’re pretty sure that Tim Hortons brass were excited to set up shop in Dubai last weekend, but going by initial reports, that’s nothing compared to the joy of expats who’ve discovered a tiny oasis of Canadiana away from home. Sure, we’re used to getting our fix at any of three locations within spitting distance, but Canadians living in the Middle East have had to live Timbit-free since leaving home. We decided to poke around the Emirati blogosphere to see how locals and blissfully re-caffeinated Canucks have taken the big news.

• Writer James O’Hearn rushed to be the first Tim Hortons customer in the United Arab Emirates, and was thus the first to discover some minor differences from homegrown Timmy’s: larger, American-size cups, no “everything” bagels (importing poppy seeds is apparently very, very illegal) and a distinct lack of a drive-through lane. “Yet for all the differences I saw,” he writes, “it still felt like home.”

• Roula and Samer, the former Torontonians behind 2 Foodies in Dubai, were appalled to see macaroni and cheese on the menu (something that’s on U.S. menus as well), but the rest was “a Canadian taste extravaganza.” Sampling just about everything, they were overjoyed to find that the bagels tasted like bagels, “like they do at every Tim Hortons in Canada and not like someone took standard bread dough and rolled it into a circle.”

• Sangeeta Reghu Nair of Sangry Words had never tried Tim Hortons before, but knew from Canuck friends that the coffee and Timbits are “stuff of Canadian legend.” The company’s plan to undercut the competition may be working; after marvelling at the price of the coffee, she writes, “I hate to admit but I need to say to all my Canadian friends that I sort of now understand their love for Tim Hortons. I feel half-Canadian this evening!”

• A defender of the faith delivered three boxes of Timmys to Ann Marie McQueen, the presumably doughnut-deprived author of A Canadian in Abu Dhabi. “Like a long-distance delivery of pure love,” she writes. “I am not going to lie—the sight of that logo choked me up a little.”

• A Waterloo lecturer teaching at the university’s Dubai campus (yes, there’s a Dubai campus) made friends with a pair of fellow Canadians over an Ice Capp. She noted, “That just doesn’t happen at a Tim Hortons in Canada.”

• The Dubai location prompted plenty of activity on Twitter. While most Canadians maxed out their 140 characters on exclamation marks, locals wondered what all the fuss was about, and one cynic even called it “one of those stories that alien intelligence agencies on a faraway planet read and think man, humans are weird.” And of course, it’s all over Foursquare.

• Tim Hortons Invades Dubai [Jimmy’s House]
• Roll up the Rim! [2 Foodies In Dubai]
• I feel half-Canadian this evening! [Sangry Words]
• Tim Hortons IN MY OFFICE, RIGHT NOW [A Canadian in Abu Dhabi]
• Tim Hortons—a Canadian Icon in Dubai [sandyindubai]

(Images: Dubai, Nelson Ebelt; cup, Tim Hortons)

(Image: Tim Hortons)

After fulfilling its mission to open three stores for every library in Canada, this weekend Tim Hortons went ahead and set up shop in Dubai. According to a story in The National, Canadian expats swarmed the “Tim Hortons Café and Bake Shop” on opening day, rejoicing that the coffee and doughnuts taste exactly the same—which is not surprising, coming from the company with the infamous finely tuned par-bake then freeze process. The Dubai location has the same menu we’re used to—sadly no fun McArabia Kofta equivalent—and the staff has been fully educated on what that whole “double double” thing means.

Of course the franchise can’t sustain themselves on Canucks in the United Arab Emirates forever, which is why they’re banking on their cheaper “value-priced” fare to keep them solvent in a mature coffee market. Tim Hortons has self-serve kiosks in Ireland and an extensive presence in the States, but this outpost stands as the company’s first true overseas export. The plan is to open 120 locations in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman over the next five years. Apologies to the Middle East, but resistance is futile.

• Tim Hortons outlet in Dubai mobbed by Canadian expats [The National]

Probably too dark to be healthy (Image: Nate Steiner)

Good news for over-caffeinated java junkies: a new study out of UBC has found that roasting coffee beans helps create stable antioxidants, the latest fad compound believed to help protect human cells from damage and premature aging. The research provides long-sought answers as to why roasting produces creates such potent antioxidants, and even suggests which roasts are best for a maximum dose. After the jump, four interesting things we learned from the study.

1. Green is good too
Unroasted coffee beans do contain natural antioxidants called chlorogenic acids—believed to have antiviral and antibacterial properties. Unfortunately, about 90 per cent of these acids are destroyed during the roasting process.

2. Apply the heat
The upside is that roasting creates even more potent antioxidants called maillard reaction products (MRPs), which are responsible for changing the colour and flavour of food that is roasted, toasted or fried. MRPs are responsible for the colour and taste of delicious fried onions and are practically an obsession with hardcore steak eaters.

3. Why colour matters
Roasting beans helps stabilize the amount of antioxidants in coffee, meaning the MRPs created by roasting degrade slower than naturally occurring antioxidants.

4. Scale it back
Medium roasts may actually be better for you than dark roasts, since MRPs created by the roasting process break down with excessive exposure at high heat. This means dark roasts contain the lowest levels of chlorogenic acids and lower levels of MRPs.

• Coffee beans could keep cells healthy, says study [Vancouver Sun]

A puny grande

The Internet was aflutter a couple days ago on the announcement that, starting yesterday, U.S. Starbucks customers will be able to order the 31-ounce (917 mL) Trenta, an enormous drink that makes Starbucks’ current largest size, the Venti, feel puny. The Trenta is so big it’s almost Big Gulp–sized: it is a whole seven ounces, or 207 mL, larger and costs 50 cents more than the Venti, but is exclusively for iced coffee, iced tea and lemonade.

Starbucks maintains that unsweetened drinks in the new size will have fewer than 90 calories, while sweetened versions (which everyone buys) will have fewer than 230 calories—the equivalent of a small meal. The National Post created a great infographic to put the size of the Trenta into context. Apparently, the average adult stomach can hold approximately 30 ounces (900 mL), just less than the size of a single Trenta. So far, Canada has been spared left out of the Trenta’s release, but if the successful Canadian test run of KFC’s deep-fried Double Down sandwich this past fall is any indication of demand for semi-ridiculous products, the Trenta may be in Canada sooner than we think. Expect longer lines at Starbucks bathrooms.

• U.S. Starbucks to one-up Venti with new, larger size: the ‘Trenta’ [National Post]
• Starbucks to offer nearly 1-litre drink size [CBC News]