Cafe Society 1-- (Austin, Texas)

Who could have predicted the coffee revolution? Starbucks, the symbol of our coffee obsession, started way back in 1971, and was founded by a triumvirate of liberal arts types-- an English teacher, a history teacher and a writer, students at University of San Francisco. The mainly roasted and  sold coffee beans and things only changed when Howard Schultz, a former store manager, bought the outfit in 1987. And, lest we forget,  San Francisco helped birth another societal revolution, hipsterism with the beats, or beatniks. The beats, known as poetry lovers and espresso coffee sippers, alternated sips of coffee with finger snapping in response to righteousness at poetry readings.

Those USF founders, with useless, idealistic, literary majors, showed their true colors and chose not to take Starbucks into the restaurant business. In 1987, they jumped off the bus and let the more ambitious Howard Schultz, a communications major, try his luck with the coffee thing. And Schultz proceeded to take it worldwide. Soon after, everybody else jumped on the bus.

So, lets's say the serious coffee drinking craze began in the 1990s. Starbucks had 140 outlets by 1992. That date coincides with the rise of the personal computer. The two things, coffee and laptops, became popular consumer items in tandem and to this day you'll see the coffee house crowd sippers peering into open laptop screens open while sipping the strong, gourmet brew. Espresso coffee and laptop computers  remain forever wedded as consumer behaviors in tandem, kind of like mom and apple pie, pickup trucks and gun racks, trophy wives and yoga pants, and iPhones and human beings.

Before we go any further into coffee history or get mired in tortured consumer analysis by a rank amateur and yes, another English major-- let's get to the present and try to explain the plethora of coffee shops in my Austin neighborhood.

I call this neighborhood LoBu, meaning Lower Burnet Road. This is north central Austin, about 3 miles north of the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, home of the Longhorns.

The coffee shops in my area are positioned in a an area of just a few square miles. I can easily walk to any of the 4 coffee palaces from my house.

They are:

1) Monkey Nest
2) Thunderbird
3) Epoch
4) Brentwood Social House, the recent arrival.

All four are doing landmine business from what I can tell.

Cowboys used to drink coffee but it was nothing like this gourmet stuff, brewed in fancy espresso machines just like the ones at Starbucks. In my discussion, in coming blogs, I'll try to differentiate between the four coffee houses, their environments and their clientele. All four shops serve pretty damn good coffee, and not sure I'll have much to say about the different impacts on the taste buds. The owners know all about those distinctions, no doubt, along with the baristas and loyal customers.

I'll continue with a discussion of my neighborhood coffee houses in the next blog entry.