Meet the Coffee Obsessives Who Go to Any Length—and Pay Any Price—for a Great Cup of Joe
For almost four decades, Jeff Jungsten has been a secret weapon for architects and interior designers in the Bay Area: his namesake firm specializes in complex, six-figure-plus construction projects for the pickiest, and wealthiest, locals. The Mill Valley house was typical, a new ask from a longtime client who wanted Jungsten, in tandem with architect Drew McGukin, to turn the property into what he called “Functional Art.” That owner, a single, 50-something American with homes everywhere from Italy to the islands a ferry ride from Seattle, had bought this classic Victorian in Marin County with an eye to installing his wide-ranging contemporary collection within. But he also wanted the house itself to reflect back on those artworks, becoming a conversation piece in itself. Jungsten and McGukin came up with an ingenious solution: a custom kitchen made from materials like copper that would age and patinate with use, evolving as a living, interactive artwork. “If you don’t finish it with sealer, it won’t stay static—the handles will darken where he grabs them the most, with the patina showing the pattern of his life,” Jungsten explains.
And when clients commission such intensive, expensive projects—this was close to $2 million—Jungsten will often buy a thank you gift to present at completion. It was instantly obvious what this kitchen was missing. “His Wifi password is ‘morecoffeeplease,’ which was impossible to ignore,” Jungsten says. “We found out he has this love for coffee, focusing on where he gets his beans, how he grinds them.” His gift, then, was the ultimate luxury coffee treat: a $30,000 customized La Marzocco machine by Australian workshop Specht Design. Every element was individually remodeled to reflect the kitchen Jungsten had installed—think walnut paneling and copper fixtures, including the foaming stem; custom copper gage covers came with a new project-specific logo, designed by an artist. “It’s impossible to ignore how cool it is,” swoons Jungsten. “The machine is the essence of art.”
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It’s also an example of the obsessive, intensive and expensive ways that men (and yes, it’s almost always a man) will go to satisfy a love for coffee—call them the MAMICs, the Middle Aged Man Into Coffee. Picture the dinner party where the host is almost willing the food to end, the staff to clear the final plate, so he can take over. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ he asks, nonchalantly. The first person to show a flicker of interest, a raised eyebrow perhaps, and he’s plunged into the minutiae of the beans he picks, the way he brews and the secret foaming trick he learned from the best barista on earth.
Who Are These Coffee Obsessives?
A true MAMIC pores over the stories in Fresh Cup, Sprudge, or Standart, the indie magazines dedicated to the javasphere, and insists on swap out Casa Dragones for Quintzalia, the first tequila aged in oak barrels that once stored cold-brewed coffee brewed from Chiapas-grown beans. Ffion Pouler’s the Pourover newsletter is a must-read, and he’ll make pilgrimages in a new city to try a specific new coffee joint per Pouler’s advice (top tip: Qima, in London’s Fitzrovia, a slick new Yemeni roastery which serves fragrant Middle Eastern pastries alongside its hangover-stiff espresso). Much like his cousin, the MAMIL (that’s Middle Aged Man Into Lycra) might riff on his love for biking with abandon, there’s no limit to the time a true MAMIC will take, or the money he might spend, indulging his love for the holy bean.
Look around on social media, and the images of men and their mugs, or espresso cups, are commonplace—take @newbamadad2007 on Instagram, or Alfred Hopton IRL. His ritual includes posting a snap of himself clutching a different mug every morning, displaying not only his vast collection but his love for Bulletproof coffee (he’s an entirely unpaid advocate). He credits adopting the fat-enhanced caffeine with fixing several health issues, and weight loss, and requests a blender and tea kettle in his room when he travels for work as the Penn & Teller talent wrangler. “I like the regimen, the discipline, the same thing every day,” he tells Robb Report, “I’m not vegan, I’m not CrossFitting, and I’m not trying to convert anyone. But if the subject comes up, it’s easy for me to talk about it.”
The Ultimate Espresso Machine Designer
There’s no greater MAMIC flex, of course, than a five-figure, bespoke coffee machine; many companies offer customization but no one has the kudos, or clout of Specht Design. Founder Daniel Schonknecht (Coffee order: Nothing beats a good espresso) understands Hopton and Co.’s urges all too well. It was almost 10 years ago that the furniture designer first started tinkering with high-end machines, mostly swapping out elements he thought felt too cheap for a premium espresso-maker—timber side panels, for example, in lieu of plastic. A few pictures of that souped-up countertop machine on Instagram caused a frenzy of interest; six months later, he was working full-time on bespoke espresso machines like the one now installed in the Mill Valley home. “We elevate espresso machines and personalize them in the same way as a car—it’s to do with your taste, an expression of what you love,” he tells Robb Report, noting that he’ll only work on high end gadgets, typically top of the range from La Marzocco, the maker in around 90 percent of his projects. “There’s no crazy curve or polarizing angles to them—they’re sharp, clean, beautiful machines you can make look ultra-modern or ultra-vintage,” he says. “They’re so adaptable.”
One common request from clients: Porsche-inspired renovations. Schonknecht stresses he isn’t simply slapping a coat of scarlet paint over the entire machine, though. “We’re ‘inspired by’ rather than ‘a copy of’ and we don’t do in-your-face renditions,” he says. “We add details only a Porsche owner would know about, like customizing the paddle that controls the brew heater to be like a Porsche interior, or the steam knobs like the wheel design. We want them to have to look at it twice to pick up on the detail, and keep coming back to it.” He’s currently at work on a 911-inspired La Marzocco remodel that will cost around A$25,000 ($16,250).
Specht is based in Melbourne, Australia but around 70 percent of his business comes from overseas, including America. Daniel just received a chunk of marble in the mail from the Netherlands from a client keen for the machine to integrate with that element of his kitchen into the design. He’s particularly proud of his work turning an espresso-maker into a tribute to German industrial designer Braun. It took 13 months to complete, including much back and forth, sourcing prototypes for each custom element. “We injected a ton of detail: vintage fans, speakers, and it was a crazy wondrous machine,” he says. “It had a clear acrylic cover on the top of it that lifted off like a record player. Every element of the machine told the story of the different products that company made.” He does work with the occasional female MAMIC—around 10 percent of his customers are women, including a surgeon so obsessed with a particular Japanese textile she went back flew from her home in America to Japan expressly to find a swatch to send him for integration into the final design. Schonknecht’s next project is establishing his own metal shop so he can fabricate his own custom bodies for machines rather than relying on outsourcing. “They don’t get the detail exactly the way you want it to be,” he notes. That would also allow him to fulfill his ultimate goal: a custom line of Specht Design espresso machines.
Where Espresso Aficionados Learn to Pull Shots Like a Pro
Still, a machine is only as good as the technique of whomever is using it—and that’s where Jessa Winn comes in. Winn (coffee order: “Plain. Today, I had an espresso”) set up Procreate Coffee in Brooklyn after several years working as a barista. The goal of her academy was to offer masterclasses to café-workers so they could better finesse their espresso-pulling skills. Over the last 10 years, though, she’s been startled at how many private customers have opted for a one-on-one class or two with Winn or member of her team—around one third of students had no interest in commercializing their skills and were simply paying to make themselves better at-home baristas. Since the pandemic, when many people invested in kitchen gadgets, she says private individuals now form 50 percent of her business. “People come in and they’re always running before they can walk,” she says. “They’re doing all these weird things they’ve seen on Instagram, or TikTok, but they don’t know how to set the grind right to get a good coffee.”
Winn doesn’t require students to come to her Brooklyn facility; she’ll happily dispatch trainers across the city for folks to be schooled at-home. A two-hour, one-on-one class costs $275—a birthday treat, it seems, for one recent student. Call him a MAMIC-in-training, in every sense. “There was a mother who came in with her son, who must have been 12 or 14 years old. They were having a whole back and forth between the two of them about what types of toys, gadgets and tools they needed to get. He was the self-appointed barista of the family,” Winn pauses, “And I’m pretty sure his mom got in touch and brought him to show him that it’s not that complicated.”
The Go-To Roaster
Steven Sutton (coffee order: “Whatever is around and easiest—espresso or drip”) might disagree. The founder of NY-based Colombian roastery Devoción has earned plaudits from purists for offering what he claims to be the freshest coffee in the country. He explains the intriguing premise for his firm’s core product. Compare asparagus cooked fresh, moments after it’s picked from the garden, Sutton suggests, to some that’s flash-frozen then prepared: the flavor’s far more impressive with the former. “And the same thing happens with a coffee bean. The bean is alive inside the cherry, but as you introduce oxygen into it over time, oxidation occurs, and that diminishes the flavor.” Many beans, per Sutton, might spend months in transit before they’re roasted, so oxidation is extensive; much of his supply completes the journey from Colombia to Brooklyn in just 10 days via FedEx. It’s earned him insiderish accolades from MAMICs around the country, as has his VIP list: Sutton will periodically introduce limited editions of certain beans, teasing them to a list of regulars who will typically snap up the entire allocation before it’s even offered to the public, dropping them more like collectible sneakers than bags of coffee. Overseas devotees, from London to Dubai and Korea, will often pay more in express shipping than for the beans themselves, which typically top out at around $100 per 8-ounce bag.
One domestic superfan is 44-year-old Oren Samari (Coffee order: double espresso shot with almond milk) who works in commercial real estate in Los Angeles; he moved there five years ago from New York, where he and his wife were both Devoción regulars. “I haven’t found my coffee buddy yet—the few individuals I feel like might be are more often than not New Yorkers that have relocated to the West Coast.” Devoción is a taste of home. “I don’t know how many bags we’ve ordered,” he laughs, “Blue Bottle? You can get it on a supermarket shelf so it doesn’t feel special, have that thoughtfulness and the care. They talk about this whole bean backstory.” He stops, unsure whether to continue. “Coffee is an obsession, if you will. I go to bed at night excited about my coffee the next morning. That’s who I am and I’m OK admitting that.” Samari will doubtless be logging on to his VIP account when Devoción drops its next limited edition; Sutton bought up all 200 bags of a particular coffee—with a cherry-heavy flavor, he notes—at a specialty coffee show in Colombia. And such shows are the ultimate way for a MAMIC to make a coffee all of his own.
The Coffee Tastemakers
There’s no more sought-after title than scoring top marks at the Cup of Excellence. For more than two decades, this non-profit has been staging contests and shows around the world aiming in part at helping individual farmers earn more accolades and attention for their small batch coffees. Gary Urrutia (Coffee order: washed process Americano, “no sugar of course”) is the competition’s managing director and proudly talks about helping drive up prices for such rarefied crops—the average in 1999, he says, was around 88 cents per pound, but is now $1.72. “We have auctioned over 5,500 lots, held 200 competitions and sold $86m worth of coffee, from Mexico to Panama,” he says, proudly.
Cup of Excellence takes place in a country around the time of its coffee harvest, which varies per climate, but runs from November until the middle of May around the world. There was a record-breaker at the most recent Ethiopian event; beans from this country are prized by purists as it’s considered where coffee cultivation began. “Argentina and Brazil are royalty in the soccer world? It’s how Ethiopia is seen in the coffee world,” Urrutia says. These particular beans, a natural process coffee grown by Basha Bekele Botusha, sold for $445 per pound, the highest ever at any Cup of Excellence; the buyer was L.A.-based roaster Angelino’s Coffee, which also purchased every bag of the other top 11 scoring beans.
Judges are invited to score them much like Robert Parker’s wine ratings, with anything above 90 points proving exceptional. Urrutia says his non-profit’s events are primarily business to business, but a wealthy individual keen to create their own private coffee brand would be welcomed. Positions on the juries are awarded via application on Urrutia’s website, though it’s often oversubscribed—judges pay their own airfare, but are hosted in-country. Charles Fleer (Coffee order: Black, pour-over) has been a regular on those juries; he’s an American who lives in Prague in the Czech Republic and runs La Bohème Café and roaster there Fleer comes to the events expressly to find specialty coffees that his most demanding, deep-pocketed clients will appreciate. Before sanctions fenced off the Russian market, for example, he worked regularly with an oligarch who would spend $250 per pound, “I had to ship it to Barcelona, where it went through his professional taste testers to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, before it got delivered to his yacht just off Ibiza.”
Fleer has taken part in 33 Cup of Excellence events since his first, in 2008, and has seen trends come and go. Indeed, the latest, which involves adding fruit juice alongside water during bean processing for a flavored fermentation aimed at markets where bitter-tasting espresso is less embraced, he describes as “not necessarily welcome.” He also warns that the default luxury bean, Kopi Luwak, where beans famously pass through a civet cat’s digestive system before being readied for human consumption, is a gimmick at best—he discouraged the late Vaclav Havel from ordering some after the freedom fighting politician spotted Jack Nicholson drinking it in the 2007 movie The Bucket List. Fleer dismisses it on flavor grounds, but many coffee-watchers these days cite animal cruelty as a reason for shunning it (The fact that the ritual of brewing beans from cat excrement likely started in colonial times when local Indonesians were banned from drinking the crop they’d picked, rather than from some centuries-old ritual, also gives cause for pause)
An Obsessive in Their Natural Habitat
Certainly, it wouldn’t pass muster at that Specht Design machine in Mill Valley installed by Jeff Jungsten—and nor would Jungsten (coffee order: straight, black, right out of the machine) embrace it himself either He’s no amateur when it comes to coffee, and in fact is MAMIC and MAMIL both. Three times weekly, he will cycle to the top of Mount Tam with a group of between 20 and 100 people. They were drinking Stage 17 beans at the summit, made by disgraced cyclist Floyd Landis, until a local roaster caught wind and suggested an alternative.
Marin County-based Equator Coffee offered instead to create a custom blend of branded beans for the ad hoc cycle club. “We asked for the most caffeine we could get out of it with as dark a blend as we could find,” he explains, noting that charring the beans reduces their kick, “It has the flavor of a dark roast, but the medium roast caffeine kick. They didn’t want to tell us how they did it, the exact blend.” Jungsten now will drink nothing but that proprietary personal roast—the ultimate MAMIC pledge. “It’s such a cliché that but we had to take this to the nth degree,” he laughs, “All middle-aged men seem to fall into it, though. And there’s a lot of us out there.”
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