A-C-M-E spells doom.

To help catch his elusive prey Wile E. Coyote keeps putting his faith in the latest contraption manufactured by the Acme Corporation. The tactic invariably backfires, bringing only pain and humiliation to the hapless predator.

Miles Kirby, the head-chef and co-patron of the London restaurant and coffee roastery Caravan, blames these calamitous mishaps on the consumer, not the corporation. “It’s the user who doesn’t get it right,”  insists the New Zealand expat.

He would say that. His two restaurants don’t merely serve their house-roasted coffees in cups made by Acme. Caravan is the UK distributor of Acme & Co., their New Zealand manufacturer. Jeff Kennedy, Acme’s creator as well as the New Zealand coffee pioneer behind first Cafe L’Affaire and now PREFAB, both in Wellington, is a friend.

Give Kennedy his do. Rather than scapegoat fumble-fingered customers he designed durable coffee cups with them very much in mind. If the Coyote dropped a filled Acme coffee cup from the top of the Shard (surely an act of intent given the secure hold provided by the wide loop handles) it would miss the Road Runner by a hair, bounce back up from the Tooley Street pavement and plonk the attempted murderer on the noggin. The steamed milk and rich espresso flung high into the London sky would fall back into the upright and undamaged cup, forming a swirly, two-toned likeness of a beep-beeping Road Runner on its surface. If the bruised Coyote finally captured something it would be the World Latte Art Championship.

To baristas and coffee shopkeepers, the added practical appeal of the Acme coffee cups is in their volumetrics – geekspeak for sizing. Eschewing generic measures or guesswork Acme’s cup sizes correspond to specific coffee drinks (flat white, cappuccino, latte, etc). Form follows function.

Acme’s white-rimmed saucers are interchangeable: The 145mm saucer fits three cup sizes – 150ml, 170ml and 190ml. There’s no worry about matching the right cup to the right saucer, an impossible task in the early morning when you’re pre-coffee and your eyes are half-shut.

The heavy-duty cups make a fashion statement, too. Actually it’s more of an anti-fashion fashion statement, the new law of  averages, that is to say, of looking average to set oneself apart. The branding is discreet; the effect, normcore (“normal” + “hardcore”). The almost generic design is about sameness, anonymity, functionality, simplicity.

Sure, Acme cups are available in groovy, midcentury hues of green, red and blue that can be matched or mixed. But it’s the dullest colours – brown, black and grey – that are most sought by indie coffee shops.

Brooklyn Coffee is a new minimalist coffee bar in London’s Shoreditch whose very name announces its hipster intentions. Its Acme coffee cups are white on the inside and the lip, as they all are, and white on the outside surfaces, too.

Caffeinating a trend where the best decoration is none, Acme’s white-on-white espresso cup and saucer might be the purest expression of a style whose appeal is plain as plain can be.

The Acme name comes full circle.

Acme cups and sauces can be purchased in the UK from Caravan and in Canada from Eight Ounce Coffee.

left: old menu. right: new menu

The trouble with his old menu, according to Gwilym, was that the coffee names mythologised what were, from his hands, fundamentally the same drink: a double espresso blended with varying quantities of milk he steamed and textured in the identical manner. Furthermore, the terms were confusing and meant different things to different people from different places. It was problematic to figure out what each customer’s understanding of a flat white or a cortado was and frustrating when what the barista champion served measured below – or above – each one’s expectations.

His new 4-6-8 system is simpler and clearer, except for metric minds who don’t really know what ounces are and don’t wish to do conversions before they’ve had their caffeine fix. For these aliens, Gwilym first takes out his three white paper cups and then performs his usual coffee magic show.

In Milan, the caffè marocchino – essentially a mini-cappuccino dusted with cocoa– has risen to the height of fashion and stayed there. The cortado, the Spanish take on a espresso “cut” with a small quantity of milk, has been assimilated at coffee bars on both sides of the Atlantic. And in San Francisco, the Gibraltar – a mini-latte served in a paneled glass – is a local cult coffee with a growing and now transatlantic following. The gospel of Gibraltar has spread to seminal coffee shops in LA (Intelligentsia) and New York (Café Grumpy), and to Climpson & Sons in London. It’s the coffee of choice at the newest of London’s great independent coffee shops, Dose Espresso, on Long Lane at Smithfield Market. 

The Gibraltar was conceived as a lark and named as something of an inside joke by the esteemed Bay Area (California) roaster Blue Bottle Coffee. Prior to the January 2005 opening of his first coffee kiosk in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley district, owner James Freeman began using the distinctive but cheap glasses he’d bought at a restaurant supply store for his improvised R & D. This research entailed pulling shots of various blends and roasts in the 4 1/2-ounce glasses, topping some with steamed milk and offering samples to the hopefully grateful employees at Dark Garden, a corset shop down the street. These young women knew a good shape when they saw one and quickly developed a fondness for the little lattes and the cute glasses with octagonal paneled bottoms and smooth, rounded tops. The coffee needed a name and barista/roaster Steve Ford, then a colleague of Freeman’s, found inspiration on the packaging for those glasses. Forget Gibraltar the rock, the city or the strait. This “Gibraltar” is

a registered name for a line of tumblers by the American glassware manufacturer Libbey. It is perhaps fortunate Blue Bottle did not buy similar glasses from a popular French manufacturer, otherwise its coffee invention might have taken the name Duralex, which sounds like the brand of a male contraceptive.

Although Blue Bottle has served Gibraltars by the thousands, Freeman has resisted any temptation to put it on his menu. The word-of-mouth status has been seen as part of its allure. Other cafés, like San Francisco’s Ritual Coffee Roasters, where Ford is now head roaster (but not the boss), have felt no compunction about listing it in bold letters alongside their espressos, lattes and cappuccinos. So how does Ford feel, now that his Gibraltar may be destined for the Oxford English Dictionary?

I’ve never really talked about the Gibraltar for publication, partly because I think it was very much of a time and place – that being the Bay Area circa 2005. The fact that I’m talking about it now is mostly because I’ve given up on the original idea. There WAS something special about it back then. Now, it’s just another drink on the menu to me, and like so many cappuccinos, generally prepared poorly or just wrong. Every year people ask about it, so I can track how far the idea has gone, but the fact that it’s all the way in the UK and I have no idea how it got there is disappointing. And not to be too melodramatic, but I feel like the soul of the drink has been lost. It used to be something unique, and now it’s just another piece of fucking latte art.

Any bitterness felt by Freeman is less of the dark-roast variety. He likes the Gibraltar’s appeal as a transitional coffee for latte drinkers ready for something shorter and stronger. (The Gibraltar has less milk than a standard latte but the same amount of espresso.) He’s pleased that it’s served in a glass (though not all cafés use the exact same glass) and therefore can’t be ordered to go. It’s a stick-around coffee which, according to Freeman, fosters cultural experience, the urban use of spaces, and sustainability (no paper to toss out). He’s nevertheless uncomfortable taking or sharing credit for the unintended consequences: “The moral of the story?” asks Freeman. “Be careful what you joke about.”