Brewing Change : ‘Cowboy Coffee’ Once Ruled the Roast in Nevada, but Cafe Latte and Cappuccino Are Bringing a Taste of California to the Silver State

Once upon a time, there was “cowboy coffee,” that dense, mobile brew borne of campfires and cattle drives, so thick, some say, it caused the spoons to stand.

But buckaroos gave way to Burger Kings, Nevada took on a Midwestern twang and coffee here began “to look like tea,” says Tara McCarty, managing director of the Western Folklife Center in Elko.

She’s the first to admit that silver palates are hard to find in the Silver State, that anyone in search of a sip of Sumatra will probably locate “garbage roadside coffee” instead. And she knows who’s to blame for this travesty of taste: “The middle-class, middle-American suburban influence.”

But a funny thing’s happening on the way to the Bunn-o-matic; it’s turning into a big, brass Rosito Bisani.

So what if Starbucks still has no plans to bring baristas to Beatty. Nevada has passed its share of mocha java milestones:

In the last two years, more than half a dozen new espresso places have opened their doors--or sometimes just their drive-through windows--here in Reno, Nevada’s unofficial Coffee Central.

There finally are more espresso machines statewide than burble away on Main Street in Santa Monica--perhaps the most caffeinated mile in the country, with more than 30 such coffee makers and shops stocked with everything from organic espresso to the improbable “Chocolate Tofu Mousse.”

There’s even espresso in Elko, the remote northeastern home of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. The Gathering, one guidebook says, is “important for its contribution to rural and small-town American culture, which is seriously threatened by urbanization, water rights, corporate agriculture, and the global economy.”

Not to mention yuppies.

Nevadans are now “getting into yuppie or maybe it’s back into their roots, to cowboy coffee,” McCarty says as she struggles to account for the changes brewing in her home state. “It’s that California influence, I know it is. California has certainly invaded Reno. And there’s quite a few (espresso bars) in Elko.”

An unprecedented number of Californians have fled to this state, bringing with them more than just traffic jams and crowded schoolyards. As they bleed across the border in search of a more stable economy--about 31,000 of them in fiscal year 1993 alone--they’re also causing a quantum leap in the quality of coffee.

At least that’s what they say here in Reno. Which, by the way, now has good coffee and bad traffic, compliments of you-know-who, former Californian Kathy Ensminger said as she bought a latte at Kinko’s copy shop on the appropriately named California Avenue. “You get one and put up with the other.”

Although Las Vegas weighs in at four times the size of tiny Reno, it lags far behind its neighbor to the north. The water in Las Vegas is so hard, one caffeine expert said, that it is barely possible to brew a good cup there.

Add salts from the Colorado River--Las Vegas’s water supply--to acids naturally found in coffee “and there goes any taste difference between an East African arabica and a West African robusta,” says Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Assn. of America. (That’s a good one and a bad one, for those not in the know.)

There are espresso bars in Sin City South--at least 15 in the Yellow Pages alone, and that doesn’t count the coffee counter at Caesars Palace.

But Reno’s Eldorado Hotel & Casino has 15 espresso machines by itself, says executive chef Anthony Gillette, who likes to boast between puffs on a Marlboro that “this is the only hotel in the country that roasts and grinds its own coffee.”

Geography and climate are on Reno’s side. Winter has snow; summer is not painful. What better place to quaff a cappuccino? “When you go to Vegas in the summer, it’s 115,” Gillette says. “You want a beer.”

Then there’s attitude. OK, so Reno soon will be home to the National Bowling Stadium; it’s also a city that aspires to culture. Witness a billboard campaign that trumpets such arts-commission slogans as “National Survey: Many Renoites prefer ‘La Boheme’ to la ballgame.”

“We are close to San Francisco; Las Vegas is close to nothing,” said Tim Healion, owner of the Pneumatic Cafe. “Las Vegas is a very superficial community with absolutely no true soul and no taste. . . . Vegas is an evil place, and I don’t recommend anyone going there.”

This from the man who also owns Reno’s very first coffee house, the nearly 9-year-old Deux Gros Nez. Yes, Francophiles, that’s “two big noses” to you; his partner gave two thumbs down to the prospective name Cabeza Gorda--”fat head” en espanol.

With its loud music, flannel-and-Docs set and resident bag woman, Deux Gros Nez at one time ruled the Reno roast. Then came The Laughing C.A.T. (home of Cat’s House Blend) and Mr. Latte, Java Jungle and Cafe Royale-Royale Roasting Co.

“It’s a real influx,” says Myles Garber, co-owner of Cafe Royale, which opened across the street from Deux Gros Nez a year ago. “But it’s still in its infancy. It’s six years behind Seattle, three or four behind California.”

Behind, however, is merely a state of mind. Squint at the long line of cars queued up for a morning jolt at Espresso to Go-A Drive Thru, and you might just think you are in California. As co-owner Shelley Warne does her morning pirouette-with-milk-carton in the closet-size former Fotomat, at least one Jeep Cherokee driver passes the time via cellular phone.

Warne, however, does not ascribe to the California-made-us-do-it theory of how cappuccino came to Reno. There is, says the former Valley Girl, a coffee craze sweeping the whole country. So why shouldn’t good coffee get to Nevada all by itself?

“California has such a big attitude,” she says. “I don’t know who died and made them kings and queens.”