Java Advocate CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH VANCOUVER - BC CanWest News Service Mark Prince has been hailed as the most influential consumer advocate in the world of coffee. 'I can't go into every single cafe and shake every single owner and say, 'Shape up your coffee!' ' he says. 'But I can tell consumers there's something better out there. Once you've had that epiphany moment, there's no going back.' It's too hot for coffee today, warmer still in Mark Prince's suburban Vancouver bungalow basement, but here hunched amid his 30-odd espresso machines, one very caffeinated man is doing his best to change the course of coffee history. Prince grinds and doses, tamps and pulls shot after shot of espresso, measuring temperatures, hot-rinsing cups, sampling and dumping as fast as they come. Anywhere else, Prince's throwaways would pass as perfect: rich and chocolatey, far from bitter and topped with "tiger-flecked" crema. But Prince, 35, isn't satisfied. He's hoping with each pull for the "God shot," he says: "Coffee so good it's as if it was blessed by God." His lips and his tongue are Tootsie-Roll brown. Perspiration dampens his salt-and-pepper hair. And for this, we might thank him some day. "I can't go into every single cafe and shake every single owner and say, 'Shape up your coffee!' " Prince says. "But I can tell consumers there's something better out there. Once you've had that epiphany moment, there's no going back." Coffee connoisseurs of the future might well hark back to a handful of Internet sites with names like alt.coffee, and wholelattelove.com, Victoria, B.C.'s coffeecrew.com, and Mark Prince's influential site, called coffeegeek.com. One Montreal collector of coffee ephemera, a photographer named Owen Egan, says there are plenty of popular sites, but Prince's site, he says, is the Internet coffee world's "900-pound gorilla." "I really firmly believe the Web and the Internet have done more for the improvement and advancement and quality of coffee and espresso than any other thing, ever," Prince says. In that Internet world of coffee extremists, coffeegeek seems to have it all: exhaustive reviews of equipment and machines, forums on how to make perfect coffee, heavy-hearted rants with headlines like: "Mediocre Coffee, it's your fault," and an audience, Prince boasts, of some 135,000 unique visitors each month. Prince brings his mission to international coffee competitions and trade shows and pops up regularly in the U.S. press as an advocate for better joe. He's trying to organize a "Canadian Specialty Coffee Association" and a "North American Barista Guild." "Today I have a one-in-20 chance of walking into a cafe and getting a good or better coffee," he says. "In five years I want it to be one in 10 cafes." Meantime, his site aims to teach ordinary coffee fans to pull their own God shots, while Starbucks and its ilk catch up. Glenn Surlet, a sales executive for Rancilio, a company that makes high-end consumer espresso machines, said recently that coffeegeek has helped increase sales of the Rancilio Sylvia -- one of Prince's all-time faves -- tenfold. This while the Sylvia can't often be found in stores. "He's done a lot of really good things for Rancilio," Surlet told the New York Times. Features on the coffeegeek home page include "Single boiler vs. heat exchanger?" "Jura Capresso F9 First Look," and the "2003 Espresso Tamper Shootout." In a review of the Mazzer Mini, a coffee grinder, Prince discusses, in great detail, the machine's "micrometrical grinding adjustments," its "burr assemblies," and whether the machine might be too hot for delicate beans. "Spinning at 1,600 RPM might be a tad worrisome to some folks about the beans being heated up too much by the rapidly spinning burrs and the fast cutting. I've done thermal tests on the grinds as they come out of the chute, and never measured anything above 26 C (about 80F), which says to me the beans are plenty cool enough," he writes. One discussion forum, called "Machine spotting in the movies," opens with some news from Showtime, with Robert DeNiro and Eddie Murphy. "When I saw this movie in the theatre, I spotted not one but TWO espresso machines on the counter in DeNiro's 'made over' house," Prince writes. "We rented the DVD tonight, and yep, there they were ... the backs of a Francis! Francis! X3, and a La Pavoni Lever machine. "Thanks to the screen capability of PowerDVD (a WinXP app), I can now tell that it was in fact a La Pavoni Europiccola, because there is no gauge at the top of the sight glass on the left side, and the height is short. You can see the portafilter is in place, and that set decorators put the steam wand on (leaving the frothing attachment off the brewer.)" Other participants chime in, saying they saw a La Pavoni in Live and Let Die, the James Bond flick, and a "Three group La Marzocca" in rocker Tommy Lee's apartment in a recent TV special on VH1. Prince keeps digital pictures of perfect coffee on his Web-connected camera phone, to show regular folk how good coffee should look. "I have pictures of my family on here, too," he says, defensively. He's a member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, an industry group. He's one of a handful of Canadians accredited to rate champion baristas at national competitions in the U.S. and Canada -- a qualification he earned, in part, by pulling thousands of shots of coffee and tweaking each one to bring out faults. (He says he's in training for the internationals, in Trieste.) Prince has 27 automatic, semi-automatic and lever espresso machines, mostly sent to him for review by manufacturers. He has six super-automatic machines that make coffee at the touch of a button. (One is Internet-capable.) He has a dozen tampers -- the presses used to push ground espresso into the machines' metal baskets -- six coffee roasters, eight coffee grinders, bins full of green coffee beans, scoresheets from taste tests, 38 vacuum brewers, including a replica of one first produced in 1840, more than 300 different types of espresso cups and two tiny "Barista Action Figure" dolls, one of which is still in the plastic. "I'm like a kid," he says, eyeballing a poster showing espresso cup designs by Illy, the Italian coffee empire. "Got it, got it," he says, his eyes skipping over each design, noting the cups he owns. "Got it, got it, need it." Perfect espresso doesn't come easy. In J.J. Bean, a Vancouver cafe, Prince stands watch as Tina Albrecht, a 24-year-old professional barista who was runner-up in this year's Canadian Barista Championships, goes to work. She begins by cleaning out a manual grinder, then starts the process of "dialing in" the machine so it takes coffee to the perfect consistency. She uses organic beans just days from the roaster, and whirrs several batches, testing for the perfect grind. Albrecht "doses" the coffee into the metal portafilter, then levels the grounds with her fingers. With a push from her shoulder and a twist of a tamper, she presses the grounds, leaning in with 30-pound pressure. Her first shot disappoints. It's "overextracted," Prince tells her, knowing without even tasting, noting a blond, dotted crema in the centre of the cup. The next shot underwhelms, too. The crema, or fragrant froth atop the shot, should be "tiger-flecked." The flecking tells the shot got all it could out of the grounds -- not too much, but not too little. "She knocked the portafilter too hard," Prince says, inspecting the dampened grounds. She pulls another, and fails. Then one more. This one pours too long. So Prince pulls out the big guns, invoking the name of the world Barista champion. "Try Paul Bassett's overstuff tamping technique," Prince instructs. "Put in about 10 to 15 per cent more coffee and try again." The result bubbles up in the cup with "the Guinness effect." Crema rises and settles in perfect tawny flecks. Prince pulls back the crema with a spoon, showing its depth and resilience. He smells it, deeply, as a baron might smell his wine. And the taste, rich but subtle espresso that's naturally sweet with the taste of blueberries and chocolate, is an epiphany. It's what Prince might call "sex in your mouth." Albrecht, relieved, smiles.