Killing My Lobster's "Coffee Wars" is a mockumentary on YouTube that chronicles the epic - and scalding hot - battle between SF coffee establishments like Ritual Roasters and Blue Bottle.

"It started in San Francisco's Mission district," says the mockumentary's Kendra Burns, PhD. "The Mission district's hipster population was running out of ways to diss' one another. So, they turned to coffee."

And so the "Coffee Wars" start.

We sat down with the Ken Grobe, who wrote and produced the piece, to talk about why San Franciscans like coffee so much (the bitter cold mornings), whether San Francisco takes itself too seriously, and Joan Baez. (This Q&A has been edited for length.)

First things first -- are you a coffee drinker?

Yes, I am. I lived in New York for a long time, and there I pretty much drank it for medicinal purposes, as a substitute for sleep - it wasn't until I came to SF that I acquired a taste for it, largely because I found a place in my neighborhood, one of the best known coffee roasters in town, Blue Bottle. I had found a coffee that I actually liked the taste of and now I'm a pretty avid coffee drinker. I've definitely grown into a kind of coffee snob after living in SF for about 4 years now.

How did you come up with the idea for "Coffee Wars"?

We were writing a sketch show on SF's foodie culture and the idea about the coffee brand really came to mind. I started seeing ten, thirty people standing in line outside of the Blue Bottle kiosk in Hayes Valley, and I started talking to people who had a French press on their desks. And Ritual has been a fixture in the Mission for several years now. The lines that you see outside of these places, the cross between branding and authenticity...it struck us that there was a lot of fun to be had and there was a real passion for coffee in this town.

One of the funniest parts in your film is when the professor character ("Kendra Burns, Ph.D") reflects on the Coffee Wars. "But you know, I think the coffee wars defined what we were -- egocentric stylewhores," she says. Do you think San Francisco takes itself too seriously?

It's hard to tell... My initial reaction is no, all you have to do is look at the Burning Man culture in the Bay Area, it's so strong. And we do have a strong, if not large, comedy community here. Even folks in the tech community don't take themselves terribly seriously.

There is certainly a great deal of political correctness in the city -- politically we take ourselves very seriously, and I don't think that's a bad thing. 

Right around when the coffee wars came out, there was actually a bona fide coffee war going on over the Blue Bottle coffee cart in Dolores Park. They were concerned it was going to take business away from the cafés around the park and people got a little mean about it, probably more than they should have.

I have to ask about the Joan Baez reference in the film. The mockumentary gives the last word to the "most crotchety living San Franciscan" who brags about, um, "f*#@ing" Joan Baez. What's that about?

[Laughs] I wanted a line that was a complete non sequitur from my oldest and most crotchety living San Franciscan. I thought it would be fun if we used a known San Franciscan - Janis Joplin seemed kind of hacked, too obvious, and Joan Baez is a big figure in the hippie and activist culture of SF. And she also seems like the most unlikely person to brag about having sex with - she was this angelic figure like Judy Collins, too elevated to brag about.

So is your film poking fun at San Francisco's coffee culture, or is it also a celebration of it?

I think there's elements of the SF food culture that take themselves very seriously -- we have amazing restaurants, we have such close access to fantastic produce, we've definitely cultivated a great deal of seriousness over the sourcing of our food and our drink and whatnot. Coming from New York, there's not as much of that, so it was a bit startling to me at first. It's always kind of fun to poke fun at things that seem really peripheral to one's life, being taken too seriously. The quality of life in San Francisco is very high and people take that quality seriously.

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