Uri Ort, 26, runs kosherstarbucks.com, which guides observant Jews about what they may consume at the coffee chain.
Uri Ort knows more about Starbucks than just about anyone else alive, but he will not name a favorite Starbucks. He will not say where he first had his favorite Starbucks drink, the tall one-pump Breve Vanilla Latte, nor where in summertime he prefers to pick up his favorite Starbucks cold drink, the orange mango banana Vivanno.
“I have relationships with many Starbucks stores,” said Mr. Ort, a 26-year-old Orthodox Jew. “There really isn’t one specific store. That’s the fact. I’m friends with baristas in Texas, in Chicago, in Baltimore, and in the New York and New Jersey area.”
Mr. Ort, an unmarried e-commerce manager who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, runs kosherstarbucks.com. He is the leading amateur in the world of coffee kosherology (that’s what we’re calling it): the science of figuring out what is kosher, what traditional religious Jews may consume, at Starbucks.
Like nearly everyone else who is not Mormon, religious Jews need their coffee. On many blocks, in many cities, in the airport, on the turnpike, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, from San Francisco to Ashtabula, coffee very often means Starbucks coffee.
Coffee beans and hot water are kosher: they do not run afoul of the biblical prohibitions against foods like pork and shellfish. But Starbucks does offer such items, for instance, breakfast sandwiches with ham. And the carafes, knives and other implements can commingle in Starbucks sinks and washing machines, which means particles from, say, a nonkosher smoothie mix can contaminate a spoon used to skim the foam off a latte.
The rules for what ingredients are kosher, and what keeps utensils kosher, are many and complicated. To help sort matters out, Mr. Ort and his younger brother, Teddy, started a Web site that they say hundreds of thousands have consulted, to see what is permissible to eat and drink at America’s favorite coffee house.
“We started the Web site in 2007,” Mr. Ort said, “because I’m a little bit obsessed with Starbucks, and I also have a strong interest in kosher. It started as a personal endeavor, to figure out what was kosher and what wasn’t. Eventually I had friends asking me, and I figured I would put it up on the Web. It started small, and just grew.”
Mr. Ort was not always a Starbucks man. Growing up in Lakewood, N.J., he was partial to Dunkin’ Donuts.
“But then I spent some time in Israel,” he said. “And I got used to a much stronger coffee. And when I came back to America I had an issue with Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.”
He began to stop into Starbucks, and became friends with some baristas around Lakewood. Eventually, his barista network grew — “A bunch of my Facebook friends are Starbucks baristas,” he said — and now that network helps his Web site stay current.
Mr. Ort helpfully marks all Starbucks products with either a green light or a red light. The Frappuccinos all get red lights. The Tazo teas, green lights. Hot chocolate, green light — but white hot chocolate, red light. The Vivanno smoothie? It depends on the flavor. Mocha drizzle on top — yes! Caramel drizzle, no.
Yes to whipped cream.
Mr. Ort is not the only macher in this game. Rabbi Sholem Fishbane, the kosher supervisor for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, spent more than two years stopping into Starbucks stores all over the world, researching his definitive 2011 document, “Guide to Starbucks Beverages.” “I’d say I visited 50-plus Starbucks,” Rabbi Fishbane said, calling from his vacation house in the Catskills. “It’s safe to say I’ve been to three-quarters of the states. I’ve been to Japan.”
Rabbi Fishbane’s paper is a thorough, painstaking document. For example, he discusses at length the Starbucks dishwasher, which uses 180-degree water — a reassuringly sanitary temperature, but bad for Starbucks’s kosher status, because it is considered hot enough to absorb nonkosher flavors into a pot.
And he gives permissible ratios for nonkosher ingredients in a kosher food: “Even though it is possible that a tiny bit of nonkosher grease might be on the rag used to wipe the steamer wands and that grease might end up in my steamed milk, the milk remains kosher because the volume of the milk is more than 60 times the volume of the grease.”
Rabbi Fishbane is a full-time kosher supervisor, and his Starbucks visits were just side trips on his travels. Mr. Ort, by contrast, is part of the Starbucks community — and, he says, a more reliable guide than even some of the professionals.
“The large certifying agencies, such as the Star-K and the Chicago Rabbinical Council, are far too quick to simply say beverages in Starbucks are not kosher,” Mr. Ort said. They are thus “keeping themselves safe while inconveniencing thousands of people, when in fact, according to Jewish law, many beverages are completely kosher.”
Mr. Ort is constantly answering questions e-mailed from around the world. Interested parties can get his regular e-mail updates, for which there is a $3 suggested donation.
The e-mail updates are necessary, he says, because the flow of Starbucks products never lets up. Web traffic is heaviest “whenever new drinks come out,” he says. And that is pretty much all the time.
“There are spring drinks, and we’ll have summer drinks soon. Then we’ll have fall, then holiday season, when they come out with the Christmas beverages, holiday drinks...”
Christmas beverages, holiday drinks — it’s a lot for a Jew to keep track of.
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