Archive for July, 2001

Posted on July 31, 2001 - by deCadmus

Better Biscotti

You know biscotti — those twice-baked Italian cookies you can buy in virtually every coffee shop you visit? I’ve ordered them from time to time, and usually find that they can’t be eaten without dunking them in my coffee. Funny, but when you make your own, you’ll find that they have a toasty kind of crunch… and any dipping is just ’cause you want to.

You don’t suppose the biscotti in those shops are stale, do you?

Posted on July 30, 2001 - by deCadmus

More Bean Basics

I’ve been roasting coffee with the Hearthware Gourmet for just a skosh over two weeks, and have from time to time found myself frustrated with the experience. I have — on occasion — roasted some really great coffee, mostly darker roasts [Sumatra, Celebes, New Guinea]. Attaining second crack with the Gourmet is smooth and effortless, as is roasting deep into the far side of second [look, kids, it's Seattle!]. Compared to the Freshbeans Freshroast, a machine that often feels underpowered, the Gourmet rules the roast — but only on the far side of second. Why, I wondered, was I getting such inconsistent results? Why did City roasts taste so dull and lifeless with the Gourmet?

My roast logs tell me that I’ve pretty much covered the map in terms of roast profiles… I’ve been from coffee that still tastes green to somewhere in second, and still my City roasts cup no better than I could find in a can. So it’s back to basics. And this time the lesson is quenching, or cooling the roasted coffee beans. It works this way…

When you’ve roasted coffee beans up to temperature [somewhere between 415� F and 435� F for a City roast] they continue to roast from their own internal heat, and that of the combined mass of beans. With the Freshroast’s smaller bean capacity, and the fairly lightweight design of the roast chamber itself, the built-in cooling cycle was more than adequate to cool the roast in a minute or two. Not so the Gourmet, which has both a third larger bean capacity, and far more metal and glass comprising the roast chamber. The Gourmet’s cooling cycle *did* cool the roaster and the beans, but too slowly to fully arrest the roast… my coffee beans were getting baked.

Halting the roast and dumping the beans to a metal colander is a pretty typical method of cooling… and so is tossing those beans between two colanders — the coffee roaster’s juggle. Typical or no, it’s a major pain in the tucus [and a mess... especially with dry-processed beans that throw off a lot of chaff]. I wanted a better way.

I considered quenching… using a pump or trigger spray bottle of water to mist the beans in the colander [not in the roaster] but that can cause its own problems — nobody wants soggy coffee beans — and really, I didn’t believe that the smallish amount of coffee I was roasting really warranted a water quench.

And then a compatriot in the alt.coffee newsgroup casually mentioned that, if you popped off the Gourmet’s lid [and chaff collector] when the cooling cycle begins, it cooled much more quickly. Bingo. It’s a practice that probably doesn’t come highly recommended by Hearthware, and if there are bits of chaff left in your beans it will soon be airborne and falling like so much toasted confetti… but it works.

My results today with a City roast are far more lively, and in some cases have proven nearly as bright as those with the Freshroast. I need to essentially start from scratch in terms of my cupping notes [those that haven't yet made their way online] but hey, for good coffee that’s a small price to pay.

Posted on July 27, 2001 - by deCadmus

How caffeine created the modern world

If you’re hankering for a long and literary read [that is to say, it's Friday and you're killing time] take a peek at Malcolm Gladwell’s JAVA MAN in The New Yorker. A tasty tidbit: “That the American Revolution began with the symbolic rejection of tea in Boston Harbor… makes perfect sense. Real revolutionaries would naturally prefer coffee.“

Not in the mood for multi-syllabic endeavors? Try USA Today’s cover story on Cause Coffees, which attempts to spell out some of the issues that surround sustainability, fair trade, the environment, and a good cuppa joe.

Posted on July 25, 2001 - by deCadmus

Cool Tool.

Take a spreadsheet, perform some electronic husbandry with virtual Post-It… ^H^H^H tiny adhesive scratch pad sheets, and you end up with something like Writer’s Blocks. Built for people who write [I first stumbled upon the product in a print copy of Writer's Digest] it’s a nifty tool for quickly assembling, sorting and identifying relationships between discrete bits of unstructured text. I’m using a trial download of Writer’s Blocks to identify content chunks and wire-frame the navigation between them for my latest [and greatest?] project. It’s got all the capabilities of those sticky bits of paper, without the worry of your hard-won design falling off the walls.

And if this whole web thing goes south, I’m all set to outline that novel I’ve been threatening to write.

Posted on July 25, 2001 - by deCadmus

A Happy Roaster

You can tell a happy roaster by the smoke in his kitchen… I’ve been roasting a pile of beans today, each batch progressively darker [cough, cough] in an attempt to break Barry’s code. He’s coyly suggested that the roast is not so dark as it looks, and should be roasted just to the first hints of oil. We’ll see, Mr. Jarrett, we’ll see…. I’ll have a full work-up in the next day or so. The beans gotta rest, you know. Come to think of it, so do I.

Posted on July 25, 2001 - by deCadmus

Romancing the Bean

Romancing the Bean
Once a year Fresh Cup Magazine produces a special issue–packed to the gills with articles and resources that highlight one particular segment of the coffee trade. This year it’s the Coffee Almanac 2001, an issue that delves into coffee production, cupping and roasting–issues near and dear to the heart of any coffee roaster–but stuff that’s generally on the other side of the counter from the consumer. Of the articles they’ve made available online, I’m keen on Lindsey Bolger’s “A Cupper’s Covenant.” Lindsey is Batdorf & Bronson’s Master Roaster and green coffee buyer, and what most impresses me is her relationship based approach to developing sustainability. In her position, she’s perfectly capable of simply cornering the market on a given grower’s bean… instead, she advocates methods that ensure a continuing supply. That’s good news for all of us–grower, roaster and consumer, alike.

Posted on July 24, 2001 - by deCadmus

You Go, Google.

Google.com, who last week took home the Webby’s Best Practices prize –a new and singular award that honors overall excellence–finds itself singled out again, this time for its integrity in managing sponsored placements on its search engine. At the same time, eight other search engines find themselves under increased scrutiny for mixing paid and editorial placement. At issue: users’ ability to discern relevant results from an increasingly huge and complex web. J.D. Lasica offers a particularly good read on the subject at Online Journalism Review.

Meanwhile, Google continues to improve the interface and add functionality to its recently-purchased Deja News service [which included more than a terabyte of messages] and has added Zeitgeist, an informative and often amusing looking glass on the world of web search.

Simple, fast, reliable… and accountable. Best practices, indeed.

Posted on July 24, 2001 - by deCadmus

Thanks Blogger!

2001: A Coffee Odyssey has been named a ‘Blog of Note‘ this week by the kindly folks at Blogger.

Posted on July 24, 2001 - by deCadmus

Oh, Espresso

I’ve been making far more espresso than brewed coffee in the last week or so. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that…

First, when you know you’ve got a *great* espresso blend on hand, you’re much more likely to flip the switch to warm up the machine… and the espresso blends from Riley’s Coffee have been wonderful. It may take 30 minutes or more to warm up the Rancilio Silvia… but when you’re pulling shots throughout the day and just leaving the machine on, it’s no problem at all. [Just be sure to run a little water through the grouphead or draw off some steam if you're not pulling a shot every couple of hours... you wouldn't want that boiler to go dry.]

Second, the more you make espresso, the easier it gets, and… well, the more you make espresso. [Yeah, it's a circular thing.] I think it’s something to do with building a rhythm–grinding, filling the portafilter, tamping, pulling the shot, knocking the puck, rinsing the portafilter… The trick that makes *everything* easier is developing the habit of knocking the puck and rinsing the portafilter while it’s still warm from the last shot. It takes only moments, and leaves you ready to go the moment the next espresso urge strikes. With a little practice, a rhythm for frothing milk for cappuccinos comes just as easily.

Now if I can just make some headway on that latte art…

Posted on July 23, 2001 - by deCadmus

Haptics, Feedback and Immersion

It’s look and feel, right? Try this: move your mouse cursor to any part of the white background of this page, and click. Feel that?

What you just experienced is precisely the same tactile feedback you get when you click on buttons and hyperlinks… a reedy, mechanical click from your mouse that indicates you’ve pressed the mouse button, and another that signals release. This tactile feedback is the same whether you’ve moused over the button surface, or missed it, or clicked the button before the code behind the page had fully loaded. The result? Nothing. A false positive. I’ve recorded false positives like these in usability studies for a while now, and find that they account for anywhere from 20% to 40% of clicks overall–more, with less experienced computer users.

The problem is fundamental: tactile feedback is provided by a device that is unaware of other events in the system, and the feedback it offers is the same, regardless of the outcome [success or failure] of those events. Some effort has been made to provide additional auditory feedback to coincide with mouse-clicks, but these, too, are driven by the mouse itself, and not by the interaction of the mouse with the rest of the system. To avoid this trap, we need to build a better mouse. [Sorry... couldn't help it.]

To really move forward, though, we need to consider a method of mousing that provides more than binary tactile feedback… we need to look at haptics. Haptic perception describes how we use our sense of touch to experience the objects that surround us… the shapes and textures that define our sense of place. A haptic mouse could not only provide accurate click feedback, it could trace the contours of the button. Bump against the edge of the on-screen window. Provide a grooved trail though a cascade of menus.

Happily enough, just such a rodent is currently on the market. The iFeel mouse from Logitech uses force feedback technology pioneered [and patented] by Immersion. While the current model has recieved mixed reviews, it may signal the the future of on-screen navigation… an experience that is more accurate, and more meaningful.