Archive for July, 2001

Posted on July 8, 2001 - by deCadmus

A Second Cupping

A Second Cupping of the Tarrazu Triple Play yielded notes enough for a formalized review. Formalized, in this case, means I scribbled down tick-marks and cobbled together some charts. What I don’t do is try to suggest an overall rating–a la Wine Spectator–as I’m not at all certain that coffee can be rated in such a manner, and I’m absolutely certain that I’m not the guy to do such a rating.

While I was at it, I finished the charts on this year’s St Helena, and have filed those cupping notes in the articles section as well. I have no idea how what little remains will last the rest of the year as I keep dreaming up occasions which warrant roasting some more.

Posted on July 3, 2001 - by deCadmus

No Shortcuts

You don’t have to be obsessive to make great coffee, but it helps. Let me just get this over with right up front… I have a natural tendency towards laziness. [This comes as no surprise to those who know me well.] I view this not so much as the stuff of the seven deadly sins [for the record, that would be sloth, not laziness] but instead as an entirely human tendency to seek out a way that’s easier than what’s generally prescribed. Call it ease engineering–the art of the shortcut.

It’s only natural, then, that I would apply my best engineering efforts to my love of coffee. Natural though it may be, it just doesn’t work. Every attempt I’ve made to shortcut any part of my coffee production–from roasting to brewing–has resulted in failure. Not catastrophic failure, mind you. The house hasn’t imploded, and the dog doesn’t slink away in shame… but the simple fact is that shortcuts lead only to an inferior cup. [more]

Posted on July 2, 2001 - by deCadmus

Dumb and Dumber

Dumb and Dumber: a usability lesson from the phone system.
Not terribly long ago the local telephone company in Kansas City introduced ten-digit dialing. Up to that point, phone system users within the Kansas City metro had been able to ignore the area codes that divide the city, dialing only the significant [and significantly easier to remember] seven digits.

I’m certain that I’ve been using the ten-digit system for more than a year, and still I find it bothersome. There is some part of my nervous system that has associated dialing a three-digit area code with placing a long-distance call… and accordingly dials a 1 first, and then the ten-digit number. When I do, the call is answered by a scratchy tape-loop [almost certainly an old analog recording that was digitized, replete with pops, hisses and scratches] informing me that it’s “not necessary to dial a one or a zero or [incorrectly] an area code when dialing this number…” Would I “please hang up and dial again?”

Clearly, the phone switching system understood precisely what I intended to dial… after all, I didn’t fail to provide dialing information, I provided more than was necessary. Why, then, would the design of the system refuse to actually place the call? Do what I meant!

I’m certain the intent of this scheme is to educate the user. Such an education could be accomplished far better by playing a speedy and cheerful “Remember, there’s no need to dial one for a local number…” and then completing the call.

I feel foolish for making the mistake already. Don’t make me feel worse by lecturing me… and don’t give me the opportunity to make the same mistake all over again by forcing me to hang up and redial.

Posted on July 1, 2001 - by deCadmus

The Lonliest Island - St. Helena’s Golden Cup

This year, St. Helena, a tiny little island in the South Atlantic, produced only 4,500 pounds of coffee. Two bags of the ‘01 crop–maybe 270 pounds–made it to the U.S. One pound of this elusive bean found its way to my house.

It’s a pretty bean: small, almost round and dense. It’s beautifully prepared: like a pearl, it nearly glows. While that’s all well and good, the question is, how does it cup? With no small amount of trepidation, I decided to find out. How does one go about roasting a rare bean? Just like any other coffee… you take notes. In this case, lots o’ notes. The only tragedy worse than messing up a batch of rare coffee like this is to not note how and why, and risk doing it twice.

The St. Helena is precisely the kind of bean that makes me wish for a digital scale–measuring by volume requires a bit of guesswork with both small, dense beans and their large, less-dense cousins. The method I’ve worked out [based on advice from the alt.coffee newsgroup] is to fill the roast chamber as usual, switch on the air, and then add or subtract beans as needed until the surface of the bean mass lofts and bubbles just a little bit. At that point, I’m ready to give ‘em some heat.

First crack starts quite quickly, and is remarkably uniform… the beans burble and pop nearly in unison. There is, it turns out, quite a pause between first and second cracks, a pause that in combination with the fragrance of this bean threw me a curve my first time through. I’ve become accustomed to roasting by nose, and when my nose suggested that second crack was fast approaching [the damp straw smell was entirely gone, replaced with the high, acrid-sweet scent that I've associated with the first wafts of the roasting coffee's caramelizing sugars] I killed the heat.

That was, as it turned out, just a bit early. While still plenty drinkable, that first roast had left more brightness in the cup than I usually care for… it was still a bit sour. On the other hand, the result was certainly representative of the origin… when you roast light, you definitely taste the coffee and not the roast itself. Even lightly roasted, this coffee was rich, spicy, and had a surprising balance of brightness to body [even if brighter than I'd intended]. Most notable was the layered depth of flavors, and the long, long [did I say looong?] finish. You know the presence you feel on your tongue after sipping a great espresso? Ever experience that with brewed coffee? Remarkable.

A second attempt fared better still. Armed with my notes and stopwatch, and mindful now that this coffee is something of a late bloomer in the roaster, I had another go today. Roasted longer, I found three or more subtle degrees of caramelizing high notes to be nosed between first and second crack. The last of these was clearly at the onset of second crack, and, moments after dumping the heat I noted two or three barely audible snaps.

I tried to let it rest. Honest. But it was no more than 30 minutes later that I had my first sip. Still plenty of citrus brightness… a whole new layer of spice–pepper and clove predominant–and then another layer of dark chocolate, and another still of evergreen pungency. And then that long, long finish. This coffee makes me itch for one of Patrick Van Den Noortgaete’s syphon coffee makers, just so the experience of serving it could be as rich as the coffee itself.

St. Helena is highly recommended, and when it’s available next year, run, don’t walk to place your order. This year’s crop is already sold-out. Now, how to make what remains last….?

Posted on July 1, 2001 - by deCadmus

Mediums Writ Large

When Thug the caveman first scrawled an image of himself on a wall of stone, we can imagine the prehistoric critics — “Arg! Ick dannae throg!” Which, roughly translated, imparts that the cave art lacked passion, and what’s more Thug would be better off spearing dinner. Little did the critics know that someday we might define the dawn of recorded history by Thug’s efforts.

When, in the Middle Ages Gutenberg created the printing press, the voices of his critics echo still… “What’s the use! The people cannot read! And if they could they would not understand without us to tell them what it means!” Which suggests that Johannes’ critics may have had some idea how the printed page would usurp their power, though even they could not know how profoundly it would change the world to come.

When Bell uttered his first words through his electrical speech machine, his critics were dumbfounded… “Who would you talk to? And won’t you disturb their dinner?!” True enough, dinner would never be the same. What’s more, dinner would never be the same wherever you might go, as one day everyone over the age of 12 would have a phone in his or her pocket.

When Zworykin [or Philo T. Farnsworth] patented his kinescope, his critics were confused. They argued amongst themselves whether the thrust of their criticism would be the tried and true, “It’ll never work” or the more obscure, “Mid-season replacements will confuse your audience.” In either case, they surely couldn’t imagine a live broadcast of man taking his first steps on the moon, or Ally McBeal’s dancing baby.

When Berners-Lee made the Internet accessible to everyone, the critics on Wall Street were frantic. “Buy!” they screamed. And then, “Sell! Sell!” Which suggests that critics haven’t changed all that much through the ages… they still don’t understand the creation of a medium any more today than they understood it in Thug’s time. Or Gutenberg’s. Or Bell’s. Or Zworykin’s.

A medium has the capacity to not only change our thinking, but to change how we think… how we communicate, experience, and understand. And to tell the truth, we still don’t know what the implications of the Internet and the Web really are. This much is fairly certain, though — we’re not finished. We’re only just begun.

A medium has the capacity to not only change our thinking, but to change how we think… how we communicate, experience, and understand.

So what is this invention, this medium, that has evidently caused us fits throughout the ages? Is it a tool? A toy? A myth? A medium is vehicle for communication. It’s a transport for the expression of ideas… a means for transmitting a message from the sender — the person who wants to express something — to an audience, those who might receive that message. This could be an audience of one, or an audience of thousands, or even millions.

Even as a medium transports a message, it also shapes it, and manifests in that message properties that are unique to that given medium. Likewise a medium lends the message its own limitations. The stark lines of a rock chip scratched against a cave wall, the gilded manuscripts of the thirteenth century, an analog broadcast beamed through the airwaves — each has its strengths and its limitations. To master a given medium it’s critical to learn what those strengths and limitations are. Which is precisely why the Internet — and in particular, the Web — is such a mess today.

It’s not immediately apparent how a new medium is best used. If our early cave artist were given a paintbrush would he paint a prehistoric Mona Lisa? More likely he’d try to use the handle to scratch on the walls. It’s no surprise, then, that early television broadcasts were little more than televised radio plays, or that today’s web sites try so hard to look like television screens with hyperlinks. We’ve got a new set of tools, but we’ve yet to master the techniques required for the medium. For that matter, we’re still trying to discover what they are.

So what do we know about this medium–this Internet? We know that there are three laws that govern the Internet, and none was penned by a legislator. The first of these is Moore’s Law — a nifty bit of insight offered by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel. Moore’s Law states that every 18 months, processing power will double, while costs remain constant. It’s the principle on which Gordon Moore built his business, and it’s proved remarkably accurate. Moore’s law has been essential not only in terms of how it has driven innovation, but in how it’s made basic computing capability more affordable for a mass audience.

That brings us to the second law that governs the Internet. Metcalfe’s Law, offered by Bob Metcalfe — a guy who knows quite a lot about networks — he invented Ethernet, and founded 3Com. Metcalfe’s Law states that the utility of a network equals the square of the number of its users. Consider the computer you’re looking at now. Imagine it unplugged from the network. Alone. Isolated. It’s still a computer. You can run a spreadsheet, edit a document, play a game. But once you connect that computer to even just one more, the power of your own computer increases dramatically. You can now share those documents, or send messages to the other computer on your network. The utility of your computer continues to increase — geometrically — with each additional node that is introduced to your network.

And that brings us to the third law that governs the Internet. At a certain point — critical mass — the power of the computing network is so great that it extends beyond the realm of technology alone, and affects the social, economic and political worlds in which it operates. This is the Law of Disruption, described by Chunka Mui in Unleashing the Killer App. Between the accelerated curve of technological change and the incremental curve of human change there is a widening gap — a vacuum — and a vacuum is a powerful force. I believe that both the fundamental cause for that gap, and the vehicle that will fill it–the agent of change–are one and the same… the Internet.

And so we are where we began, with the birth of a new medium — the invention of a vehicle for communication that disrupts as it transforms. The effects of this particular medium will be especially powerful, and likely unusually disruptive. While other mediums have empowered the individual to communicate with the masses, to do so on a large scale has always required an intermediary — an art gallery, a publisher, a theatre or broadcast company. These are powerful organizations, groups that are rarely content merely to replicate a message, when they can edit and augment it as well.

The Internet, however, is inherently a many-to-many medium. Virtually anyone who has the ability to browse the web has the capability to publish on the web, without the services — or the editorial predilections — of any intermediary whatsoever. It’s interesting to imagine what might have transpired if Thug’s cave art were instantly transported to every cave that chose to tune in. Or if there had been a printing press in every kitchen.

It’s just as interesting to imagine where the Internet will lead us. I don’t claim to know. But I expect it’ll be a helluva ride.