Archive for February, 2003

Posted on February 27, 2003 - by deCadmus

Tasting Notes

It occurs to me, shortly after bemoaning the lull in new crop coffee arrivals, that I’ve got beans on my sample shelf that I’ve yet to find time to taste… and others that I’ve tried, found wanting, and wondered: was it the bean, or the roast that was the problem? [Note that my whopping ego will not allow me to consider that I might, myself, be an impacting factor.] In this episode, then, a tale of two Kenyans… one of which has lingered long untasted, and one that was tasted, and left to linger.

The first – from the sample shelf – comes from Steve Ackman’s Two Loons Coffee. Its mark is Kenya AA Estate Kimandi. Steve keeps a small inventory, I think… certainly he’s choosy about what he stocks. He has a knack for choosing well, or his tastes and mine simply follow a similar path.

The Kimandi is a complex, changeling cup… not only from start to finish as the hot coffee cools, but even from the beginning of the sip to its end. Ground, the coffee’s fragrance is slightly sweet and spicy, though it’s not particularly aromatic in the cup. The first sip is lively lemon and citrus – tart, but not sour. The Kimandi is fairly light in body [at least this roast is... you could likely tweak the roast for a slightly rounder cup] and its finish is lingering, and smacks of red wine and black raspberry. As the cup cools, the berry flavor is more pronounced. Mighty good stuff.

Kenya number two is from Tom Owens’s Sweet Maria’s: Kenya AA Karamundi. On recommendation of another home-roaster I bought five pounds before having tasted this bean. [A practice I do *not* recommend.] Having roasted it a time or three I’d largely given up on it… while its fragrance and aroma were both hugely promising, the cup itself was ultimately ashy and harsh.

This week I gave the Karamundi another go… this time bracketing three roasts between the completion of first crack and the onset of second. The lightest of these roasts still had a cereal, grainy quality. The darkest – quenched at the first tic or two of second crack – was, again, distinctly harsh. The middle roast, however; was spot on… despite the curiously dark color of the bean.

The Karamundi is a mildly sweet, acidy cup, with a heady aroma of roses and violets. Its flavors run to sassafras and vanilla – not unlike a cream soda. Its body is round and mellow; its finish is brief, and hints of lemon peel. While it starts fairly complex – unlike the Kimandi – the flavors in this cup are largely consistent as the cup cools, likely a result of its lovely, flowery aroma.

While each of these coffees of Kenya has something to offer, I recommend the Kimandi for its complexity, its lingering finish, and its ability to take any of a number of roast styles in stride, yielding only another way to enjoy a lovely, brisk cup.

Posted on February 25, 2003 - by deCadmus

Peet’s Coffee is coming home…

Peet’s Coffee is coming home to Seattle, again. Sort of. Almost. Well… it’s complicated.

Peet’s was established in Berkeley by the venerated Alfred Peet nearly 40 years ago. It was at Peet’s that Jerry Baldwin and his partners found their inspiration for Starbucks. And, in those early days, their beans, too. When Seattle-based Starbucks got too big for Peet to supply, Alfred taught Jerry, and then Jim Reynolds, how to roast their own.

Fast-forward to the mid-eighties… Starbucks’ owner Jerry Baldwin buys Peet’s and moves to Berkeley. Jim Reynolds follows, only now he’s buying green coffee and overseeing roasting for both Peet’s and Starbucks. Just a few years later, Baldwin sells Starbucks to Howard Schultz and, well… you know the rest of that story.

Peet’s is now on an expansion track of their own, and will launch their first Seattle store in June. By all accounts, Peet’s intends to maintain the very same practices that have served them well for 40 years: frequent roasts, and small batches. Can they do it?

Posted on February 25, 2003 - by deCadmus

Coffee Doldrums

Coffee – like most any stuff that’s a product of soil and rain and honest sweat – is a seasonal crop. Where it’s grown determines when coffee trees [shrubs, really] will bloom and fruit and ripen. Coffee only grows well in the spaces between the tropic lines of the globe; even then it’s rather picky about altitude: coffee plants prefer the rarified air and cooler temperatures of mountainsides. Generally speaking, the higher the altitude, the denser and more flavorful the bean… and as you get closer to the equator, the higher the coffee must be grown. There’s a payback to all that mountain hiking, though… coffee grown closer to the equator is likely to have not one major harvest season, but two. And, point of fact, there’s a number of equatorial growing regions that pretty much harvest coffee cherries year-round.

This is all to say that, right now, we’re in the midst of the coffee doldrums. Yeah, there’s still some new Indonesian coffees coming in [remember that part about some coffees being harvested year 'round?] and there’s quite a number of African coffees – Kenya auction lots, and particularly Yemeni beans – that have been long afloat, or mired in customs where probably every shipment that has a Yemeni origin is getting something of a thorough inspection, times being what they are.

Meanwhile, it seems this time of year I’ve established a tradition [remember, kids: once is precedent, twice is tradition, three times it's written in stone] of poking around to see what coffees I might have missed. Coming soon from Coffee Bean Corral: New Guinea Waghi Peaberry. Yeah, I’m still a sucker for peaberry coffees. I’m disappointed, though, that the folks at the Corral are out of stock on their Sumatra Lintong, a bean I’ve missed entirely the last year or so. I’d hoped to give it a go.

Coming soon from Sweet Maria’s: Sumatra Iskandar Triple-Pick, and Indian Pearl Mountain Peaberry [yup, there I go again]. I also opted to try Sweet Maria’s Colombian Organic Mesa de Los Santos, though I don’t typically do Colombian coffees. This one is a single-estate origin, rather than the typical “hey, let’s throw all the big beans in a single pile” affair that Colombia is [in]famous for.

Yeah, I know.. it’s not fair to single Colombia out for pooling crops and grading by size… but I suspect their coffee production on the whole may have suffered more for it than other origins. Kenya, for example, does the size-grading thing for its auction lots, but I can still easily get great single-origin beans.

Take that, Juan Valdez.

Posted on February 23, 2003 - by deCadmus

On-stage, and off.

It’s been a tremendous fun weekend, performance-wise. Friday evening the little improv company that I play with – Commedia Sans Arte – was featured at the Just Off Broadway theatre in Kansas City.

While we’ve taken the stage together more than a hundred times at Renaissance Festivals, this show marks our first *real* gig this side of the 16th century… which means it’s the first time we actually played to a space where we actually had control over the technical aspects – sound, lighting and the like – and didn’t have to compete with what was happening in the lanes, or the merchants hawking their wares just down the way. And I find myself hard-pressed to describe just how right it felt to do a film noir translation scene with a guy in the background thrumbing a slinky, swingy beat on a stand-up bass. Good fun.

And then Saturday evening herself and I attended a fabulous concert by Cherish The Ladies… Irish music, traditional and slightly less so, fronted by the amazing Joanie Madden on the penny whistle [high and low] and flute. And just a coupla blocks from home. ; )

Posted on February 23, 2003 - by deCadmus

Hall of Famers

If the specialty coffee business ever were to build a hall of fame, pride of place would likely go to Alfred Peet, who brought European-inspired roasting to Berkeley, California nearly 40 years ago. And in that same hall, at Peet’s right-hand, there surely would be a spot reserved for Jim Reynolds… a coffee buyer, roaster and taster steeped in Peet’s tradition, and today the very embodiment of the Peet’s brand.

Jessica Guynn of The Contra Costa Times offers a delightful profile of Reynolds – The Bean Stops with Him – at once thoughtful, and romantic, and – best as I can tell – spot on.

With near religious concentration ridging his frothy brow, Jim Reynolds pours 6 ounces of hot water over 10 grams of freshly roasted grounds in the two dozen glass cups lining an 18-foot table in the Peet’s Coffee & Tea headquarters.

He waits a few minutes, then uses a soup spoon to pierce the thick brown crust that has formed on the surface of the coffee and takes a whiff.

After stirring, Reynolds lets the coffee steep for another few minutes before skimming the excess grounds. Again, he waits, letting the coffee cool to a few degrees above room temperature.

Then, with a monastic deftness that comes only with decades of practice, he lifts the spoon and slurps with the force of a vacuum cleaner, swirling a small amount of coffee before spitting it into a spittoon, not once spilling a drop on his Mark Twain mustache.

Reynolds appraises the appearance (a quarter pound of each type of bean sits in plastic blue trays on the cupping table), aroma (maybe flowers or chocolate), flavor (sometimes blackberry or cloves), body (how the coffee feels on the tongue) and acidity (”a liveliness detected on the back and sides of tongue”). And then moves onto the next cup.

“Cupping is the single most important thing a coffee buyer does,” Reynolds said. “You have to be able to decide with only a few sips whether to buy many thousands of dollars worth of coffee. We’re going to be cupping that coffee hundreds of times from the initial green sample to the final roast, so I’d better like it.”

It’s a longish sort of excerpt, but then it’s a longish sort of article… and this is just a hint of the good stuff therein.

Posted on February 21, 2003 - by deCadmus

Tip o’ the Hat

A tip of the hat…to Mark Prince – a caffeinated compatriot and fellow writer of expressions espressi – who picked up some nifty coverage in today’s USA TODAY.

“As with soccer and fermented grapes, coffee drinks are another European import that the cowboys in all of us want to rope and wrangle into submission.

“One thought is that Italy has stalled, that they think, ‘We’ve made the perfect drink, and that’s it,’ ” says Mark Prince, a Web designer by day and administrator of coffeegeek.com by many a late night. (For the record, an Italian barista came in third last year, behind a Norwegian and a winning Dane.)

“So while Italy does live and breathe coffee, I do see this as giving us a little room to sneak in,” Prince says. “And the West Coast in particular is really pushing the envelope.”

And don’t worry, Mark… we won’t tell them you’re a Canadian fighter jock.

Posted on February 19, 2003 - by deCadmus

And more on Doctorow.

I pre-ordered Cory’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom from Amazon. Round about the time I got it, Cory announced that the novel would be freely available for download in its entirety. [His publisher must love him.] When it comes to reading a novel, I still prefer books to bits, and – either way – this one is a spiffy read.

I was unavoidably transported to my twenty-something days, sneaking a Disney job interview into a business trip to Anaheim. I got a short “insiders” tour that I’ll never forget. [Did you know there's a small half-court inside the Matterhorn?] After a second interview that day I learned that all Disney cast members had to be clean-shaven. [!] I wonder how many other would-be-Imagineers have chosen other paths, unwilling to give up their beards? But I digress.

The ‘lectronic version of Down and Out is made available via a Creative Commons license – a new way to protect as little or as much of your copyright as you care to. I’m intrigued, and as I learn more I’m increasingly inclined to make the entirety of Bloggle available under a similar CC license. It seems a nifty way to make my lil’ contribution to the Public Domain.

Posted on February 18, 2003 - by deCadmus

All the news that’s fit to blog…

Cory Doctorow wonders out loud whether Reuters’ decision to cut 3,000 jobs is in any way a result of the disintermediation effect of the blogosphere. I’m inspired to wonder a little further out…

The evolution of the modern journalist [don't snicker, that'd be rude] had long been toward an unbiased, dispassionate recording of events: who, what, when and where. At some point in the not terribly distant past, this grew to include interpretations of why, and speculation on what it all means. Our dispassionate observer became involved in the event; a hollow, shadow-participant… and then only until a bigger and better event came along.

Enter the amateur journalist… better still, millions of them. No casual observers here, these are folk who recount with vibrancy and passion – and often surprising clarity – events in which they are fully engaged. Bias doesn’t much matter, as another point of view is only a click away, found on the blog of yet another fully-involved party.

Me, I think we’re seeing journalism redefined by a new medium… yet another step in the curious evolution of journalism.

Posted on February 18, 2003 - by deCadmus

Supertasters: Both Sides

Now *there’s* a double-edged sword.
Supertasters – those lucky few who pack an extra parcel of taste buds on their tongues – are apparently at an increased risk of a number of cancers. It would appear to be a diet thing… supertasters don’t like the taste of foods that are good for them. Hey, does that mean *I’m* a supertaster? I’ve wondered… and one of these days I’ll get around to testing.

The relevance? While the article above suggests that supertasters don’t care for coffee [it's too bitter] the truth of the matter is that there’s quite a number of supertasters involved in the coffee trade. Unlike the dreck you’ll find in a can, specialty coffee is *not* too bitter… and the more adept palate of a supertaster can identify nuances that might escape many of the rest of us.

Are you a supertaster? There’s actually a very simple method that you can try at home that doesn’t involve minute amounts of flavors administered by a guy in a lab coat, but just a little bit of blue food coloring. Note to self: this’ll probably get messy… and maybe shouldn’t happen *before* going to the office.

Posted on February 17, 2003 - by deCadmus

Building Block

Back to the subject of the user experience…

I’ve had the extreme fortune to, once again, find myself playing my favorite role – practicing a mix of usability and information architecture, and being something of a customer experience gadfly. When the dotcom bubble burst I had to wonder if I’d get the opportunity to return this space at all. Instead, not only do I get to play, I get to coach a team of very smart people, as well.

In August I accepted a position at H&R Block, managing the web content services team. In September I started doodling tweaks to the site’s IA on notebooks and napkins. In October, we started whiteboarding. In November we presented a new design to management. And over the course of 45 days in December, we executed that design. That all-new version of the H&R Block web site went live January 10… synchronized with the new season’s product launch.

All in all, I’m awfully pleased with what we’ve built. Sure, there’s some bits I’d like to have done differently, if we’d had the time. There’s little things, still, that rub me the wrong way… but we can address those, and we are.

Building and launching the site was a galvanizing event for the new content team, who continue to throw themselves into new projects with all the energy of an upstart startup… just without the Aeron chairs.