Archive for May, 2004

Posted on May 27, 2004 - by deCadmus

The ABCs of Espresso

Bruce Milletto and the gang at Bellissimo — the folks who wrote the very nifty Bean Business Basics — have a new effort under way… and this time it’s hands-on.

The American Barista & Coffee School [get it, ABC?] is open, and the first students are surprised to discover just what there is to learn. Says one restaurant owner,

“We’re two weeks into it, and we didn’t even know we were doing it poorly,” she said. “How would I know? Some company came in, set me up, and, said ‘See ya.’ I’ve really been educated here. It’s an investment.”

Of course, if you don’t wanna pony up seven large to learn the ABCs at Bellissimo’s place, you can always jack into the collective wisdom of alt.coffee. You might even find somebody in your neighborhood who’d be happy to bring the lesson to you.

Posted on May 27, 2004 - by deCadmus

So much time, so little to do…

So much time, so little to do…

Wait. Strike that. Reverse it.

Posted on May 26, 2004 - by deCadmus

Blend to Order: Good Idea, or Vanity’s Bitter Cup ?

So you’ve always wanted to blend your own coffee? Me, too. That’s one of the many reasons I started roasting my own. There’s a certain allure to being able to say, “This is my blend,” and considerable satisfaction found in having produced it with your own hands. ‘Course, there’s a not-so-fine line between pride of craftsmanship, which nearly always has some sweat involved; pride of ownership, which may or may not be a result of your own labors; and plain ol’ vanity, which is like as not a wish to show the world what your money can buy. These are distinctions your trusty author continues to struggle with. Just ask herself, the lovely Mrs. trusty author.

And so, as the San Francisco Bay Coffee Company launches a new roast- and blend-to-order service — fronted with a shiny new web service, of course — we’re left to struggle with whether this is an idea who’s time has come, or whether this is merely a recipe for bad coffee. For, despite the company veep’s argument that you can toss together any ol’ coffee and it’s going to taste just great, my own experience suggests that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to blending.

It’s not always easy to predict how two, three, or more coffees are going to play together in the cup. In fact, the results can be not only surprising, but confounding… and sometimes, icky. A good blend is the result of a lot of trial and error, most of it error. And with a minimum order of 18 pounds of custom-blended coffee, that’s an expensive learning experience.

Much easier all ’round to order two or three pounds of various coffees you like from a roaster you know, and to blend them yourself. Just brew a cup of this and a cup of that, and spoon coffee from one cup to the next till you have a flavor that floats your boat. Got it? Now blend your beans in the same ratio.

Don’t forget, of course, to print your own vanity label.

Posted on May 25, 2004 - by deCadmus

A Cup of Justice in Nicaragua?

Smithsonian Magazine recently followed along on a trip to origin in Nicaragua led by Thanksgiving Coffee’s outspoken Paul Katzeff. Along for the ride, apparently, [the story doesn't stray too far from Katzeff's tale] are Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano and good friends Geoff Watts and Doug Zell from Intelligentsia. Catch our erstwhile cuppers in action…

“I got a Baby Ruth vibe from that one,� says Peter Giuliano, his dark eyes shining behind thickrimmed black glasses. “There was a lot of a real caramel, nutty taste that turned me on, though on balance it was too forward.� Giuliano’s title is master roaster and green coffee buyer for Counter Culture Coffee, in Durham, North Carolina.

Across the table, the tall and bearded Geoff Watts, director of coffee for Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters, shakes his head. “I thought it was leathery—in a dry, leathery way,� he says.

Okay, so that isn’t likely to be Geoff’s favorite quote. ;)

Look beyond Katzeff’s casual dismissal of a lot of other people’s hard work in terms of Organics and Fair Trade, and you can find some good stuff here…

Posted on May 24, 2004 - by deCadmus

Make a Big Noise

Napster beat iTunes to the UK music download market, and on Wednesday, it looks like Oxfam will, too.

Oxfam?

The people who brought you Mugged, a scathing report of the state of the coffee crisis, now bring you Big Noise Music… a pay for download music service that grabs a dime from every download and puts it toward Oxfam’s efforts to end poverty, and to make trade fair through open markets and open minds.

In case you were wondering, it’s OD2 under the covers.

Posted on May 23, 2004 - by deCadmus

The Rest of the Story: Chapter 1

So, Bloggle is undergoing changes. It’s not alone — the changes really reflect only some of the changes that have been happening in the life of your trusty author. And this is…

The Rest of the Story
Five years ago — only five? — when I started Bloggle I was a happy Web Geek, doing happy Web Geek things, i.e. building Web sites for companies that were only beginning to realize that this Internet thing was more than just a passing fad. Maybe I had a jump-start: I’d been building online bulletin-board systems for a number of years when the behemoth began to stir.

The Internet was there… had been there for years! It was only this new itch between the behemoth’s shoulderblades — the Web — that proved so much more compelling than so many itches that had come before: Gopher, WAIS, etc. Tim Berners-Lee put together a simple transfer protocol mixed with a startlingly simple, stripped-down version of SGML that made it easy to create pages that could be shared with a thousand million people all over the planet. And then in a coup de grace, Mark Andresen added pictures [!] and a killer app was born.

Bloggle’s birth was the result of a new flea on the back of the monster… the weblog, or blog. The phenom that is blogging grew out of an aspect of the Web that, looking back, I can admit I didn’t really understand. There were thousands of personal Web sites. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Vanity sites, personal paeans, or just silly collections of dancing hampsters… in my view they only added to the wrong side of the signal to noise ratio. Sure, there were a few pages out there that communicated something important, something relevant. By my measure, they were few and far between.

And then this blogging thing. What need was there for a tool that allowed the huddled masses to blurt with amazing simplicity and no editorial process whatsoever whatever they had on their mind at the moment? Who would be interested what Zannah had for breakfast? Or what Cam’s point of view was on virtually anything? And what was the deal with Zannah linking to Cam’s commentary and adding still more commentary on the side of what was – to me – a fairly empty point to begin with?

Slowly, oh so slowly, comprehension dawned. First was the realization that, just as I had found some small number of these personal sites – these blogs – to have something of interest to me, so too had other people with views strikingly different from my own. For every Zannah there were a hundred like-minded people. Maybe more. Maybe many, many more.

And this linking thing… once I got it, I was amazed just how short-sighted I’d been. Maybe I’d spent so much time immersed in the data networks that pulsed just below the surface of things that I hadn’t been paying attention to what was developing above the surface.

And it hit me like a heavy-handed scifi plot reveal… The OSI model was wrong: there are eight layers to the network, and the top layer is people!

Right before my very eyes – before the eyes of all of us! – a vast human network had emerged and it was chock full of a hundred thousand points of view, and it was focused by a lens made up of a million links to kindred content authored by kindred spirits. And it was going to change everything.

And so I started Bloggle. ‘Cause I was damned if I was gonna miss out on something that I’d been in the middle of right from the start.
[Continue to Chapter II, in which your trusty author discovers what can happen when people chase their dreams...]

More: dream+jobs | coffee | web | vermont

Posted on May 23, 2004 - by deCadmus

Fortune’s Fab Site

Kudos to dear friend and fellow coffee fiend, Fortune, on her nifty site update. No, Fortune, it’s not too girly-girl.

Posted on May 23, 2004 - by deCadmus

Peru’s Triple Whammy

Coffee growers in Peru are facing a triple threat.

Coffee prices continue to hover near record lows making it almost impossible to keep their farms, much less continue to produce a crop. It’s only those growers that are able to produce specialty-grade beans — beans grown at high altitudes in far-flung communities, that are harder, denser and more flavorful — that are able to fetch prices above the “C” market price.

These same growers, however, are finding their high-grown beans compromised by intermediary buyers, who blend their product with local, low-grown coffees and sell the blended crop at market prices. “That’s demoralizing,” says grower Friolan Fernandez…

The middlemen are a necessary evil because they come out to remote farms and help us get our beans to market. But they don’t care about quality. That’s demoralizing for those of us who produce good coffee.

And then there’s “La Broca”.
A significant amount of Peruvian coffee is both shade-grown and organic. That’s a boon to the local ecology, and can realize a higher price at market as consumers’ growing demand for such coffees takes hold. Unfortunately, it also makes for conditions that are ideal for the borer beetle – la broca - an invisible army that’s quietly destroying up to a third of Peru’s coffee crop by sapping nutrients from coffee trees, and destroying the coffee beans, themselves.

This isn’t the first appearance of the borer beetle in Peru – it’s been problematic at one time or another in most all Central American coffee growing countries – but the timing couldn’t be worse. Low prices have resulted in fewer people to tend the trees, and as a result, fewer hands to fight the beetle invasion.

What can you do? Try a lovely Peruvian Organic coffee this week… and maybe buy a pound for a friend.

Posted on May 22, 2004 - by deCadmus

Sprung

Spring has sprung – finally! – in Vermont. This little snippet of garden is from what will soon be the new chez Cadmus in Williston. Just as soon as the whole homebuying/moving process is done.

Posted on May 14, 2004 - by deCadmus

Battle of the Coffee Icons

When icons do battle, it’s epic stuff… Godzilla and Mothra. Kirk and Kahn. IBM and Apple. Juan and the Mermaid?

The Colombian Coffee Federation – that even sounds epic! – fronted by the fictional Juan Valdez, is preparing for battle with the Siren of Seattle. The Seattle Times calls it thisaway:

Long before Starbucks hit the mainstream, Valdez was the face of coffee to many Americans, leading his mule through coffee fields and grocery-store aisles on TV ads sponsored by the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia.

Now, the federation is looking to parlay Valdez’s familiar image into a global chain of high-end coffee shops. Ten Juan Valdez stores are up and running in Colombia, and federation chief Gabriel Silva told Reuters this week that the chain will open at least eight U.S. stores later this year.

It’s a bold move for the Colombian group… and the logic is eminently clear: why settle for pennies per pound for green coffee beans when the beverage business gets dollars per cup?

The upside is huge, but so’s the risk. Does Juan still carry the iconic power he held while Mrs. Olson was hawking Folgers, and Mr. Coffee was the state-of-the-art of brewing tech? Can any coffee house stand on the one leg of a single origin, ’specially one that’s the very definition of mild, unassuming coffee? We’ll see soon enough.

Bonus question: What was Juan’s mule’s name? [Look in the comments, below, for the answer!]