Archive for October, 2005

Posted on October 31, 2005 - by deCadmus

Coffee Geek Gets Brewed

Perhaps in a fit of nostalgia for simpler times, Mark Prince at CoffeeGeek has authored a “how-to” article that has nothing whatsoever to do with espresso… but instead offers a spiffy step-by-step walkthru –with photos — of how to brew a cup of coffee with a pourover filter. Well done.

Up next… the Coffee Geek guide to Cowboy Coffee. ;)

Posted on October 31, 2005 - by deCadmus

NaNoWriMo?

In a fit of optimism (read, insanity) I’ve registered for the annual writing marathon at NaNoWriMo — or National Novel Writing Month.

The goal: fifty thousand words in thirty days. Now, it’s more or less expected that much (all) of the participants’ writing will be sheer (utter, complete, total) garbage. The idea is to get into the habit of writing… to prime the pump, as it were.

The event starts in just about twenty-four hours. I have no characters drawn, no plots… er, plotted and no particular idea where my writing might go. I’m intrigued, but I remain on the fence…

Anybody out there tried NaNoWriMo in prior years? Was it worth it?

Posted on October 30, 2005 - by deCadmus

Out of This World

It’s crisp, it’s cold and it’s clear skies in Vermont (a very welcome change) and Mars looks like a pumpkin in the sky.

Pretty.

Posted on October 30, 2005 - by deCadmus

Something New Under The Sun: Clover

“But what about me?” says you, a fan of fine, single origin coffees.” I mean… there’s oodles of cool new tools for the espresso-hound — PID temperature control, ever-more-fine grind control, bottomless portafilters, pressure-sensitive tampers — but what if I simply want a really great cup of brewed coffee?”

It’s a fair question. If you think about it, there’s really very little that’s changed in coffee brewing gear for, what, a hundred years? Maybe two? The Turkish coffee pot, or ibrik , was used in the 6th century, and ruled coffee brewing for some 1300 years… Filtered drip coffee made the scene in the 1700’s when folks discovered that filtering their coffee with their cotton hose made it a little less crunchy. The Rumford drip pot came on the scene in 1800; vacuum pots were patented in the 1830’s, and their tippy (yet swanky) upgrade, the balance siphon, in the 1850’s. In the 1890’s early coffee percolators made the scene, but we really don’t consider them an advancement so much as a screaming retreat.

Closer to 1900 and you have the advent of the cafeolette press pot, or French Press (known, we understand, as the Freedom Press on Capitol Hill.) The Melitta paper pour-over filter was invented in 1912, largely eliminating socks from the role of coffee filtering medium… and in the 1970’s you get the first electric auto-drip brewers, pioneered by Joe DiMaggio — er, Mr. Coffee.

It’s only in the last few years that the needle has moved at all; Bodum revamped the vacuum pot with some spiffy electronics and a highly reliable filter, while Phillips, Nespresso and Keurig have taken their respective shots at single-cup brewed coffee via pods and sealed capsules. But these single-cup brewers, however convenient, don’t generally offer the flexibility that the modern coffee snob demands… that is, to brew any coffee under the sun.

It’s high time there were some real upgrades to brewed coffee. Maybe — just maybe — the Clover will shake things up a bit.

Unveiled this week at Coffee Fest in Seattle, the Clover is a commercial-grade single-cup coffee brewer that has clearly impressed some of the most demanding folk in specialty coffee on the left-coast. Say’s Victrola’s Tony (tonx to you and me), “The Clover… delivers flawless cup quality, with granular control of brew parameters from freshly ground coffee, and delivers with unbelievable speed.”

The brew cylinder is all stainless steel as is the filter mechanism. PID controls keep the water and brew environment at precise temperature. The elegant interface allows for granular creation and selection of specific brew profiles for multiple coffees. The brewing of the coffee is visible to the customer and at the end of the brew cycle you are left with a ring of nearly dry grounds swept away in a single stroke. It adds a bit of theater to the brew process, much like a melitta-style bar, but cleaner and far faster.

Did he say elegant? He did. Theater? Yup. He also tosses out bons mots like epic, and uncanny. It’s not only Tonx that’s impressed, but Chris Tacy, too. (Be advised that to find Tacy’s remarks on the Clover you’ll need to scroll past some tasty photos of Kees van der Westen’s sexy new single-group espresso machine… try to keep your eyes in their orbits, eh?)

The Clover. Sounds to me like it may be there’s something new — really new — under the sun after all.

Posted on October 29, 2005 - by deCadmus

Manhattan Smells Good: Officials Baffled

It’s still a mystery why New York City residents suddenly found themselves in a cloud of winsome aromas…

An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome.

“It’s like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes,” he said. “It’s pleasant.”

The odor had followed Mr. Padilla and his friend along their walk in Lower Manhattan, from a dormitory on Fulton Street, to Pace University on Spruce Street, and back down again, to where they stood now, near a Dunkin’ Donuts. Maybe it was from there, he said. But it wasn’t.

Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister.

It certainly wasn’t the sweet smell of coffee from Gillies, which, for years now, has had its aromas banned by the city of New York.

Go figure.

coffeearomanew-york

Posted on October 28, 2005 - by deCadmus

From the Reading Chair

I have to remind myself that, since I now have a spiffy, categorized site I can write about whatever I want, and you can simply tune into to what you want to read… and tune out what you don’t. (It’s Blog 2.0, don’t ya know.) So without further ado…

From the Reading Chair

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow.

It didn’t take me long to suspect that Cory wrote this book on a bet. You know the drill… say you’re at a writer’s workshop and somebody challenges you with plot-lines that are so absurd as to be incomprehensible (quite a lot like our gang would do with improv… and most often on a stage before a less-than-sober crowd, where the chances that something foolish and epic-scaled would happen were freakishly high.) Things like, “Let’s say your Dad is a mountain and your Mamma is a washing machine. Oh, and you’ve got brothers who are like a set of Russian nesting dolls… No, really.”

And then I began to suspect that Cory was actually somewhere in the process of writing an Electronic Frontier Foundation manifesto, when it occurred to him to take the result of that writing workshop and mash it up with the techno-gee-wizardry of wifi freedom for all.

Someone Comes to Town is weird — altogether absurd and strange — and at the same time compelling and tightly written. It’s Alice in Wonderland meets the Goonies; David Copperfield and a car wreck; and like that wreck it’s hard to look away… the detritus is bewildering, but you know — you just know — there’s got to be some demystifying, essential truth in there somewhere.

Curious… and curiously satisfying. Recommended.

Posted on October 28, 2005 - by deCadmus

Whither Goest Google?

In July I switched from Blogger — a publishing platform I’d been on for more than five years— to WordPress.

Bloggle had always enjoyed pretty amazing search relevance at Google… without any particular effort on my part to optimize things. However, within days of switching platforms, traffic arriving from Google started falling off, despite my efforts to carefully redirect a few resulting changes with permanent (301) redirects as recommended by Google… and today Bloggle appears to have been all but abandoned by the engine.

Anybody else switch away from Blogger and find they’ve been shut out of Google?

Curious…

I should add that the number of folks visiting Bloggle — despite the Google embargo, and my, er… inconsistent frequency of posting — has never been higher. So, thanks for stopping by. ;)

Posted on October 27, 2005 - by deCadmus

Dirty Jobs

The past few days I’ve been hunkered in the La-Z-Boy, trying to nap away a bit of a bug… and when napping wouldn’t happen and reading made my head hurt I flipped on the idiot box. In the course of my channel surfing — mostly between National Geographic, FoodTV and Discovery, (hundreds of channels and I watch, what… three?) — I happened upon a series called Dirty Jobs. And I couldn’t look away…

In this show, the host — Mike Rowe — does, well… dirty jobs. Icky jobs. Nasty jobs. Or as Discovery says:

Our brave host and apprentice Mike Rowe will introduce you to a hardworking group of men and women who overcome fear, danger and sometimes stench and overall ickiness to accomplish their daily tasks. Not one to just stand by, each week, Rowe will assume the duties of the jobs he’s profiling, working alongside rattlesnake catchers, fish processors, bee removers, septic-tank technicians and other professionals: average folks tackling extraordinary tasks that simply must get done.

In this particular episode the adventures ranged from nursing sick sea-lions to wrangling ostriches (nasty mean critters they are, too… just dinosaurs with feathers) to — and here’s the relevant part — working on a coffee farm. Now given the show’s format, a fair amount of air-time was given to the fertilizing part of the coffee growing process, and that means working with a lot of compost, a fair amount of manure, and a heaping pile of fermenting coffee cherry skins (which have a pretty amazing aroma, let me tell ya.) Just the same, the show also did a fairly spiffy job of walking through the many steps involved in processing coffee: picking, sorting, washing, pulping, fermenting, washing (again), drying, milling and roasting.

Dirty Jobs… look for the Ostrich Farmer episode.

coffeefarmprocessingkona

Posted on October 25, 2005 - by deCadmus

A Perfect Storm?

It’s snowing.

Not the faint flurries that speak softly of the downly blankets to come… no, not these. These are big, gloppy, frozen clumps of fluffy, white stuff — crazed, drifting vollies — resolute in their intent to bring on that white winter; to make it begin.

This is not, the weather-casters assure, a repeat of the scary Hallowe’en Nor’easter that raged in 1991… (spawning a great book, and a mediochre movie) but a mere superstorm (if that).

Still and all, those tumbling flakes outside my window have a tale to tell… and they’re mad with enthusiasm to tell it.

Posted on October 24, 2005 - by deCadmus

Update: Hurricane Stan Relief

Chipper Harris at Coffee Kids was kind enough to pass along some updated information on the coffee communities of Guatemala and Mexico in the wake of hurricane Stan… as well as a view on where their relief efforts have focused so far.

Coffee Kids has set up three emergency relief programs to focus on those areas hardest hit by Stan. According to Founder and Executive Director, Bill Fishbein (one of the most genuine people I’ve met, anywhere):

“We’ve made arrangements for urgently needed contributions to be sent immediately to three of our longtime partner organizations: APROS in Guatemala, CAMPO in Oaxaca, Mexico and Icsur in Mexico’s State of Chiapas. These local nonprofit groups are in the best position to determine where the most urgent need is and provide immediate assistance. The funds will be used to provide food, potable water and supplies as well as repair severely damaged roads.�

“We hope that members of the international coffee trade rally immediately to support these devastated communities. The coffee farmers and their families urgently need food, potable water, shelter and supplies.”

Get the whole story at Coffee Kids’ web site and, while you’re there, maybe take a minute to make a contribution to an organization doing meaningful work, at the farm gate and beyond.

coffeeguatemalahurricanerelief