Archive for August, 2007

Posted on August 31, 2007 - by deCadmus

Passages: Alfred Peet, 1920 – 2007

Alfred Peet — founder of Peet’s Coffee, grandfather of specialty coffee in the U.S. — died this week.

Mr. Peet opened his coffee shop at the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley, California in 1966, and awakened the American palate to the high-grown, high quality coffees of Costa Rica, Guatemala and East Africa… coffees that his father had roasted in the Netherlands prior to World War II. More, he helped to establish a uniquely American coffee house culture. Walnut and Vine became a gathering place; a hang-out for musicians and artists, writers and radicals.

Alfred was an inspiration to most everybody in the specialty coffee trade. He famously schooled Starbucks’ founders Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl on the fundamentals of coffee roasting when they were purchasing more coffee for their Seattle store than Peet could roast, himself. His signature deep coffee roast — pungent, smoky, but still distinctive of its origin — became the hallmark of “West-coast” styled roasting.

Alfred Peet always wanted his coffee to tell his story. For forty years it’s done just that.

Thanks, Al.

Posted on August 30, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• Hey, that’s pretty savvy for Wall Street. TheStreet.com’s Eileen Gunn takes a peek at Fair Trade — and Fair Trade coffee, in particular. For a publication that’s altogether dedicated to Free Trade it’s a remarkably balanced, and only remotely snarky read. Still…
  

  “[T]his is where my capitalist instincts start to twitch. I’m always skeptical when someone tries to argue to me that subsidies are simultaneously superfluous and essential.

  Moreover, those prices include a 10-cent premium for social and environmental programs (such as building schools and health clinics and teaching new farming techniques). In 2006, those dimes added up to roughly $91 million in social aid from the U.S. to growers in places such as Honduras, East Timor and Guatemala. That’s nice, but is it trade — communities benefiting from earned profit and prosperity — or is it non-tax-deductible charity?”

  That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it? The naked capitalist is entirely confunded about the difference between charity, and simply doing the right thing. For them the difference between a hand-up and a handout is entirely a question of whether or not you get a tax write-off. (sigh)

  Just the same, I’m always happy to see capitalists twitch. Good for the soul.

• Meanwhile, the big kids continue to play with the box it came in. Procter & Gamble is suing Kraft over packaging. Since introducing its plastic AromaSeal canister in 2003, P&G has seen sales of Folger’s coffee climb. Now that Kraft has launched its Maxwell House brand coffee in a similar container P&G has cried foul. ‘Course the real foul here is their coffee, which, were it lavished with the same attention as its packaging, would be something to talk about. Meanwhile, both brands continue to lose ground to specialty coffee, in the grocery and beyond.
• Is somebody being clever? The headline reads, Uganda: Coffee Producers Are the Biggest Losers. While the article speaks to the unequal share of profits that coffee growers receive in the Ugandan coffee trade, it could as well be speaking to the latest trend among Ugandan exporters: actually *losing* the coffee. In just the last few months more than 20 containers (each with about 20 tons of goods) have arrived at their destination filled with — wait for it — dirt. Apparently the coffee was stolen before it left port, and they had to put *something* in the box.

  Hey, that’s kinda like the story just before it, huh?

Posted on August 29, 2007 - by deCadmus

Where Are the Great Good Places?

In a coffee shop, and with her infant daughter snoozing at her elbow, a single mom — recently divorced, and struggling to make ends meet — writes a story about a boy wizard and an enchanted school. She writes in a coffee shop not for inspiration, but because she doesn’t have money enough to heat her apartment. Her story, of course, the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; the single mom, JK Rowling. I’m given to understand both mom and daughter are doing rather well, these days.

Rowling wasn’t the first author to take to the local coffee house — whether for warmth, or inspiration. Voltaire was an early coffee house patron, and he’s said to have tossed back between 50 and 72 cups a day (straying closer than most of us would dare to a lethal dose of caffeine) while writing works such as his fittingly frenzied Candide and Merope and his scathing Letters on the English.

It was a coffee house called Tillyard’s that was the unofficial home of The Royal Society — a clubby bunch who lunched and drank coffee and argued about alchemy — and ultimately published the collected works of their chair, one Isaac Newton. And in Austria you may be hard-pressed to find a coffee house that *doesn’t* boast of an author, poet or playwright who sat at that very table.

Given what passes for coffee house culture today, however, it’s remarkable that Rowling was able to pen a paragraph or two, much less a book empire. For all the lofty talk of the Third Place your chances of finding a Great, Good Place to write the Great American Novel are anything *but* great.

John Scalzi skewered most any remaining romantic notions of coffee house writing in his 250-page epic snark — and one of my favorite reads of the year — You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop. And a clip from an episode of Family Guy making the rounds on YouTube doesn’t offer much hope, either. Still, you can’t keep folks from trying…

Of the countless coffee shops I’ve visited, I could probably count those that offered a viable third place on one hand. Which is a shame… and probably a factor of economics. Hard chairs, small tables and surfaces that echo (echo, echo…) tend to get customers in and out the door quickly. So maybe I’m not going to write my novel in a coffee shop. I can deal with that. But shouldn’t I be able to have a conversation?

What’s coffee house culture like in your corner of the world? Got a Great Good Place to share?

Posted on August 29, 2007 - by deCadmus

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

Bloggle’s readership has been doubling about every other month for a while now. Recently it’s started to double every other week, which I find pretty amazing, and gratifying. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that I’ve taken to posting pretty much every day. Duh.

More readers, however, also means more bandwidth, and while bandwidth may be cheap, it isn’t free. And of course you know what that means… advertising.

But wait! There’s more!

I’ve implemented ads in such a way that if you’re a regular reader, you may never see them but once (or maybe twice.) If you visit via a search engine or head straight to archived pages you may see them, still, but even then only until the site recognizes that you’re *you* — the special person you are — the regular reader.

More, I’m trying to ensure that ads are actually relevant to the conversation… so if you *do* run across an ad, who knows… you might even be interested in it.

Posted on August 27, 2007 - by deCadmus

An Illustrated Guide to Espresso Drinks

Lokesh Dhakar had already made something of a name for himself among web builders for his very spiffy Lightbox image manipulation scripts — scripts which, by the way, drive many of the the galleries and slide shows that you’ll find here on Bloggle.

He’s upped the ante with his latest contribution to a world in want of caffeination… an illustrated guide to espresso drinks.

I’m new to the world of fancy coffee drinks. With the vast number of ordering options and new words with accented characters to pronounce; the coffee shop ordering experience can be intimidating. I’ve created a few small illustrations to help myself and others wrap their head around some of the small differences.
–Lokesh Dhakar

While I expect his contribution won’t bring an end to the incessant arguments about coffee drinks and their proportions, it does offer an informed, common point of reference. Maybe it’s the beginning of a period table of espresso elements. ;)

Posted on August 26, 2007 - by deCadmus

This Modern Life

It’s remarkable the ways the Internet has transformed us. We’ve been quietly beguiled by technology that doesn’t look or feel like, well… like technology. We’re connected — inexorably, insidiously connected — in ways that just a few years ago we might not have imagined, and yet today we take wholly for granted.

For your consideration, Roger Mummert’s slice of modern life via the NYTimes travel section — At a Family Gathering, an Internet Cafe Breaks Out.

“Do you mind,” one in-law asked, as I rounded up bedding and fretted over having enough milk in the fridge to fill 12 cereal bowls in the morning, “if I just pop onto the computer and check my e-mail?”

“Oh, yeah,” remarked another. “Maybe I could just track my son’s flight from D.C.”

“Ooh, perhaps you could print something out for me …”

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together.

Welcome, to this modern life.

Posted on August 24, 2007 - by deCadmus

Woz: Why Robots Will Never Make Coffee

What’s not to love about Steve Wozniak?

Think of the steps that a human being has to do to make a cup of coffee and you have covered basically 10, 20 years of your lifetime just to learn it. So for a computer to do it the same way, it has to go through the same learning, walking to a house using some kind of optical with a vision system, stepping around and opening the door properly, going down the wrong way, going back, finding the kitchen, detecting what might be a coffee machine. You can’t program these things, you have to learn it, and you have to watch how other people make coffee. … This is a kind of logic that the human brain does just to make a cup of coffee. We will never ever have artificial intelligence. Your pet, for example, your pet is smarter than any computer.
— Steve Wozniak

I have no doubt that robots *can* make coffee. I’m certain there are coffee-making robots in Japan right now. But I’m pretty confident that they’ll never consistently make, say, a really good cappuccino. There’s just too many variables at play.

Now, however, thanks to Woz I hold out some hope I can teach my dog to make a decent cappa. Right after I can teach her that my socks really aren’t chew toys.

Posted on August 23, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• I resolve to stop collecting coffee memorabilia. ‘Cause the repercussions are daunting —
  

  Barbara and Lowell Shindler’s coffee cup runneth over. The couple, who have a coffee-distributing business, have turned the basement of their Roslyn home into something of a coffee museum that’s filled to the brim with java-related items: antique bins, clocks, artwork, shoehorns and more than 2,500 pre-1960 coffee cans adorned with everything from a picture of Benjamin Franklin to jungle animals, all arranged alphabetically on shelves.

  Shoehorns?

• Excuse me… but is your cup glowing? A spiffy temperature sensitive addition to a plain ‘ol plastic lid may make your to-go cup a little bit safer.
  

  The lid looks like a regular plastic lid, like the ones placed on top of to-go cups at the coffee shop. It’s normally dark brown. But if the coffee or tea inside is hot, the top portion turns bright red. The red will fade to brown as the beverage cools down, so people who’ve used the lid a couple of times will presumably learn what stage of coloration indicates their preferred temperature.

  And so the unstoppable engine of technology has made hot lips history. Sorry Margaret.

• This just in! If I see just one more “wacky news” feature about Kopi Lewak I think I’m going to go cat shit insane. (Though I have to admit, the civet lolcat is kinda cute.)
• Finally, if you thought that cold-brewed coffee required fussy gadgets, well… think again.

Posted on August 22, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Geneology — A Varietal Family Tree

…and Typica begat Bourbon; and Bourbon begat Caturra; and Caturra begat Catui and Villa Sarchi (which should not be confused with Saatchi & Saatchi.) And it was good. Well, much of it, anyway.

No, it’s not yet another lost book of the Bible. It’s James Hoffman’s budding effort to map coffee’s family tree. Have a look and see if you can figure out where your cup comes from.

Posted on August 22, 2007 - by deCadmus

Roasted ’til the Bitter End

Science Daily reports that chemists have identified those chemical compounds largely responsible for coffee’s bitterness. More, their findings suggest that most of the bitterness is introduced during coffee roasting.

“Everybody thinks that caffeine is the main bitter compound in coffee, but that’s definitely not the case,” says study leader Thomas Hofmann, Ph.D., a professor of food chemistry and molecular sensory science at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. Only 15 percent of java’s perceived bitterness is due to caffeine, he estimates, noting that caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee both have similar bitterness qualities.

“Roasting is the key factor driving bitter taste in coffee beans. So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get…”

This isn’t news to anyone who’s roasted coffee that they know to be exceptional, and ended up with something that could grow hair on a wildebeest’s chest. (And yes, that includes me. Er… as the roaster, not the wildebeest.)

The bit that leaves me scratching my head, however, is this:

“We’ve known for some time that the chlorogenic acid lactones are present in coffee, but their role as a source of bitterness was not known until now,” Hofmann says.

I have a number of books on coffee — books that have been popular references for years — that, I believe, speak at some length to the links between chlorogenic acids and bitterness. Maybe I’m missing something here. Or maybe there’s more to come still from the research.