Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category

Posted on February 18, 2007 - by deCadmus

Update

I’m still working on updates to tags. A new, structured tag system is nearly complete, but tags are unreliable in the meanwhile. (Use search, instead!) Reviews are now online and good to go.

Posted on February 13, 2007 - by deCadmus

Whoops, II

Known things that are not working: coffee reviews, tags and tag clouds, image galleries. Find something else broken? Please, let me know.

Posted on February 12, 2007 - by deCadmus

Whoops.

Bloggle suffered something of a catastrophic failure from a tiny thing that snowballed. (They say the mightiest avalanche begins with a single flake. I am that flake.) Things are now largely recovered, just a few more bits to shake out. Missing features (e.g. reviews) will soon return. Promise.

Posted on July 24, 2006 - by deCadmus

Creeping Featuritis, Part XVII

In which I make some progress… and in so doing change my mind.

I have long asserted that I don’t much care to assign numbers to coffee, and for a host of reasons. First among these is that origin coffee is altogether unique stuff. It speaks of where it was grown — lush cloudforests filled with exotic birdsong to treacherously steep volcanic slopes to shade-dappled hills above vast, beast-covered plains. Its flavors and aromas reflect the soil, the rain, the sun and the care of its grower. (more…)

Posted on July 17, 2006 - by deCadmus

Summer Coolers, Redux

In celebration of the hottest day of the year so far, here’s a chilly double-dip into the Bloggle wayback pages appropriately entitled, Summer Coolers.

I’ve long been ambivalent of flavored coffees. I tend toward the naturally nuanced flavors of a single-origin cup, or the many-layered flavors of a well-balanced blend. So it feels like something of a dirty little secret to reveal that I’ve been drinking a lot of flavored coffees of late.

Sure, I could plead extrinsic circumstance; justify it in the name of research. I could, that is, if I hadn’t thoroughly enjoyed the experience. So here’s the whole truth — flavored coffees are a pretty nifty way to make refreshing summer iced coffee without sugar syrups and the calories and carbs they add to the mix. Add a cocktail shaker full of ice and some cow-juice (or for the Atkins inclined, heavy cream) and you’re on the fast track to a fiendishly frosty coffee concoction.

Coffee’s not just for breakfast any more… or the blustery days of winter, either. When the mercury climbs – or whatever that stuff is they put in thermometers today – all you need are a few handy tools and a little know-how and you can make easy and refreshing treats to see you through the summer heat.

The tools.

You may think you need a fancy blender to make a smooth iced coffee drink. Not so! Your author’s favorite drinks require little more than ice, coffee and some kind of leak proof container to shake ‘em up. Of course, there’s really no better tool for the job than a cocktail shaker… I like those that are made of durable, dishwasher-safe stainless steel, and feature a built-in strainer.

For drinks that are stirred, not shaken, you might also consider ice-cube trays. Even if you’ve got one of those automatic ice-maker gadgets in your freezer, the humble ice-cube tray has its uses… and one of those is to freeze coffee into cubes so that as the ice melts it doesn’t dilute your lovely iced coffee beverage.

The ingredients.

Iced coffee fairly screams for a bit of creamy dairy goodness (Vermont is a dairy state, after all) and — at your option — a little bit of sweetener. Having said that, you’ve got a lot of options… you can use skim milk, or heavy cream, or anything in-between. (Heavy cream often has carrageenan, a natural thickener, added to it to give it added body – this is especially nice in frozen coffee drinks.) As for the sweet stuff: sugar is fine, honey is heavenly, but calorie and carb-neutral sweetening products will work as well – sometimes better. (More about that in a moment.)

The basic technique.

• Brew fresh coffee. This is important! Who wants to drink coffee that’s been left to cool (and loose its aromatics and flavor?) We like coffee that’s to be iced brewed strong… even double-strength.

  If you’re adding sweetener, add it to the just-brewed, hot coffee and stir to dissolve. Neither sugar nor honey are especially soluble in cold liquids (but many sugar substitutes are… you can add those directly to your cocktail shaker.)

• Fill your cocktail shaker with ice. Don’t skimp… too little ice will leave you with a luke-warm, watery mix.

  If you’re adding dairy products, pour them over the ice in the cocktail shaker. It’s a good idea all around to keep cold with cold until we’re ready to bring them all together.

• Shake, shake, shake! Add your hot coffee to your cocktail shaker, top with its lid and shake vigorously, all at once rapidly chilling the hot coffee, mixing coffee, sweetener and dairy, and frothing the whole mixture. Shake for no less than ten seconds and rarely more than twenty.

Shaking done, simply strain your coffee concoction into a tall, cold glass – maybe even a classy martini glass or two – and enjoy.

This article first appeared on Bloggle June 2, 2005.

More: coffee | cocktail | iced-coffee

Posted on April 1, 2006 - by deCadmus

Shocked! Shocked, I say!

I haven’t looked at Bloggle’s metrics for a while, so I was shocked — shocked, I say — to learn that there are now more than 1,200 people visiting these pages every day… while another 500 download Bloggle’s feed daily. Curiously, there seems to be an inverse relationship between my posting frequency and the number of people who visit. Which is to say, the less I write, the more you read. I can’t claim to understand that… and I will fight the temptation to test it by writing nothing whatsoever while waiting for readership to go through the roof.

Meanwhile, I’m honored and pleased that you’d take the time to stop by this little corner of the web.

Thanks.

More: bloggle | metrics

Posted on February 24, 2006 - by deCadmus

Reader Email

Like most everybody with an email address, I get a daily deluge of email offers to sell me mortgages, prescription drugs, and college diplomas… and while I’d love to paper my walls with non-accredited college diplomas in fantastic subjects — Semiotic Philology, Medieval Film Studies, Contemporary Coffeeology — these places never include a price list. (What kind of marketing is that, anyway?)

I also get a number (a small number) of emails from Bloggle readers. Some are praise! Others are criticism. (Both are welcome.) Most are questions… and most often those questions become fodder for future posts. Here’s a sampling of those that I don’t think I’ve yet written about… and their answers.

So how do you like living in Vermont?

Very much, thanks.

Really?

Yes, really.

When you review coffees, how do you brew the coffee, and why don’t you offer a number scale?

Great question. Most all of the reviews I offer here are based on tasting coffee versus cupping coffee. The distinction — in my mind, anyway — is important.

Cupping coffee is a technique usually used (and in my mind, best used) to evaluate green coffee, both to determine its roast potential, and to identify defects. (See Cupping Coffee with the Pros for details on the mechanics of cupping.) Tasting coffee, however, is something that everybody does… it’s just that some of us are perhaps more contemplative over their cup than others.

I make every effort to taste and evaluate coffees the same way you would, and so I brew the coffee I’m tasting much as you might, in a Melitta pour-over cone, brewed at 200 degrees F. (This is, incidentally, how I make most *every* cup I drink.) I’ll occasionally find a coffee that prefers another brewing method… when I do I’ll note that, too.

Cupping coffee is more rigorous — and more methodical — than tasting coffee. Cupping affords more opportunity to quantify a cup, but little opportunity to appreciate it. Cupping generates lots of numbers, to be sure. But numbers alone can’t tell the story of the farm where that coffee was grown, or how it was harvested, or how that coffee pairs with dessert. Numbers do little to describe the vast array of distinctive origins and flavors and aromas that make up the world of specialty coffee. At worst, numbers can have an unfortunate homogenizing effect on a market… at best, they simply fail to tell the whole story.

Is it snowing in Vermont?

Yes, at the moment it’s something of a blizzard out there. It’s lovely, really.

I own a little coffee shop in [Anytown, USA] and I roast my own coffee. If I send you some coffee, will you review it?

I love tasting coffee from all over. I really do. By all means, feel free to send coffee… and if I find it particularly distinctive I’m almost certain to write about it. Please send your coffee sealed in its commercial packaging. (To learn where to send coffee, drop me an email — there’s a link under my photo on this page — and I’ll forward you a postal address.)

If you write about my coffee, can I use your review to help sell my coffee?

Yes. It’s your coffee, after all.

Can I approve what you write about my coffee before you publish it?

No.

If I enclose a twenty dollar bill, can I guarantee a good review?

No. And for that matter, I can’t guarantee that I’ll write about your coffee at all… but if I do, I’ll call it like I see it. Of course, you’re still welcome to send your money… I may be in the market for a non-accredited college diploma.

More: coffee | coffee review | coffee tasting | vermont | reader mail

Posted on November 4, 2005 - by deCadmus

Feeding Better Now?

Briefly noted: I just fixed some code that was causing some feeds to fail (argh.) And, I’ve added some spiffy new tagging features.

The feature creep never ends…

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 August 11, 2005 - by deCadmus

Flickr-ing Images

As you may have noticed in yonder sidebar, I’ve been slowly uploading photo sets to Flickr, and discovering nifty new ways to display them as a result. For example… this spiffy slide-show that takes you on a virtual tour of the La Voz coffee cooperative on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. It’s just like being there. Except, of course, you can’t smell the coffee cherries, or feel the intense sun, or… well, maybe it’s not quite so much like being there, but it’s pretty.