Bloggle

For me, one of the signs of coffee obsession is that on most any trip to the grocery store I’m compelled to take a stroll down the coffee aisle… just keeping tabs, I guess. This trip I noticed the following:

• Dunkin Donuts has moved in. Big time. This wasn’t a surprise… in my neck of the woods (New England) they’re saturating the airwaves with a whole new line of commercials. And when I say saturating, I mean there are currently significantly more DD ads on the television than political ads. Yeah… that many.
• Emeril Lagasse has his new line-up of bright blue coffees out there, too, so thoroughly private-labeled it’s impossible to discern who actually roasts it. (Timothy’s makes Emeril’s K-Cups… I don’t know if they do the whole bean, too.)

But what really struck me is this: even though every single one of the coffees that I looked at — Dunkin Donuts, Emerils, Peet’s, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Melitta, Folger’s, Equal Exchange and many, many more — was packaged in what appeared to be laminated, heat-sealed bags with one-way valves, virtually all of them were offered in pre-ground coffee, only.

That’s a damn shame.

There’s a whole host of complex chemical reactions that happen when coffee is roasted. The clock starts ticking… some volatile aromas waft away within hours, flavors fade in days. The coffee is for all intents and purposes rusting. Those fancy laminated bags do a pretty darn good job of slowing this process by taking oxygen out of the mix… but grinding those coffee beans exposes vastly more — several orders of magnitude more — of the coffee’s surface area to the ravages of this process of oxidation. Ground coffee immediately begins to stale.

Supermarkets, of course, have limited shelf-space. There’s a tremendous bit of calculus (and often as not, some exchange of legal tender) to determine what brands get put where, in what varieties, and quantities. Multiple styles of the same product — say, whole bean and ground — are frowned on. Discouraged, even.

If a roaster is given four slots on the grocery shelf, and if that roaster offers more than four varieties of coffee, well then… he’s in a fix. He can offer two coffee varieties in both whole-bean and ground, or he can offer four varieties, all of them pre-ground. Which do you s’pose he’ll choose? Mmmhmm. Why? Because 99% of folks buying that coffee — even the premium brands — just don’t realize what they’re missing.

Just say no to stale, pre-ground coffee.

There’s a world of difference between coffee you buy pre-ground, and coffee you grind yourself. Grinding your own coffee — fresh, just before brewing — is the single, most dramatic thing you can do to improve your coffee. Honestly. It’s like the difference between corn-on-the-cob that was picked fresh just a few minutes ago, and stewed, creamed corn; a dry-aged Kansas City rib-eye and a freezer-burned hamburger patty, or filet of sole and a fish stick. The thing is, pound for pound, whole bean coffee doesn’t cost you any more than the stuff that’s already ground, so why would you buy your coffee any other way?

Just say no. Don’t buy it. Find your grocery manager, and insist they carry whole bean coffee. Or find a local roaster who treats their coffee with the respect it deserves.

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• The snarkiness begins. Canadian papers are having pseudo-hysterics over the per cup retail price of Panama Cup of Excellence Extraordinaire, Hacienda La Esmeralda.
  

  Starting this morning, coffee drinkers in Vancouver will be able to sip some seriously expensive brew.

  At a staggering $15 per 8-oz cup ($135 per half pound in bean form), the Panama-grown, 100-per-cent geisha varietal bean is the most expensive coffee ever to hit lips in this coffee-crazy city.

  ‘Course it’s all offered with a wink and a nod, and the folk at Caffe Artigiano are surely giggling all the way to the bank with the free press. Me, I’m in for a cup, if only I could get one delivered.

• Brilliant! A UK teen was hospitalized after downing seven double espressos at her family’s sandwhich shop. Quoth the victim of her own excess:
  

  “My nerves were all over the place. I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating. I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I thought I was going into shock.

  “I did not realise this could happen to you and I only hope other people learn from my mistake.”

  To be fair, I’ve had my own brush with espresso-fueled hyper-caffeination. In fact, just last week I’d commented on it on a post at Scazi’s Whatever:

  A few years back I spent an enjoyable Saturday in Chicago working with an eclectic mix of coffee pros and talented amateurs. The object of our attention: create a world-class espresso blend.

  Blending coffee for espresso is tricky; there’s a *lot* of trial and error, and lots and lots of tasting. We began ’round 9am, and finished around 4pm, ’cause — despite merely *tasting*, and not downing every lovin’ espresso that crossed our paths — most of us just couldn’t do it any more. My own palate was blown out, and I was literally *thrumming* like high voltage line.

  I should perhaps note that the result of that weekend’s exercise was the Intelligentsia elixir called Black Cat Espresso.

• I had no idea. Apparently Dunkin Donuts is the leading coffee retailer in the United Arab Emirates.
  

  “Dunkin’ Donuts, the UAE’s leading coffee & baked goods chain, has recently introduced a new iced drink that packs all the flavour of its renowned regular hot coffee, but at a chilled temperature that promises to help take the heat out of the summer.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts opened their first outlet in Dubai in 1997 and celebrated ten years of business across the UAE last month. The company has enjoyed phenomenal success within the emirates and now boasts over 40 outlets, with a target of 50 to be reached by the beginning of the New Year.”

  Waitasec. You’ve been in Dubai for 10 years and just now figured out that iced coffee might be a good idea?

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