Bloggle

In Vermont, it’s said, there’s nine months of winter and three months’ rough sledding. While that’s fine for skiing and snowmobiling and such, it can put a real damper on the aspirations of the dedicated home coffee roaster, banished to the garage or the wide open spaces beyond after that incident with the dark-roast batch that triggered the smoke alarms at midnight.

It’s little surprise, then, that home roasters everywhere — in wintry places, especially — find themselves drawn like so many moths to the flame of a coffee roaster due to hit retailers soon… the Behmor 1600. Its spec sheet is promising: batches of up to one pound, a number of programmed roast profiles and the ability to tweak them on-the-fly at roast-time, quiet operation so you can hear the audible cues of roast progression, and built-in smoke abatement technology. (more…)

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• Hacienda La Esmeralda wins the SCAA cupping pavilion’s top spot, officially giving it the honor, “World’s Best Coffee.” For the third year in a row. Unprecedented.
• Science Blogs wants to know, why is New York coffee so bad? I’d like to know, too, so I can eliminate my habit of planning my conference schedule so as to avoid NY, NY’s dismal coffee options. Yeah, I know, there’s Ninth St. Espresso and I hear good things about Grumpy. And Gillies has been roasting good stuff there since the dawn of time. (Maybe Fortune can chime in on this one!)
• And one for the recipe file… Coffee-and-Cocoa Encrusted Sirloin. A variation on this theme has long been on my grilling menu, though I prefer a rib-eye or Kansas City Strip. Yum.
• Finally, is a coffee-inspired brown the new black?
  

  “The hottest colour going are the browns — every shade of cappuccino, mocha, cafe-au-lait and milk chocolate.”

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