When it comes to coffee quests, vacations and traveling pose both opportunities and challenges. On the West Coast, where I am visiting friends and relatives this month, it is a chance for me to sample selections from Peet’s Coffee and Teas. In December, I enjoyed the Sumatra and Aged Sumatra. This week, upon arriving in Los Angeles, I bought what was billed as a high-end blend — JR Reserve — and a heavily promoted single-source bean from Costa Rica. More on that one later.
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A Few Days With Peet’s JR Reserve
July 2, 2009The Coffee of Monte Crisol
June 25, 2009
I bought this coffee on Father’s Day, before my daughter and her friends cooked the dads a delicious dinner of salmon, salad, fruit salad and other good stuff. It had been raining in New York City for days, but the sun came out briefly. I bought this instead of the first place winner in the Cup of Excellence, the Fazenda Kaquend, from Brazil, roasted by Ritual Roasters in San Francisco, which my favorite Chelsea cafe was offering for an astounding but perhaps understandable $35 per bag. Instead, I bought a bag of these less expensive beans from Costa Rica for about half that.
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Los Inmortales in a Bag
June 20, 2009
It has been a week for obsessions, from Twitter to a new addiction, Plants vs. Zombies. The first was the subject of a two-day conference where I was a panelist, even as social media played a role in the Iranian election unrest.
The other is the latest computer game that has consumed too much time of the 9-year-old and, um, others, in our household. It is amusing and addictive. If you play it you will never look at mushrooms or vegetable gardening in quite the same way again.
Somewhere in there I helped my daughter build a replica of Brandenburg Gate out of wood and clay for a school project.
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Welcome, Twitter Users
May 31, 2009
Hello, and thanks for visiting my infrequently updated personal blog (read the latest entries). The odds are good that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This is my primitive method for tracking traffic from that page.
My name is Patrick LaForge. I have been an editor at The New York Times since 1997, after a dozen years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in upstate New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. I started using Twitter in early 2007, when Sewell Chan and I created the City Room blog for The Times. In May 2009, I left City Room and the metro desk to become director of the copy desks.
How I Use Twitter
I generally post updates about Web content I am reading, watching or thinking about, not what I had for lunch. I follow hundreds of people who use Twitter the same way — a collection of active linkers, journalists, bloggers, New Yorkers, Times staffers and readers. I do not automatically return follows, but if you engage with me and provide interesting content, the odds are I will follow you. If you are relatively new to Twitter, you might be interested in this post, “Basic Twitter Links for Journalists.”
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Late Night, With Wondo Harfusa
May 31, 2009
These days, I seem to be on a musical nostalgia tour. A couple of weeks ago, it was The Dead.
Then last night, my wife and I found ourselves in the crowd for They MIght Be Giants at Le Poisson Rouge, on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. The crowd of people in button-downed shirts and khaki was enthusiastic. But it did not have the same energy we recalled from the late 1990s, when the band could fill the Bowery Ballroom, and nerdy fans sat in circles in the line outside singing angst-ridden lyrics they knew by heart. That was long before the band transformed itself a Grammy-winning act for children known for TV and movie theme songs. Anyway, the last thing I did before leaving the apartment was to pull another shot of this coffee, from the Yerga Cheffe region of Ethiopia. It kept me bouncing.
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A Couple of Shots of Soma by Barismo
May 25, 2009
It was a beautiful Memorial Day in New York, and I was getting down to the dregs of the bowl where I throw the leftover beans from my coffee experiments. It was starting to taste a little too much like the bitter Starbucks mistake from quite a while back.
I took a bike ride down to my favorite indie coffee shop, Café Grumpy, using the newish Ninth Avenue lane, encountering just one illegally parked delivery truck that forced me to divert awkwardly into the street.
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Shots of Alphabet City, the Espresso
April 26, 2009
It was a busy week of catching up at work after vacation, then a busier weekend that included a children’s birthday party by the Hudson River, with volunteer activities to benefit the Children for Children Foundation.
Then last night it was off to Madison Square Garden for The Dead. It was a great show, musically. There were certainly some aging hippies in the crowd, but most of the audience had a middle-aged suburban feel to it. A lot of people who might have been dancing in the hallways and aisles 20 years ago seemed content to sit in their seats and suck on plastic bottles of Budweiser.
Toward the end of the night, I was thinking more about bedtime than the music never stopping, despite a couple of quick shots of this Intelligentsia espresso blend before the show. I’ve been drinking it all week.
Let’s resume the coffee quest.
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Taste of Agua Preta From Carmo de Minas
April 17, 2009
Earlier this week, my quest for a perfect cup of home-made coffee took me to Chelsea Market, where I picked up this direct-trade coffee from the outpost of Ninth Street Espresso at the market. This was part of my at-home vacation, or staycation, which mostly entailed watching my daughter do gymnastics; taking her to a bookstore, a tea house, and a museum; reading some books; sharing fresh Belgian beer with some friends; working out; updating my Twitter status; and, of course, drinking coffee.
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