That was the first real winter we’ve had in New York City in a while, but I’m still glad to put the days of snow and winter jackets behind us. I’ve been engaged in a bit of apartment-organizing, having finally bit the bullet and paid for some storage space. There is some stuff we didn’t want underfoot but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Some old computer equipment, some books, the comic collection from my misspent youth in the 1970s, my complete collection of Spy, furniture that we might put in a big summer house if we ever buy a big summer house. I fueled the weekslong effort with cups and shots of this coffee from Stumptown.
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Archive for the 'Coffee!' Category
Springtime With Burundi Bwayi
March 21, 2010A Guide to Good New York Coffee
March 12, 2010Here’s a great New York Times article last week by Oliver Strand about the growth of the culinary coffee scene in New York City.
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A Lost Twitter List, Beans From Kenya
March 6, 2010
Before I get to the latest installment of my endless coffee quest, I must mourn the end of my brief reign as a Twitter list maven. At the start of this week, I made the mistake of using the latest crashy build of Firefox while playing around on the Tlists site with my lists.
Because of a glitch, several of my lists, including the Linkers list, which had 1,940 followers and was among the top Twitter lists, briefly became “private” and shed all followers in the blink of an eye.
Alas, after some consultation, there seems to be nothing Tlists or Twitter can do. (But I am grateful that the Tlists folks are trying to help with a prominent placement of my list on their home page).
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From the Coopac Cooperative in Rwanda
February 16, 2010
A sign of a good coffee, I think, is that you can drink a full cup readily without any added dairy, soy or other coolants and flavorings. Most of the time I drink espresso, which generally works as a concentrated shot to the stomach and central nervous system, but on a crazy snowy day — we’ve had a lot of them in New York lately — I like to linger over over a regular mug made with the refurbished Jura, which is still going strong nearly two years later.
Fazenda Sertaozinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil!
January 30, 2010
I’ve been neglecting the blog for quite a while. It’s so much easier to Twitter, or post Facebook updates, or check in with Foursquare, that it’s hard to work up the head of steam it takes to write about coffees that have only mildly impressed me, or books that I haven’t managed to finish, or what have you. It’s the doldrums of winter, the eve of February, the shortest month on paper and the longest in the northeastern mind.
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Catching Up on Coffee: Helsar de Zarcero
December 20, 2009
I was too busy for blogging these many weeks, but I was drinking coffee, and so my record here will have a gap. There was a roast from Verve that was quite tasty but is no longer available, and I made it through a couple of rough weeks with the delicious Peet’s Holiday Blend, which my wife carried back from Los Angeles.
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A Guatemalan Roast From Grumpy
November 15, 2009
Interesting things seem to be happening at one of my favorite New York coffee haunts, Café Grumpy. For one thing, the shop’s official blog is looking flashier and busier. And Grumpy — which turned me on to many of the best roasters in the country (Intelligentsia, Verve, Barismo, and Ritual) — is now roasting selected coffees of its own at its Brooklyn location.
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Direct From Panama Carmen Estate
October 25, 2009
I haven’t had much time to find new coffees lately. It has been a rather busy few weeks, with a trip to Cleveland related to “After Voices,” my wife’s new poetry chapbook from Burning River, a local press. We’ve also had illness in her family, grim news in the journalism world, birthday gatherings and more happenings than I can count. On the Cleveland trip, we hit the highlights, with readings and a visit to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. We also stopped in at the local indie coffee chain, Phoenix Coffee, which also roasts its own beans. I’m kicking myself for not picking some up on the way out of town. Luckily, I still had this (shrinking) bag of beans from Stumptown.
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A Return to Guatemala via Stumptown
October 11, 2009
I’ve enjoyed a number of Guatemalan coffees — the Finca La Folie from Ritual Roasters, Itzamna from Intelligentsia, the Nimac Kapeh and the Soma blend from Barismo — so I picked up these beans on another side trip to Stumptown’s Manhattan location at the Ace Hotel in the 20s. As always, the service was fast and pleasant, and I received a complimentary coffee because I was buying beans. (I was also playing around with Foursquare and its iPhone app, and discovered that there’s a fierce battle to become “mayor” of this location.)
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An Opinion About Blue Batak
September 28, 2009
It is a little known fact that coffee improves your objectivity as a journalist. O.K., I’m kidding.
I don’t believe in “objectivity” and usually avoid the word. It sounds like an impossible God-like standard. Most people who use that term are setting up a straw man. I prefer terms like balance, neutrality, fairness. And conventional newspaper journalism can certainly reach conclusions, so long as they are supported by evidence, and qualified.
This just happens to be a topic on my mind and in my Twitter stream. The fairness/objectivity debate is in the air.
I work for a news organization that promises fairness and ethics. Like Buddhist enlightenment and perfection in general, they may not be attainable. The value to the reader comes from aiming for the worthy goal, without fear or favor, bias or prejudice. Even the best newspapers print corrections every day, but they still set accuracy as the standard. We don’t give up because perfect accuracy is unattainable.
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