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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Posts Tagged ‘Coffee!’
Fazenda Sertaozinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil!
January 30, 2010Catching 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 strawman. 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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Sweet on Finca La Folie
September 19, 2009I found myself on a fool’s errand trying
to research this coffee, suggesting that it has already sold out. And, as so often happens, I got distracted wandering the Internet. The seller, Ritual Roasters has a great video tutorial about espresso, using a French press, the Clover and other topics. I was hooked after the first one, in which the barista explains the wide variety in espresso flavors, even with the same beans, and he compares the intensity of espresso to the slap in the face of whiskey. I never thought I’d have this much fun watching videos of coffee geeks do their thing.
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Coming Back Around to the Flor Azul
September 13, 2009
This direct-trade variety from Nicaragua was one of the earliest culinary coffees I wrote about on this blog, back in November 2008, when I first started to systematically evaluate the beans I was trying.
Back then, I thought I knew a fair amount about coffee, but I really didn’t know anything. My knowledge was limited to some basic presumptions I had about the geographic origins of various coffees. I didn’t know much about individual growers or roasters. That level of detail was not readily available on the Web or on packaging until this third-wave era of coffee geekery with its focus on elevations, how beans are grown, dried and roasted, and the precise temperature settings on super-expensive coffee-making equipment.
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Grown Near a Glacier in Kenya
September 6, 2009
I write this during a long Labor Day weekend, as we’re trying to grab the last few strands of summer: A few last bike rides, wrapping up some reading, paying a visit to the Spa Castle in Queens, and more. This has not been the greatest couple of months. The economy is still in turmoil, of course, and there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty in the news business. At home, we have been coping with some illnesses in my wife’s extended family.
So it has not always been easy to focus on coffee, though my blog quest can be a welcome distraction. This coffee in particular came and went before I had a chance to fully appreciate it. I bought it at the same time as the Koke from Barismo and Verve’s El Balamo-Quetzaltepec from El Salvador.
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El Balsamo-Quetzaltepec, That’s a Mouthful
August 30, 2009
A coffee-obsessed blogger bought three bags of beans at once, one sunny day in August. One of those bags is still nearly full. One is about half-full. And one is completely empty. This is the story of that one, which sits next to my computer, taunting me with a rich, thick aroma of beans that are no more.
A couple of weeks ago, I asked what would happen if someone on the quest for a perfect shot of espresso coffee found what he was looking for? Read the rest of this entry »
A Shot of Koke
August 29, 2009
So I was all ready to write about this espresso a couple of weeks ago, but then I lost Internet service at home for a week. Long story, not very interesting, but it was an inauspicious start with Verizon DSL service. For many years I paid Earthlink for DSL on top of my Verizon phone line, but the phone company finally found the price point that made me switch. Unfortunately, they did something to the line right away that cut off the Earthlink service before sending me the modem. Then there was trouble on the line, yada yada. I said it was boring. On to the coffee, one of three varieties I bought here in New York.
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The Black Cat From Bolivia
August 17, 2009
What happens if, in a quest for a perfect shot of espresso, you actually find it, or something close? For one thing, perhaps like a fine wine, you can never be sure the next year’s vintage will be as good. And your taste and preferences might change. Of course, my quest was mainly a conceit to try a bunch of coffees and blog about them.
I didn’t expect to actually find something so far superior to the rest. But the third bean I brought back from Intelligentsia in L.A. this July came close. Alas, I just drank the last shot.
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