When you step into McNulty’s Tea & Coffee in the West Village, you feel as though you are stepping into another era of coffee, when specialty shops like this were the main purveyors of gourmet beans from around the world. In that respect, it reminds me of Empire Coffee or Porto Rico Importing Co.
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Posts Tagged ‘Intelligentsia’
That Old Time Coffee on Christopher Street
July 3, 2010Coffee, Hot and Cold
June 12, 2010
Inside Third Rail Coffee at 240 Sullivan St. in Greenwich Village.
This is a quickie coffee post, dashed off while watching the U.S.-England World Cup match and discussing the propriety of promiscuously using “tweet” in news articles.
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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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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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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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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 »
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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There Goes the Turtle
August 10, 2009
This is the second of the three coffees I bought about a month ago on a trip to the Silver Lake outpost of Intelligentsia in Los Angeles and have been enjoying in the weeks since. (Earlier, I wrote about Itzamna from Guatemala.) I was guzzling this, both as espresso and regular coffee, and it was my impression that it worked better as a regular cup. The name translates as “the turtle,” and, alas, this “in season” offering may be sold out now. I’ll have to savor the last bit left in the bag.
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Named for Itzamna, ‘God of Nectar’
August 9, 2009
After neglecting my blogging for a while, I figured I ought to make note of three excellent coffees from Intelligentsia in Los Angeles that I have been drinking over the past month or so. On a vacation trip in early July to visit family, we made a detour over to Silver Lake, where I bought a mug and a few different bags of single-source beans. I packed them in my suitcase and returned to New York (carrying coals to New Castle in a sense, since some local shops carry Intelligentsia selections). First up is the selection from Guatemala.
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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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