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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Posts Tagged ‘Verve Coffee Roasters’
Catching Up on Coffee: Helsar de Zarcero
December 20, 2009A 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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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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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 »
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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From the Aptly Named Wondo Worka
February 7, 2009
Yes, I’m coffee-blogging again.
After ambiguously adequate experiences with single-source beans from Starbucks and Joe the Art of Coffee, I high-tailed it back to my regular source of beans this week.
I’m sorry to report that the Costa Rican coffee from Starbucks remained bitter until the bitter end. I finally mixed it up with the last of the Indian Mysore, which made them both somewhat passable, because I hate to waste beans. But it was a chore. A change was in order.
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Several Shots of Finca Santa Isabel’s Best
January 17, 2009
This felt like a long week. A lot of meetings. My daughter had her first round of standardized testing at school. Two reporters I rely on the most at work took some days off. Then a plane ditched in the Hudson. We blogged, twittered, stayed up late. It was the rare big story with a happy ending. Way back on Sunday I had bought this bag of beans and, even before the crash landing, I was making myself three fast espresso shots with the Jura to jolt myself awake each morning before rushing out the door. That did not allow much time for contemplation of how these beans compared to the others I’ve sampled and written about.
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