Just posting a small blog to say that the posts you've found (and hopefully read) here on BX are a sampling of the posts on my blog site.  If you desire to read more words that have spewed forth from the fountain that is my keyboard, then you should head over there.

When I was a kid, I was afraid of anything that might be the slightest bit good for my health.  I avoided eating anything green, soy, or low-fat like it was poison, which was very difficult given my mother's persistence in buying food rich in vitamins and hiding it in my sugar.  She would cook broccoli into my brownies and carrots into my cake!  The nerve!  In retaliation, I decided I would mask everything even remotely good for me in sugar.  Every morning when I got a bowl of Chex, it was… Continue

A few days ago, I made a latte with dead shots.  They weren't even old shots.  They weren't on their last legs, in need of a transfusion, or on life support in critical condition.  They were dead.  For those of you who aren't cued into coffee lingo, a dead shot has supposedly become gross and decomposition-y after having been made and let to sit.  Some people say they go dead after 30 seconds and some say a minute.  The point is that apparently shots of espresso have the life span of a mayfly,… Continue

Okay, so I'm at Stumptown in Portland right now and I order an espresso, latte, and scone.  Am I a worse person for the fact that I, one, see a man behind the bar with about a day's worth of growth and think "he must be new" and, two, hope that the person pulling my shots has a proper "barista" level beard?  There was, however, a person working behind the bar with no facial hair whose gender was in question (turned out it was a girl) so I automatically felt that he or she was more… Continue

I've recently been in conversation with a shop owner about transitioning from using a semi-automatic espresso machine to a fully-automatic one.  For the lay-barista, a semi-automatic machine basically means that the machine has a pump on the inside that pushes water through it.  Believe it or not, in the olden days of yor, espresso machines had big levers that pushed water through them and, subsequently, into your espresso cup.  Nowadays, most machines are automated in some way.  A… Continue

I have wanted to start a coffee blog for about three years now.  The problem is that every time I've started down this trail, I'd start second-guessing my motives and experience.  It feels like, while I do really enjoy coffee, there are so many people out there who "get it" and who "know more about it" than I do.  A great example of this being my coffee-mentor Marcus.  He has traveled to coffee farms, roasted coffee in all manner of machines, and can observe and taste coffee in a way… Continue