I love this store! It's enormous:

Originally a car dealership, the Rochester store is still called Spot “Chevy”. It somehow manages to feel comfortable rather than cavernous, despite the size. This
store doubles as a gallery space for many artists, and they have lots
of room for doing music acts as well.

I drove out to Rochester to do some Fetco calibration, some Marzocco maintenance, and chat with their managers and baristas a little. One of their strongest baristas is
going to Norway for a few weeks; hopefully he can make his way to the
Nordic Barista Cup to check that out, maybe drink a lot of
Aeropress'd coffees? So jealous! That lecturer list is impressive. I've thought for years that
Northern Europe might be the place for me, and after finding out
about their coffee culture I am even more convinced.

Fetco calibration went pretty smoothly. I talked to Jessica, Spot Rochester's awesome manager, about what I'm doing with our grinding and brewing parameters, and she seems
sure that it wouldn't be a problem to train everyone up to different
grinding practices if we decide to do that. So that's cool.

I think I want a “naked” Fetco basket of some kind so I can watch the brew cycle and check the temperature in-basket. I know I've got some old baskets kicking
around in storage somewhere; I also might just see if I can disable
or trick the sensor that requires the basket-magnet.

My TDS meter and scale, they comfort me.

It's a bummer that Fetco output rarely matches the electronic controls. It's stable, so all you have to do is measure the water and reset until you hit it right, but, still.
Also a bummer that some of the parameters you can change have
relatively broad settings—like only being able to control brew time
in 30 second intervals. My respect for these auto-drippers has gone
up a lot since I've adjusted them, and thought about how consistent
they are compared to manual methods; it seems like just a little more
work could allow them to make a really awesome cup. Forget Clovers &
Trifectas: why aren't we seeing really good, highly customizable
1-cup auto-drippers? It seems like you could make a fairly compact
machine that could compete with a pour-over rail system.

Spot Dog! I hear he had a sibling at Elmwood who was KIDNAPPED and probably still sitting in someone's garage now.

While in the store I also discover a stash of weird parts to add to the Sacred Linea Graveyard I'm constructing in Buffalo. I think I might up my estimate to 2 working
machines I can cobble together, but we'll see. As soon as I get
through Elmwood's Art-fest I'm launching into project Frankenlinea:
from a few machine-corpses I want to patch up an old brass-group
4-head and totally refurbish it, with PID controls. I'd also like
to see if I can split the 2 group boilers so they both have their own
pump, allowing faster use without compromising pressure. In a kind
of morbid, masochistic way, I am looking forward to descaling the
boilers.

Jessica & I finalized some plans for this coming Saturday, August 21^st: at 10am we are going to hold a home-brewing demonstration, “1 coffee 5 ways”.
We're going to take a coffee—maybe the Guatemala Limonar?--and brew
it in a Mr. Coffee-type devise using their dosing instructions
(haven't decided if we should grind the beans a day or two in advance
just to really skew it towards realistic). Then we're going to taste
that by comparison to French Press, Chemex, Aeropress, and Toddy.
That might be a bit much, so if things look crazy we'll probably chop
the Aeropress. My goals are legion! Educational goals: get people
to realize a.) preparation changes the flavor of the same coffee, b.)
brewing well at home is not hard or expensive, and c.) please grind
fresh. I also want to raise the public awareness of Spot as a center
for all things coffee, and for that matter raise the public awareness
that there ARE interesting things going on with coffee. And while
I'm at it, maybe sell a few Chemexes or presses, a few bags of
coffee.

Sadly, I had to jet back to Buffalo to take care of work stuff there, no time to check out any other Rochester cafés. There seems to be a growing coffee scene here that
I'd like to get more familiar with—a few months back I did a
lightning café-tour with some other Buffalo baristas, and we noticed
some good things going on. I don't think Rochester's ever done a
barista jam; organizing one of those might be a goal of mine before
too long.

That's it for now! Grinders & brewers doing up some delicious coffee, cutest Marzocco humming along, and I am heading back to Nickel City.