Blog

All Posts (13)

Sort by

tiresome.

Posted by nora peterson on August 31, 2010 at 4:44am
well,
since everyone else is going back to school now,
it means I'm basically working just short of overtime.
my schedule seems to be consistent; monday and tuesday off,
then five days on in a row.
as you can imagine, this is very tiring,
and by the fifth day, I feel as though I might lash out at the next customer who orders a 'frappe',
when of course, they are called and ice-crema at the DBC.
Damn it, I hate that.
in other news.I have an art show set up at the shop for december.
Marlon and I are trying to get together a colab that will stay up through his month (november) and my own.
wish me luck on all of that.
that's all for now, I'm going to go enjoy my day off.
Read more…

what ive learnt about making coffee today #3

Posted by Jason Tam on August 28, 2010 at 9:45pm
well more like what ive learnt about coffee yesterday and cant be bother blogging until today.

finally found out what a doppio ristretto is
doppio mean 2
ristretto mean restricted.
essentially it half a short black. as i recall, its around a 10 second extraction which gives it a fuller coffee flavor.

an espresso should have you tasting it around the whole tongue and it needs to be enjoyed straight away otherwise itll turn bitter and sour.

know your machine

know your jug

you should have your textured milk to be ready to pour straight away after its finished steaming otherwise the froth will settle and be horrible for art.

heres something my mentor couldnt answer..

if a flat white has no froth how can you do art on top?

Read more…

Soaking Sumatra Beans in Cold water

Posted by Noribsham Bin Ibrahim on August 23, 2010 at 4:06pm

I wanted to grow my own coffee plant and this the first experiment i did. I soaked 10 Sumatra beans in cold water to hydrate them (a theory i gotten from no where). This morning it's "bloated" and seems like some roots emerging from the coffee seeds. Next step is to plant in in fertile soil back at home. It takes about 5 to 8 weeks for the young sapling to grow. Let's wait and see if it will happen.

Read more…

what ive learnt about making coffee today #1

Posted by Jason Tam on August 19, 2010 at 8:48pm
much like all things in life, ive learned that coffee is a ever learning process to a perfection where no one apart from god himself can ever achieve. so i strive to create a good cup of coffee which im currently learning to do and i hope by documenting my learning experience via a impersonal online diary can help with my journey somehow...

wish i could have started this at the beginning of my epic coffee saga but hey three weeks barista experience is close enough to the start.

what ive learned today
theres a button awkwardly placed inside the automatic espresso machine which resets the preprogramed buttons that makes the water come out of the filter.

texture milk with your ears.

60 degrees celsius has a distinct sound.

pouring the textured milk slowly into the espresso shot raises crema which retains the beautiful rich brown colour.

i still cant make a good rosetta.


Read more…

Atlanta's Disloyalty Card has been unleashed to the world!

Posted by Jason Dominy on August 17, 2010 at 9:30am

photo.JPG


photo1.JPG

Following the success of the London and Seattle Disloyalty Cards, Atlanta becomes the third city in the U.S. to encourage coffee lovers
to branch out into the larger city and discover new and different shops.
The Atlanta Disloyalty Card was organized by myself (Jason Dominy) with
the goal of showing Atlantans the amazing amount of great coffee all
over the city, not just in the pockets most Atlantans work and live. We
had a tremendous amount of support for the card, and actually had more
shops wanting to be involved then we had spaces for. I feel like the
shops that are on the card give a great picture of specialty coffee as
we know it today, and are bound to represent coffee and Atlanta coffee
in the best light possible.

The shops are all over Atlanta andinclude: both Octane Coffees, Dancing Goats Coffee Bar, both Aurora
Coffees, drip Coffee, Land Of A Thousand Hills Coffee, Parkgrounds, REV
Coffee, and Element Coffee. The roasters represented include: Batdorf
& Bronson, Counter Culture Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee, Stumptown,
Land Of A Thousand Hills, and 1000 Faces Coffee. People are already
showing great excitement for the card, and BGA members are doing a great
job of promoting not only the card, but great handcrafted coffee and
espresso.
Read more…

A quick Rochester Visit

Posted by Jacob Casella on August 15, 2010 at 9:00am

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 21st: 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.





Read more…

Espresso Apollo and some thoughts on 'spro culture.

Posted by Jacob Casella on August 14, 2010 at 6:44am
One of the guys that works with me at Spot Elmwood was headed down to Philadelphia for a few days, to visit the Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities among other things. When I learned this, I immediately gave him directions to go to Ultimo coffee (it's possible I may have also instructed him to hit on Aaron Ultimo for me if possible). And, knowing that they have Counter Culture coffee, I was hoping he could pick me up a pound of that Espresso Apollo that everyone's been talking about. Kevin came through on all counts.



I got the Apollo dialed in, gave it a stir, gave it a sip. Initial reactions: phreow, sweet! Tart and juicy, ridiculously bright. The first food association I made was some kind of lemon bar or pie: definitely not sour but pointed that direction, with a kind of buttery-sugar thing underneath the fruit. I'm not so good (yet!) at pulling out individual specific flavors out of the mix, unless it's a hit-you-over-the-head kind of flavor, and this is a delightfully complex espresso. Four of us gave it a try yesterday, and after the initial “phreow!” we all stared off into space making chewing motions for a minute or two trying to figure it all out. The shots I pulled today were a little more mellow, still very sweet and juicy, but more “round” if that means anything. Unfortunately, at this point the beans are going on 10 days old, not in the best container for at least a few of those, so I may be missing some of the clarity of flavor other reviewers have been talking about.

I'm hoarding my 1lb too much to use this blend for milk drinks (plus I'm doling it out to other baristas), but I can well believe that it would vanish under the cow: everything interesting here is the front-end, acidy stuff that gets muted in a cap or a latte. This is a drinking espresso, indeed, and I've never tasted its like in Buffalo.

So! Rant on espresso: what elements might help create an environment where we could see more awesome espresso options in the café scene around here?

I'm most familiar with Spot's Espresso blend, of course, and while it makes a very decent drinking espresso, where it really shines is as the base for big milky drinks: it's got a big heavy body that can punch through 10+ oz of milk and syrup and still taste like coffee. I'll occasionally grab an espresso straight at other Buffalo cafés; most of them seem to be what I think of as very Italian-style. In many ways I think this “traditional, Italian-style espresso” (excuse the scare quotes) is rated higher the more it resembles Turkish coffee without the sludge. One of the things I hope to ask other baristas in the area is: does your espresso blend have a goal, and what is it? Do you pull normale, ristretto, or even on the long side?

I always get a little excited on the rare occasions we run low on espresso blend, because that means dialing in an SO espresso for a couple hours. I'm lucky enough to have a third grinder now at Elmwood, which acts mainly as a training tool and back-up, and allows me to pull shots of different coffees for palate training (comparing the component beans of our blend, for example, so trainees can taste what each is contributing). Sometimes our roaster will mention that one of our single-origins might be interesting as an espresso, so I'll give that a try, maybe even sell a few shots to customers—but it never takes off.

People don't buy that much espresso! At least not at my store. They buy lots of lattes, cappuccinos, brewed coffee, sweet drinks, but not straight espresso. We have a few regular spro drinkers, but it's only a handful—espresso (and macciatos) are a really small percentage of our drink sales.

A couple theories on the relative unpopularity of this most wonderful beverage: price & drip competition, atmosphere, and perception.

Price & the Comparison to Drip Coffee

Espresso is kind of a steal, price-wise. I've never seen espresso much out of the $2 range, probably because café owners instinctively know that people are going to hesitate to spend more than that for such a little cup, unless of course it's alcoholic. Thinking about cost, espresso uses somewhere from 14 to 20 grams for a shot; drip coffee is chronically underdosed, and even at good ratios might range down to 12 grams or less per cup. Plus, coffee waste is higher on espresso due to adjusting the grind, waste at the dosing level, and chucking a bad shot here and there. Then you factor in the cost of espresso machines, grinders, and related equipment, and the training and labor cost of a skilled barista, and that $2 spro is really starting to look like a bargain. But, from the perspective of the drinker, you can get a fairly large coffee for the around the same price, and you know you'll be drinking it for much longer, maybe bulking it out with lots of sugar and cream—so, from the buyer's perspective, spro doesn't necessarily look like the better deal, especially depending on their perception of it. More on that in a second.

This isn't to say that espresso isn't profitable for coffee-house operators; it certainly is, and as an ingredient in more expensive milky drinks it's vital. But, if the majority of customers see drip coffee as what they want, and so don't create a big demand for a variety of high-quality espresso blends & SOs, why should owner/operators invest more in what, by itself, is basically a fringe menu item? This is a serious question, and I know part of the answer is: chicken and egg problem, get better spro options in place and visible and people might come around. Right now the standard set-up in most Buffalo cafés is to just have 2 espressos, regular and decaf. I'd be delighted to see that expand just to 3—keeping the decaf, and then having one blend/bean for milky drinks and another for straight drinking—exciting espressos like the Apollo that started this rant. If that took off, then maybe eventually we'd see the demand for more than one drinking espresso at a time. But, catch-22, by my calculations you probably need to sell somewhere in the vicinity of 500+ straight drinking espressos to pay off the decent grinder you need to make it. Totally doable, but it's a big number when you're comparing grinder prices to your average daily espresso orders.

Atmosphere and Culture

I'm really interested in the atmosphere and culture that allows/demands a good espresso scene. I haven't been able to spend much time people-watching in the major coffee centers of North America, and of course I hear about the espresso scene in the World Where Drip Coffee Never Took Over, aka Not North America (Australia/New Zealand I find particularly intriguing in terms of their coffee scene for some reason). I'd like to see that in action—not to abandon non-espresso coffee in the least, but just because I think espresso is getting a bad rap in most of America, and I'd like to see it on its own turf, where it's the expected way to drink coffee. Spot Coffee is opening a shop up on Hertel, which is very much the Italian part of town, so I'm really crossing my fingers in the hopes that there is a dedicated espresso-loving crowd up there.

I think if I were designing a café to maximize espresso consumption there are a couple things I would do. First, make the process of making it more visible—use lower counters and/or low slung machines so the barista is more visible. When I first switched over to using naked portafilters, I had a brief day-dream of some complex system of mirrors or video-monitors to really show off those extractions—obviously not very practical. I don't really like turning my back to customers, but if there is a way to keep the machine angled so that they can see the shots as they're pulling, great—instead of hiding the action behind a machine that gets between the barista and the customer anyway. Going along with that, use multiple machines if necessary, and really make the bar a comfortable place to sit and drink. Abolish the line phenomena as much as possible; a booze-bar approachability is what you want. To be fair, I've seen lots of shops with smallish floor-space that achieve the right mix of coziness without needing to have a bar seating/serving area.

I don't want to take espresso in a to-go cup, but neither do I want to take it back to my table and sip it slowly for a half-hour: I want to drink it in just a few minutes, chatting with the baristas or other customers. I don't want to wait very long at all for an espresso—that's why it's espresso—but a spro-customer shouldn't feel like they need to keep moving down the line and out the door, either. People who want a complicated flavored 20oz drink or coffee always seem to be in a hurry, and then they'll be sipping it for hours (that's why they want it extra hot), whereas the espresso which must be made and consumed very quickly works better in a more leisurely environment. I think that's irony.

Perception

The public perception of espresso lags behind what we know in the industry, even more so than with other brewing methods. Strong, bitter, and a tiny cup pretty much sums it up for most people and even most cafés, I would guess. The use of “espresso” or, let's say it, eXpresso as a flavor in ice cream etc. has compounded the confusion, as has the focus on caffeine content. Even more than coffee, espresso has a rep as just a caffeine delivery system.

(Side-rant: I just refuse to talk about caffeine content in espresso now. It's certainly there. Does it have more or less than a coffee? Which coffee? By volume, by cup? Are we talking a normal shot or ristretto, what dosing, what roast level? Robusta in the blend? I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the hopped-up-on-espresso effect is psychosomatic, just because it has such a stronger taste than coffee. I'm not even going to talk about it until I can get some scientific testing done on the espresso I serve, and that's not exactly top priority on my list.)

When people do have a little more nuanced conception of espresso, it's almost inevitably based on a stereotype of European-style espresso, usually meaning Italian. I have a distinct memory, from when I was a tyke, of my father explaining what espresso was: it was a tiny cup of black, magically potent coffee, bitter as death, equally well suited to greasing tractor bearings or melting through bank vaults. Wizened Italian men in immaculate suits, the way I pictured my great-grandfather Tomasso, would stir in a pound or so of sugar into these little cups while they discussed “the family”. Fruit or floral notes in the cup would probably be grounds for verbal or physical abuse. Decades later, reading about the “first wave” of Italian-immigrant-driven espresso culture in America, I would have a nice “aha” moment. (And just to bring it full circle, weirdly enough: the town where my great-grandfather settled after immigrating from Italy? Apollo, PA.)

My mother had never had a shot of espresso until I made her one at my shop a while back. She wasn't an instant convert, but her comment sticks with me: “I had no idea espresso tasted like that.” This is a double-ristretto shot, served to someone who likes flavored coffees and lattes, makes coffee at home and uses flavored creamers, goes to Starbucks—in other words, my mom is pretty close to the perfect example of the average American coffee drinker. The idea that espresso is such a complex beverage, that discussions of sweetness and creaminess, specific flavors like fruits, chocolate, and spices are common in the upper-tier coffee world—is completely off the radar of such a coffee drinker. As baristas, we need to make sure we are getting the word out about this stuff, and more importantly getting people to discover these complexities by tasting great espresso.

We need more awesome espressos

When I was first getting really obsessive about coffee, I had three espressos that were kind of game-changing for me. God-shots, if you will. Jay Caragay pulled me a shot of Hines Organic in his Towson, MD library <a location. This was my first exposure to a really deliciously bright spro. A super-friendly barista at the Equal Exchange café in Boston, MA made me an espresso from a blend that was heavy on some Sumatran coffee: utterly mellow, very sweet, with this heavy butter-and-caramel-popcorn taste and mouthfeel that was totally new to me. Finally, I pulled what was, for me, a god-shot of Spot's espresso, totally by accident, just a test shot after doing some maintenance on the machine down at Delaware & Chippewa.

I've had a lot of great shots—probably quite a few that were “objectively better than” the above-mentioned shots, if I could take a time-machine and check them against my current palate. But the point is, those three shots stand out in my memory, they were god-shots when I had'em. The first two showed me two very different and phenomenal directions espresso can go in, totally different than the bitter, comparatively watery shot too often taken for the (Italian?) standard. The shot I pulled at Spot gave me a totally absorbing sensory experience—I was talking/emailing about it for days, it was literally revelatory—and, having shown me what my blend is capable of, made me obsessed with recreating that shot every time.

The thing that bugs me most about the traditional Italian espresso argument is not just that I don't like that style of espresso—I don't think I've had a good Italian espresso. Buy me a ticket to Florence, I'll get a shot of not-stale Illy from a good barista, and I'll let you know. No, the thing that bugs me is the idea that there is one good espresso—one type of blend, one type of preparation. That just hamstrings an awesome medium. Imagine if someone said that wine can come from one kind of grape, it can be made with one specific process, and everything else is not wine, so you might as well just get some vodka and fruit juice, savages. The range of coffees, roasts, and blends that make for good espresso might be narrower than the range that can make a good filter-drip coffee, but it's still pretty large. Listen to the way barista competitors describe their espressos to get just a glimpse of the potential. (Sprudge has a nice list of videos from the WBC).

I understand that barista competitor who said he'd only had a few good espressos in his life. Hopefully that was a little hyperbolic on his part, but really good espresso is often hard to find. When I'm visiting some random café, I don't often get a coffee that is jaw-dropping, but it's usually at least palatable. Not so with espresso!

More so than anything else we serve, I think espresso is a beverage we coffee-people have kind of been keeping to ourselves. I don't know how many hundreds of shots I've had in my few years in the industry—you do it for a little pick-me-up, to check the quality of your product, and because you know that, running around behind the counter, there's a good chance any other drink you make for yourself will be spilled/lost/cold long before you finish it.6 At Spot Elmwood, we're periodically fans of rounds of “shift shots”, which tend to get focused on for their caffeine content—but they also ensure we're all tasting espresso pretty frequently, so even the people who aren't working the bar yet, or who don't normally go for “straight” coffee in any format, get a chance to taste superior vs. inferior espresso.

I raise my demi to an image of the future, where espresso-drinkers rival other coffee-fans in their numbers and nuanced palates, where good espresso is the norm, not the exception, and where 3 or 4 grinders per shop allow us to celebrate many different espressos. Buffalo-area roasters and baristas: we should find a location sometime and do a public espresso tasting. Bring your own blend and grinder and we'll go to town.

Oh, and here's hoping that Nietzschean binaries compel the folks at Counter Culture to craft some dark, winey Espresso Dionysus.
Read more…

Ethiopia Wollondi available

Posted by scott@herkimercoffee.com on August 13, 2010 at 6:42am
Ethiopia Wollondi, Naturally processed coffee similar in profile to Yirgacheffe
On the map: Wellega, western Ethiopia.

Wollondi is a naturally processed coffee project being cultivated by Ninety Plus Coffees.

Notes:
Grind- purple fruit, grape candy, lemon, blue and blackberry, melon and carmelized cane sugar.
Wet- honeydew melon, lilac, blueberry, grape, warm sugar.
Body- on the mild end of medium.
Acid- clean and mouthwatering, definition of balance, leans toward apple fruit acid.
Sugar- plenty. see flavor to follow.
Texture- again, clean. apple juice, minimal natural process pasty feeling, honeydew melon juice.
Flavor- sweet, fruity and light. Familiar Yirgacheffe Froot-loop blueberry lemon with a tinge of blackberry. Plenty of carmelizable sugar tasting like cane sugar of african origin (fragrant type). Intriguing honeydew melon taste and mouthfeel. Notable how that characteristic winds up more in your sinus as the smell of honeydew rind...very sweet and refreshing, summery.
Complexity- not overly complex as it stays pretty much the same from hot to cold, great balance yields great cup from start to finish.
Consistant- completely.
Finish- clean, crisp and medium in duration.


Read more…

Buffalo Brewing Blog

Posted by Jacob Casella on August 12, 2010 at 3:00am

Buffalo Brewing is a blog about the coffee and coffee-house scene in Western New York. I'm based out ofBuffalo. I want to encourage the growth of specialty coffee and goodthird places in my city and beyond, by encouraging education and asense of community on both sides of the counter. I also want a placeto put my thoughts/rants/opinions/questions about coffee and cafésdown where they can, in theory, be publicly ridiculed.


Full disclaimer! I'm Jake Casella. From the sticks in PA, I moved to Buffalo in 2006. I work for SpotCoffee, a small chain and roaster based out of Buffalo. I've beenworking for Spot for 4 years, as a barista, store manager, and headof barista training/coffee quality. Given how many hours I'm atwork, it's inevitable that this blog will be a little Spot-centric attimes. And I'm not above making a shameless self-promotional plugonce in a while.


That said, this blog should not be considered to represent the opinions etc. of Spot Coffee, inc. Justme! Nor is its purpose only to advertise for Spot, though do I hopeyou get a good impression of my shop. I want to promote quality,education, and community in the region as a whole, not just asconnected to the cafés I work at. I think it's worthwhile for itsown sake; I also think that cafés should shoot for “good”competition.


It's my theory, not backed up by peer-reviewed statistics or anything, that coffee shops and theircommunities are a non-zero-sum game. The more educated coffeedrinkers we have, who like quality and great atmosphere, the betterall quality cafés in the city will do.


More disclaimer! I don't claim to be an expert on all things coffee, though I am working on it. Don'ttake my word as gospel, and please jump in to comment on anything Iam totally wrong about—I'll appreciate the feedback. LikeSocrates, I try to maintain a good balance of being a didactic jerkand loudly professing my own ignorance.


The format! I will be putting up my own rants and thoughts about coffee as they come to me. I will alsostart visiting various coffee-related businesses and writing upsomething little about them, hopefully interviewing a barista orowner or something at each. I'd like to tie this in to a resourcespage and a Facebook group eventually.


The rules!

  1. Stay positive! I am never going to post a negative review, as my goal is to help a community form,and I want the attitude to be open. Constructive criticism isgreat, but if my first interaction with someone focuses on somethingI think they're doing wrong, I can't imagine they'll want to getinvolved. I will not be bad-mouthing chains like Starbucks, TimHortons, etc.--they are a part of the coffee scene here, and theirimpact on coffee drinkers cannot be denied. If I think there issomething negative worth talking about so that, as a community, wecan think about it and find some solutions, I will do so in a mannergeared to be anonymous, focusing on the problem rather than thelocation where I noticed it.

  2. Keep it friendly! I'm not out to post your trade secrets on the internet. I want to make sure thatanyone I talk to, any shop I feature, feels completely comfortableabout our conversation making its way onto the web.

  3. Encourage quality! By highlighting people who are doing things right, and by linking totrends and resources, and by talking about things I love in coffee.

  4. Encourage education! Particularly for the coffee drinker who is just starting to explore this crazyworld.

  5. Encourage community! On both sides of the counter. One of my favorite things is going to othercafés and talking to the baristas, seeing regulars from my own caféand getting a second to talk to them, not as their barista, but as afellow café-lover. I come from the sticks, I mean really, andsince moving to the city I have completely fallen in love with goodpublic spaces. Coffee shops are one of my favorite types of “TheThird Place.” I think I have a high standard of living, notbecause of how much money I make, but because of the presence andquality of the neighborhood I live in. That's what I want tocelebrate and promote.


In addition to posting this blog at http://buffalobrewing.blogspot.com,I'll also be posting it on Barista Exchange, where I hope I can getsome feedback from the larger coffee community. That's it, wish meluck!

Read more…

Battle Scars, Grinder Ideas

Posted by Jacob Casella on August 12, 2010 at 3:00am
I thought I was pretty clever, coming in to work before 5am to swap out the burrs in our main coffee grinder. One hour and a number of odd complications later, I was starting to sweat at the thought of all those coffee orders just over the horizon...fortunately, I got everything brewing in time. Our fix-everything-man came by and helped me figure out the problem: turns out I was just being too gentle in trying to loosen a bolt. Gentleness aside, I did manage to stab myself pretty good with a screwdriver:


Lesson learned.

(By the way, I am very pleased with the Salter kitchen scale I've been using to set the grind. It's only accurate down to about an eighth of an ounce, but that is reasonably okay for the volumes I'm doing. The long on-time is great, and anyways the digital is a great improvement over “Old Bouncy” the mechanical kitchen scale. I heard about it over on Barista Exchange in this thread.)

I have to say that my appreciation for the Fetco Grinder/Brewer set-up has gone up a lot lately. After monkeying around with some brewing ratios & parameters, I have our house blend at a place that I really like. It's not radically different, just a little better—I don't have a refractometer (yet), but a TDS meter, brew chart, and some math put it right where I want it. And my palate agrees! I've even got a few good comments from customers, which is nice.

However, working on the grinder today, I couldn't help but notice the way that grinders are lagging behind other coffee equipment. Any coffee geek can tell you the primary things we want out of a grinder. Extra kudos might be given for good dosing mechanisms (particularly on espresso grinders) and limiting the amount of grounds that stick somewhere other than the dosing target, but really we just want it to perform well on the basics: it should be fast, quiet, and cool, the range of particle-sizes should be fairly small for a given setting, and it should be finely adjustable (ideally stepless).

The thing is...those qualities are expected out of any decent commercial grade grinder today, whether it's for espresso, brew-to-order, auto-drips, or bulk grinding. I think that there are a few really significant improvements that could be made to all categories of coffee grinder. And the big one is, you guessed it:

1.) Grinding by mass.

That's really what we want when we're grinding: a specific weight of ground coffee, to brew with a specific amount of water. (Thank you, universe, for keeping water's mass pretty much stable to its volume as far as us baristas are concerned.) The problem is, most of us coffee-brewers are grinding by volume or time. At home—well, most people at home probably aren't even grinding, but either way they're probably just using a scoop of some kind—measuring by volume. The only automatic grinders for drip coffee that I've seen use a timer to allow beans to fall into the grinding chamber; you just have to use trial and error to get the right mass of coffee—beans vary a lot, and as the burrs age they don't grind as fast. When using an espresso grinder, one doses by eyeballing the basket (volume), except for those fancy new electronic doserless models (timed). The only time I see baristas consistently dosing and grinding by mass is in shops with brew-to-order methods—except for those Mallyke press-pot grinders (timed). The standard method seems to be just scooping some beans into a cup on an accurate scale before grinding.

So, what's wrong with these methods? Screwdriver-wound in my hand still throbbing, it's mainly those timed auto-drip grinders that are bugging me. They work pretty well—if you have someone that knows how to set them, and is using an accurate scale. If the beans don't vary for any reason—that is, if they are all of uniform size and density. If the grinder is regularly re-programmed as the burrs wear, and finally if you don't mind grinding a ton of coffee while you zero in on that perfect time.

Too many coffee shops don't have the regular equipment maintenance that they need. That's a separate and much larger problem, but it's a fact. The more coffee equipment that will make good coffee in between service visits, the better the coffee will be in the average cafe. Personal experience with our grinders suggests to me that quarterly re-calibrating is the absolute minimum, and unknown events can create a need for adjustment more often than that. I don't have the statistics, but I doubt the average American coffee-shop is getting thorough quarterly maintenance.

Beans vary. Using different blends? Using the same grinder setting for a French-Roasted Indo as you are for that lightly roasted peaberry? The mass : volume ratio for these beans is significantly different, as is bean size, and that plays out in noticeable differences in dose when using the a timed auto-grinder. So what do you do? My grinder has 2 hoppers with 3 settings each, so in theory I can work with my roaster to find a mass:volume ratio for each bean and blend he sends my way, break those into 3 (or 6) time:mass profiles, program the buttons to fit those profiles, label each bag accordingly and train my staff to grind that way, and then replicate that system at all our locations.

I am far enough down the rabbit-hole that I am giving this real serious thought, at least for 3 mass:volume categories: the thought of a 3-liter brew varying by as much as an ounce or two in the dose kinda gives me shivers. But it's not the most elegant solution.

For shops that are doing brew-to-order of whatever kind, pour-over rails, Clovers, etc., the issue isn't correct dosing—measuring onto a .01g accurate scale handles that. It's training, and time in coffee prep. Now, granted, cutting-edge shops seem to have these kinds of systems down. For a shop that is very interested in the all the benefits of brew-to-order, but is considering starting such a system from scratch (*cough*), the element of training everyone to dose correctly and the time spent on each step of brew-to-order looks a little intimidating. A programmable grinder that worked by mass would knock out a huge amount of concerns for these operations, and would probably be welcomed by the cutting-edge as well.

Espresso—well, on the one hand espresso grinders work pretty well. Eyeball-dosing or using timed doserless controls both seem to work pretty well. If you're using multiple beans for espresso, you almost certainly have a grinder for each, so that's not a problem. On the other hand, if someone did invent an espresso grinder that could quickly grind mass-accurate down to a hundredth of a gram or so, I'm sure it would not be left out in the cold.

So, let's invent this thing. I don't think it would be too crazy. Basically you just need to insert a step in between the hopper and the grinding chamber, where the coffee is measured by weight before being ground. I can think of a number of ways to do this—from a paddle-wheel or gum-ball-dispenser-type device to doll out the beans at a measured rate, or just a “stutter” of timed releases. A smart enough machine should be able to learn a mass:volume/time ratio from one partial dose, and then achieve the desired full dose with subsequent cycles. It would be very important for this machine to “finish clean”, with no grinds or whole beans left in, since you're brewing different beans and don't want to contaminate. Perhaps a “bypass shoot,” where leftover whole beans are shot out unground? As always with coffee equipment, compactness is important, a minimum of moving parts is a plus, and the ability to clean it easily and often is paramount. Bringing us to the next item on my wish list:

2.) Cleaner insides. This is a peevish comment, maybe, but I can't believe how gunked up grinders get inside. Microscopic coffee particles, in all their oily goodness, get everywhere, and congeal into this weird clay-like substance all over the place. I can't believe that they're not affecting flavor as they're knocked loose with each grind cycle. There has got to be a way to seal up the area around the burrs better, and to prevent oil/particle build-up. While we're building this dream machine, let's also put on a “purge” button, that grinds a very small amount of beans to make sure the residual grounds aren't from the previous batch.

3.) Since we're being whimsical, let's also tack on a computer brain that analyzes particle-size (maybe even surface area), probably by some kind of optical measurement, and

4.) Electronically controlled grind adjustment. Automatically adjusts for burr wear, can be programmed to provide different grind settings for different coffees.

Taken all together, this grinder will allow us to program a dose, by mass. That's the big thing. Add on 3 and 4 and we can make a one-touch button that grinds your coffee exactly how you need it, which would be ideal for medium-to-high volume shops using multiple brew-to-order methods. Sounds great, yeah?

Please steal this idea if you're capable of making it happen. I have a long history of thinking up stuff that I don't or can't actually make (laser bore-sights are common now, NASA and the Navy are using my 3-axis gyro system for steering in frictionless environments, and those nail-clippers that catch your nails are everywhere. That last one was going to be my fortune, I tell you.) All I ask is for one of these grinders in my shop, and maybe my name in the credits somewhere.

Seriously, though, I think we are creeping up on some big changes in the coffee scene. 3rd wave shops are experimenting with all kinds of brew-to-order, and that's great...but 3rd wave shops are still in a very, very small minority. What we need to see are some brew-to-order machines that work great with relatively low fuss, so that more coffee shops can get in on the action. The cutting-edge shops will always be great, but I'm also very interested in the rest of the coffee scene—the big & little chains, the independent shops that don't necessarily have the money, training, background, or clientèle to go to the extreme innovative edge—but they still have customers that could appreciate a truly great coffee were it prepared right. For that, I hate to say it, we're going to need really good brew-to-order machines, Clover or Trifecta or some future-machine glimpsed but dimly, that are more automated, requiring less complications from the perspective of the buyer. By eliminating waste and allowing a per-coffee price-point, without the big scary variables of training that manual brew-to-order methods require, these machines could bring quality single-origins to every corner, much as lattes et al. were brought to the masses by the 2nd wave (and its reciprocal relation with more consistent/more automated espresso machines).

And these future-machines will need a future-grinder.

Somebody get on that.
Read more…

USA's "Most Influential SocialMedia" Voice in the Restaurant Industry Speaks at Social Media Club PDX Aug 11

Posted by Jeffrey J Kingman on August 4, 2010 at 6:54am

PRIORITY DISTRIBUTION

Social Media Club Portland (OR) hosts Paul Barron, Publisher of Fast Casual Magazine and the USARestaurant Industry's "Most Influential" Social Media Voice.

Paul Barron
Paul Barron

Paul's presentation, "Web Era 4 - What It Means to Restaurants" is a must-hear for Portland restaurant professionals/owners and publicrelations/social media service providers.

Less than 10% of USA restaurants have even begun to embrace the social web - here is the opportunity to get leading theory from the tophospitality social media thinker in North America.

Paul Barron, with over 52,000 Twitter followers, was rated in July 2010 as the top social media influencer in hospitality in the USA by Restaurant Reality Check Blog. Publisher of Fast Casual Magazine and Social Coco Blog, Paul is actively engaged with the boards of both the National Restaurant Association and Share Our Strength.

It's our distinct pleasure to welcome Paul to speak to the Pacific Northwest hospitality and public relations/marketing/social mediacommunities at Social Media Club PDX.

Event Details:

Registration is open and underway, limited to under 100. Register here at EventBrite.

Paul Barron: "Web Era 4 - What it means to the restaurant industry"

As a leader in the new restaurant, technology and social media era and also as the founder of Fast Casual.com and QSRweb.com

Change Agent has often been my moniker and I welcome it with open arms. As a Publisher and new media maven I have spent the past 16years developing online media to build brands and amass audience. Ibelieve that change is the one thing that is always constant. I feelfortunate as a founder of many blogs, podcasts, viral video and socialmedia platforms. Each of these experiences has helped me to be on thecutting edge of every new media push since the first web page by TimBerners Lee in 1992.

As an expert in understanding the evolution of digital media over the past 15 years, I can say I am one of the elite in Social Media inall sectors of business and continue to grow and understand thismassive shift in communication.

As a trend watcher I have had a chance to be part of the biggest shift in consumer restaurant interaction in the history of therestaurant business. In the mid 90's I began tracking and defining the Fast Casual restaurant segment that has grown to more than a 40 billion dollar contributor to the half-a-trillion restaurant business.

As an early adopter, consumer science master, programmer, designer, social creator and best of all a student of the actual technology that drives the weband this entire new media craze, I understand what it takes to create adigital footprint and develop a social brand in today's online world.

I am happy to talk to your brand; group or company on how new media can change the way you do business.

McMenamin's Lola's Room at the Crystal Ballroom

Lola's Room at the Crystal Ballroom McMenamin's
Lola's Room at the Crystal Ballroom McMenamin's

The little sister of the historic Crystal Ballroom, Lola's Room is located on the second floor, directly below theCrystal. If you're a fan of DJ'd dance events, raging local rockshowcases or intimate seated performances, then take a moment andbookmark this page.

The navigation menu at left is your roadmap to Lola's Room and the other offerings at the corner of 14th %26 Burnside. Check out what'scoming up on the Events Calendar, discover how to let us host your nextparty, or simply investigate our brewery, artwork and history.

A night at Lola's Room should always include a stop by Ringlers Pub or Ringlers Annex, where there's usually a vibe to fit your mood -- great pub fare,inspiring beverages, engaging conversation, a good pool game, a rowdyparty, or a groovy DJ in a dimmed and quiet setting.

August 11th from 5 to 9 pm. Cash beverage/pizza by the slice bar.

Giveaway Schwag

More schwag coming!

Registration is open and underway, limited to under 100. Register here at EventBrite. $10 pre-registration, $15 at the door.
Read more…

Latest Blog Posts

Most Popular Blog Posts

Blog Topics by Tags

Monthly Archives