Chemically Imbalanced (espresso-jogged screeds)

loquacious brag week fortnight: vivace’s dolce, bumper crop’s microcosm

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK FORTNIGHT of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

home-roasted dolce: burnt to blisters, yet still too light for espresso use.

** bumper crop’s microcosm espresso blend already had us hopelessly in the tank, having first arrived during last winter’s brooding months and completely stealing away the blogwife through sheer force of agreeable sweet complexity. this blog learned to put its doldrums behind it in a hurry.

this second-ever batch presented itself with the barista-poet’s recent jaunt through town, acting as a well-known sort of jon lewis calling card.

with hardened water, the badly nicknamed quintimicrocrux actually got softer, with the toasted sugar and clear fruits rounding out a bit — the opposite of the hard-water effect on our ethiopian obsession du jour. soft water shots brought more pronounced barley, less cream.

a raving 15. this coffee was an old friend and an energizing new presence. we only wish we could order some regularly, as a way of periodically reframing “sublime espresso” in our blogmind.

** and then there was the home-roasted version of vivace’s notorious dolce espresso blend, it of the obscenely pasty malabar coffee beans and wild honey flavors.

at least, that’s what it tastes like when the pros do the roasting. this blog, it failed hopelessly to turn anything worthwhile out of our limited supply of green beans. batch one: oh, yeah. there’s malabar in here. meaning the stuff was so far under-roasted, for malabar, that it sent this blog into convulsions and weak, warbling whines that could only follow a sip of liquid, gassy marmite. unthinkable as a beverage.

what was confounding was that even a roast to the point of scattered blisters (see pic above) left a blend essentially too yeasty and grassy to brew as espresso. we didn’t have enough to experiment thoroughly, but count this blog exasperated.

and so, the most dismal numeric score in this shameless stretch of braggy coffee swilling comes from this blog’s own roaster. a 3. we’ll leave the finer points of cooking malabar to the godfather.

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blog is bad, beats its breast.

you’ve heard of the espresso wigging out when the humidity goes up, no? a sudden grinder adjustment usually suffices. but this blog knows of a bane much worse, a sudden and adverse malady for which your grinder can offer no fix — the eyes of professional barista persons, hovering around the home bar while you try to serve a string of 15 capps to a living room gaggle.

we’re not calling octane’s ben and danielle evildoers, per se. or hex-bringers. or even snorking, over-unctious moldwarps. well, ok … we are!

*sigh* no, no. it’s not their fault this blog can’t hold its shot-to-shot consistency together under a seasoned gaze. or that they happened to visit as the thursday group was coalescing in the bloghouse. nor is it the crowd’s fault, though usually we have to fry an ear straining close to the grouphead to hear the gurgling hiss of our pre-shot water flush over the hub-bub. nor was it really the korate’s fault, though it’s been throwing daily curves. it wasn’t even the fault of danielle’s custom rippled tamper face.

the carping answer: it was (d) all of the above. the truthier version: parties are distracting fun, the korate’s acting finicky and serving a crowd while under scrutiny intimidates the sparky out of this blog. and so there was a roasty capp and then a hot lemon tonic for spro — not the korate’s prime attributes, you could say. determined to do better, and with little time to spare, we began to grind with the gnashing of our teeth, tamp with a clenched fist and pull scalding shots directly through our parted fingers.

penance. yet another way in which home junkie-ism in the hinterlands is like an austere monastic existence.

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loquacious brag week fortnight: novo’s la alondria

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK FORTNIGHT of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

** novo’s colombia la alondria is more like it! less ignominy, more pleasure. and possibly the first coffee whereby our own scribbled taste impressions ended up matching 100 percent of the roaster’s descriptors — still, there are only two!

buttery caramel, for sure. also, some light, agreeable spice … we’ll call it purple sage. not a knockout coffee, but all the more enjoyable after the jarring grassiness omnipresent in its other significant colombia. in other words, it was our rebound relationship, an adequate palate cleanser when it was needed most. and a 12.

meanwhile, (pant, pant) we tire of the coffee reviews. have we really swilled this much of note? are we more spoiled than our tapeworm? can we buy our soul back from the devil, in exchange for all this easy review filler? we see now why other blogs do it!

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loquacious brag week fortnight: ccc’s el puente, gaturiri

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK FORTNIGHT of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

blogging while enamored

** counter culture’s honduras finca el puente is pleasingly subtle — as opposed to maddeningly subtle … not unlike its farmers, actually, a couple of virtuosos whom this blog once met and whose personalities are now inextricably linked to our image of this velvety excellence.

a hard-water cupping unleashed the juicy plum, the fig and the slippery elm — the soft, plush and gradual taste experience leading them to dub this brew the “purple princess.” it demands your attention, your pause upon slurping, but then rewards this silence with definite and rich pleasures.

a soft-water french press brought more of an edge, oddly enough, with a light tangerine spritz, watermelon, toffee and lime. a 15.

** the kenya gaturiri, by contrast, offers a lot up front, and shape-shifts without warning. not nearly as fruity as the stuff we had from hoffmann’s hands last march, but still a sweet-ish dried fruit aroma, maybe with some powdered sugar dust on the front of each whiff.

if we hadn’t cupped it with a raging bell-pepper sumatra, we might have thought this was all over the sweet pepper end of things. as a result of comparison, however, we ended up calling it light, sweet zucchini on the back of the tongue, that steamy breadiness included. wet aromatic tobacco. prune. 12-ish.

yeah.

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loquacious brag week: bumper crop’s guat, yemen

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

** bumper crop’s guatemala de sola was a stealth plant by the barista-poet. untouched during his jaunt through the bloghouse — there was so much to pull — its finally emerged through a groggy fog one morning as this blog, typically one-dimensional and junkie-esque in its brewing methods, chucked some into the grinder and pretended as if it were intended for spro.

tangy, hard-to-tame cherry. steamed white rice. maple syrup. some shots randomly hard to mute, others suddenly winey and mellow. medium body. classic guat fruit. not a favorite, not an obsession, but easily a pleasure. worth, say, a 13. (we’re beginning to despise these numbers games … more than we already did!)

** bumper’s yemen mocca sanani, meanwhile, demanded that we wrassle it to the ground for a rough helping of dirty cocoa and muskier, dried cherry. almost a sun-dried-coffee-husk flavor to it, very quishr-esque. a sticky, lingering mouthfeel hung around, like some mascarpone-based yogurt-ish signature beverage. but then, ha-ha, we’ve never really heard of such a thing!

having recently roasted through 10 pounds of a strikingly similar yemen without anything remotely like pleasurable espresso, drinking this sanani was instructive for our continued hack efforts: hmmmm, nothing wrong with dirty fruit. maybe target the shoe polish for elimination. that yemen, it befuddles your normal roasting radar, progressing slower, burning faster, popping louder and distracting you with that relentless blizzard of chaff, calling your craven amateur bluff like so much feinting clownishness.

a vacillating 12. not that you could get any if you wanted. neither of these offerings appears on bumper’s online coffee list. it being a small-time idaho outfit, we suspect this is a necessary part of the charm.

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loquacious brag week: crema’s sidamo korate (hint: HOLY SCHNAIKES)

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

korate to blog: “eat me.”

** crema coffee’s ethiopia sidamo korate is perhaps the third coffee ever to turn this blog into a stark raving evangelist. it makes you want to EAT. one whiff, and you reflexively — no kidding — begin to chew, whether in an effort to contain the drool within your vacuous longing bouche or in an involuntary effort to EAT THAT BURBLING BERRY SAUCE.

the korate is like a monstrous mixed berry torte smeared viciously with creme fraiche. it’s like a milky, sweet pipe tobacco drowning in a loganberry reduction and port wine. it’s all the berries you can think of, at various stages of sipping. it’s mind-blowing in a way you never realized you wanted your mind to be huffed upon. it makes you scrutinize the granules to see if, perchance, they are soft and bursting with juice.

“what’s korate?” we said. and still, we’ve seen none few* of the big quality roasters offer this coffee (though a few lesser knowns are). we were less than enthused when c-n-c’s shannon trotted it out, a new offering from his new small-time n.c. roaster. shannon, we guess, hadn’t even tasted yet.

meanwhile, the barista-poet was traveling in our direction as people across the southeast tried to distract him by offering stellar coffees in our comments section. of course, we panicked. “what does this blog have to offer?” we moaned. “he’s not coming from the PNW to drink vivace dolce on the home bar.”

from such ignominy a glory such as korate must arise. at least, that’s what abe lincoln said. with mr. barista’s choice in our home, himself towing a wealth of stunning brews, the korate arrived, from an ethiopian place we’d never heard of, through a start-up north carolina roaster via the cash register at the local coffee kiosk, which is situated in a log cabin, on the prairie ….

no, wait. lest hyperventilation ensue, we’ll consult more empirical sources of judgement: in ethiopia, the korate handily outscored the famed idido yirgacheffe and the sidamo biloya. it grabbed a beefy 94 points from a certain notorious coffee reviewer. it “blew the doors off” jon lewis’ green espresso truck back in idaho. and, it turns out, our favorite green coffee supplier now offers a wet- and dry-process version, each carrying a hefty score.

we’ve got 60 pounds in the mail, the cypriot and this blog.

on the cupping table, it stood up to counter culture’s esmeralda, aroma-wise. pulled with soft water, it was a sort of drier, fluffier, filmier fruit spritzer, with a hint of biscotti dough. mineralize the water a bit, though, and an 18-gram, 199-degree, 1.8-oz. double espresso reminds us of …. wait, didn’t we just write a post on this?

sparky. give it a 16.

p.s. the 17-point scoring scale invented for this week of unbridled bloggy braggadocio is, it should be noted, of a completely arbitrary breadth. but no less so than any other static numeric score! context is everything …

UPDATE: * this blog stands corrected. stumptown, using a different spelling, appears to offer the stuff.

UPDATE 9/3: it stands to reason! having flogged the stuff relentlessly, octane’s ben and danielle came to town, only to find … meh. at least, that’s what this blog got from the looks on their faces. for some reason, the crema coffee-roasted korate was more muted today, more “mango” in danielle’s words, more barley-esque to this blog’s palette.

at least one of them was sympathetic, having dealt with an extremely finicky dry-processed ethiopian at this year’s national barista competition. looks like we need to know how far out of the roaster the stuff is, in order to brag reliably.

strangely, the aroma wafting from shannon’s hopper was more massive, juicy blueberry than ever …

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loquacious brag week: novo’s la josefina

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

** novo’s colombia la josefina espresso has got to be one of the most dramatic letdowns we’ve encountered in some time … sorta like assuming certain well-heeled presidential candidates are a lock for the nomination only to discover — no, oh no — they’re toast!

ah, yes. for the confluence of oblique denver jokes, this blog apologizes.

toast. definitely some of that, charitably speaking. funnily enough, novo’s own description of this spro isn’t all that far off from our exasperating experience. just substitute “dandelion” for “sweet grass” and “bitter cacao seed” for “chocolate,” and you’re almost there. add also, severe hoppiness.

desperate to find the sweet spot, this blog even e-mailed some folks with product experience, to no avail. we dosed high and low, pulled hot and cool, tight ristretto and slightly gushing espresso, as well as combinations thereof. the grass and hops, it just didn’t go away. the blogbrother was in town the weekend we wrassled the stuff — a pricey gift from a denver bud who lives above a novo — and, ultimately, we went in search of another coffee. even the cappuccinos tasted flaxen.

still stranger: the best shot we had, by a mile, was this week, more than five weeks after the roast date, when we chucked the remaining bits into the grinder on a whim and pulled some uber-tight, 17-gram soft-water ristrettos at about 199 degrees. the hops had mellowed slightly to barley tones, while huckleberry and unripe rhubarb glimmered through. the mouthfeel and freshness, of course, had long since departed.

give it an 8.

p.s. whew! just discovered “la josefina” is an actual place in colombia. this blog was half-scared this coffee was a monument to, you know, swashbuckling people named joseph! that was close …

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loquacious brag week: stumptown’s carmen

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

** stumptown’s panama carmen is like the cute little pixie who WON’T SAY ANYTHING, even when you coax. pleeease? not even if we do the cross-eyed, tongue-nostril touch? don’t get this blog wrong: it’s a fine, fine coffee, with some of those now-notorious panamanian aromas of lily and honey. once wetted, though, the berry notes and sweet lemon noted by others just don’t fully materialize. we’d say “watery,” except that would imply a dosage problem. so instead: muted, maddening, inscrutable, lightweight.

for charity, we tried soft and hard-water formulations, various french-press ratios, etc. always a hint, never enough flavor to grab. we’d doubt our sensory abilities on this one, except that we roasted the 2006 carmen ourselves and found it extraordinarily complex and rewarding — even on a table with lady ez. let’s say 12, eh?

points for the nifty package insert.

UPDATE: it’s been noted that we procured this coffee quite some time ago. surely the oldness of the coffee isn’t to blame for the above-mentioned muteness? rest assured: this blog consumed the stuff weeks ago — from one to 14 days after the roast date — and took copious notes.

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loquacious brag week: primavera’s harar

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

** primavera’s ethiopian harar was the sort of rocket shot from nowhere in alabama that transfixed all the more because of that context. the barista-poet brought it, recommended it and nodded mystically while drinking it. always a good sign!

unlike more bodacious harars, this stuff offered not the classic rockin’ blueberry, but more of a toasted berry vanilla and warm blankety bread slice comfort sip. maybe some husky prune hints. anyway, it was good. a 14. like a hot fruited milkshake that sort of makes you elongate your swallows — for extended tastiness enjoyment! or something.

buy some, for kicks. if it makes you feel better, they associate with atlanta’s octane and listen to sufjan.

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loquacious brag week: ccc’s mesmeralda

we don’t care that these taste descriptors are meaningless to you — other blogs brag about their coffee spoils all the time! and so, we hereby parlay an unprecedented stretch of excellent brew — a home junkie’s full house — into an ENTIRE WEEK of loquacious gloating. amorphous crack-metaphors for the romantics, cupping notes for the serious students and a 17-point scale for the churlish analytics!

*** counter culture’s panama esmeralda, lot 8 (the $13/lb batch, according to our hierarchy of worship), somehow staggers and stultifies at the same time. as if your favorite sour apple jolly rancher had gotten stuck to the fuzzy corolla upholstery, then peeled off and re-sucked. technically still your favorite, no? but somehow, not the same.

we’ve written obscenely verbose essays to lady ez, engaged in humiliating public poetry on her behalf, and now come to this: always shocking day-lily-like aromatics. a hot lemon tonic in the beginning, then — at some precise cooling moment — sour muscadine skin. not unpleasant, but like a day-old red wine. then orange tea. fresh pine. clover honey. (hard-water cupping results.)

in an annual jowl-freezing ritual, attempts to pull soft-water espresso shots made speech impossible, due to lockjaw. on the other hand, the spare shots easily obliterated this blog’s bathroom odors, when placed in a strategic decorative pattern:

how about a 14? ol’ mesmeralda managed to confound and STILL remain the most beguiling coffee on a cupping table. every time. even four weeks later.

UPDATE: it’s bothering us. was it a funky roast? the lot number? our overly exaggerated memory of esmeraldas past? hard to know. fortunately for us, there’s a place where you can order lots from four sections of the farm!

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tale of woe: studio spro gets mo’ and mo’ po’

it’s come to this: cashew fingers and an aperitif to sandwich the spro down the gorge at the studio of the bioluminescent cypriot.

alas, our favorite mid-afternoon haunt for the kind of spro fixes vital to surviving cubicle land has become a dungeon of very, very dark liquid arts. this blog, of course, has a long tradition of needling the fellow publicly when the spro gets po’. consider this a recommence!

wherefore art thine snobby prideful tastes, sarkis?!

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taste? bah!

and so now we have seen the apocalypse: latte art, and its machine-produced permutations, on page one of the nation’s second-largest newspaper — and by far its most austere.

and who’s this hoffmann person named therein? an espresso champion of some sort? naaaa. he’s merely the creative spark behind the mouth pour!

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CI befriends the rich!

this blog supplied the single-origin burlap window drapes. the barista-poet brought coffee soap. and somewhere betwixt the two was a staggering, two-day exhibit of the ways you might live — really live — with coffee as a centerpiece.

or, more precisely, with beauty as a centerpiece — objective, classifiable, very non-postmodern beauty that slaps your brain around and acquaints you deeply with the error of your ways. beauty through spro, of course, that you’ve never quite tasted this way … but also through poetry, through the minerals in the water, the sundry other libations and european hot dishes, through vivid late-night porch debates, haphazard circles of pipe-smoking men, local coffee bar-lolling and philosopher pie-eating. through ridiculously shoehorned sleeping quarters and gulps of experimental music. through the rough edges and surprising glimmers of a subset of the coffee community whose identity is sharpening to a point.

all of which to say: that jon lewis, he sure can work a home espresso bar! more comfortably than certain world champions, we might note. herewith, a brief catalogue of a sleepless, mystically drenched weekend in which one of the country’s finest pullers of espresso liquids — and the ladies of his house — brought peace, love and coffee to these hinterlands. also, gin.

* en route from birmingham, there came the coffee itself. among the bricks strewn about the blogtable was a revelation through taste of primavera’s ethiopian harrar, it of the massive, fruited dry fleshy taste-like impressions! sorry, but it was buried ‘midst so much other coffee nectar that the specifics grow blurry. still, a startling reminder that a budding birmingham coffee joint may soon deserve a road trip.

* the water, it shaped what we were able to know, in a sense. greenville’s ridiculously soft tap water, gloriously pristine but devoid of most any earth morsels, made another stellar ethiopian — crema coffee’s sidamo korate — light, fluffy and muddled but added prickling edges to lewis’ microcosm blend. with some crude, home-junkie water-hardening techniques the ‘cosm softened to a creamier complexity and the korate grew more pronounced, more defined and clear. more on these experiments in the days to come …

* put this blog, the barista-poet, the bioluminescent cypriot, solis jake and c-n-c’s hudgens on a deck with cave-aged gruyere, some maredsous triple, a pipe haze and cascades of herbal verdure in the concrete planters and you get a discussion that quickly veered to what thoughtful coffee types are now saying is the ignored-but-vital third leg of the specialty movement — financial realism. you know, something clear-eyed to go with your highfalutin’ standards and attempts at urban community. this, too, is a can o’ worms for another day.

mr. lewis, solis jake, hudgens, men’s shoes. also, extensive espresso spoils.

* eliot said it — so did browning: the vitality of the present and its affections is what matters. the past and future, well, that’s disaffection for you. and so it was at shannon’s place at opening time. the future evolution of his business and all the notable recent history hung in the air but soon melted away, and even the spro shots weren’t what mattered. it was four guys — most of greenville’s snob club — finding ways to explore both good and difficult coffees. eventually, mascarpone cheese got involved. which is very much like real life, no? no? you haven’t heard the maxim about life handing you a difficult spro and you ameliorating its strong points with carefully chosen mascarpone dollops? no?

* the rest, it was all fine food and rambling conversation. and what is this blog, jay caragay? so no, we will not foist it all upon you. suffice to say that, when small blogchildren and visiting tykes who barely know each other grow acquainted there is a certain symmetry that emerges, a social compact of genial relationship balance from which the adults can always glean. and in a way, we did. no superiors or inferiors, no brainiacs versus simpletons, no gurus or fanboys, but a cornucopia of ideas, real-life pains and future ideas mixing together in our living room.

and somehow it all (gulp) kept coming back to the spro. which makes that mister lewis a fellow of deep riches, and this blog an unapologetic pursuer of wealthy friends.

the barista-poet plies the home bar of all its meager value.

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further proof this blog languishes in the hinterlands

hard to know why atlanta coffee establishments of note held rumored cuppings featuring famous barista persons with nary an advance word breathed on these here interwoven nets.

hmmm, lessee. nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope and nope. conspicuous!

UPDATE: it was a counter culture thing! note to lamont: the zombie would have never kept us in the dark like this …

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stumping

the cultish thrum of stumptown orders you around, like a badgering shoulder angel.

pretend you’ve been here before — DON’T scan the furniture. sit at this uber-sleek window bar … it’s where the dressier people hang. maybe text someone. don’t EVER study the menu board. act as if it’s perfectly chill for the girl with the red hair explosion and lolling demeanor to say “oh, sure” when you order and then DO NOTHING, while a second girl rings it up by way of eavesdropping and the barista polishes his portafilter with indifference to all. amble downstairs. ALL the “in” people go down there. you can tell because they’re happy.

without tonx, we don’t know what we would have done. sit there, drink a stellar capp, dream out the window and ignore everyone, we guess. as it was, we felt empowered by the tip that there was something down there worth seeing, and so descended to strike up a convo with roaster stephen, he of the Downstairs Demeanor. meaning chatty and normal. it’s not every seattle espresso bar that idles a kees vanderwesten espresso machine in the basement training lab.

as noted previously, this stephen of the handles scored us a batch of hot panama carmen estate so fresh it virtually dropped out of the vintage baby probat roaster directly into our gaping bouche. the people standing around nearby probably thought, “hey, look at that hot panama carmen estate dropping out of the vintage baby probat into that guy’s gaping bouche.” and they were probably jealous.

unlike 2006, this blog later found the carmen to be substantially more subtle in the propagation of her blackberry chocolate. all upper nasal, no middle tongue.

back upstairs, and a recognizable face appeared. this blog blanked on the name, but thought “moped.” jen prince! clearly, she was unnerved that random south carolina persons would know her by sight and transportation mode, and so bade us drink some ethiopia misty valley on the house, that its wondrous aromatic wiles might distract us permanently.

and they did. distracted us from the melancholy minions filling the cafe seats, from the jaunty red-haired girl hypnotically saying “oh, sure” over and over again while DOING NOTHING, and from the ridiculously grapefruit-heavy shot of hairbender we’d just downed. as in, grind the rind and soak it in wine strong. where, we ask, was the notorious chocolate back end?

no matter. we were now sufficiently soaked in the silvery atmospheric stumptown haze that we could trip obliviously toward broadway, waving at the taxis and murmuring about that ridiculously cheap san ignacio they had back there.

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radblog

you should probably read the RodBlog exactly because of how defensive it makes those protective coffee insiders.

note: the above link doesn’t go to the blog itself. for “rod thoughts,” click your way from the home page. top left.

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in defense of rangy musk. also, locust.

if this blog trolled the forums as it should, not only would its skin be pastier and its Monitor Eye achier, but it probably would have already procured the vital knowledge that vivace’s espresso dolce might as well be called ‘holy monsooned malabar,’ for all its pale, puffy gassy-ness. indeed, were we just talking about pasty?

and so here, for scientific purposes, we have this blog’s minimal summer arm coloration — let’s call it “inner thigh white” — next to some unroasted dolce. or, as you might reasonably call the shade, “thrice-dead corpse.”

malabar wins the pasty-off!

which sort of explains the extraordinary, love-it-or-hate-it vivace spro and the sharp rush of nostalgia when we plopped some of the roasted stuff into the basket this evening. it’s now weeks since our first sip on the haphazard rush through coffee mecca, and the distinctive profile is instantly recognizable. sweet like honey, harsh like locust.

erg, yes, we did just bumblingly compare the godfather’s espresso to john the baptist’s diet. for the shallow metaphor pool, this blog deeply apologizes.

there must be SOME reason others haven’t followed the malabar-heavy espresso route blazed by one of the world’s most cited espresso gurus … and it ain’t that customers hate it. the day we joined the seattle hipsters lolling on the fire escapes, vivace’s meager sidewalk kiosk heavily outdrew the thumping zoka stand and even the airy stumptown outlet in the same general part of town.

the answer eluded us on the telly this eve, as this blog bandied the puzzle with c-n-c’s shannon. frustrated, and somewhat smitten, we gargled some more. holy mesquite cherry. it’s no chocolate bomb, but it IS a rangy fruited musk. which, we suppose, is what one could have said of john the baptist.

p.s. that wikipedia page on malabar coffee … strangely hoffmann-esque! for example: “spoilt.”

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spro-tripping, fantastically

Stumptown roaster steven (stephen?) drops panama carmen estate hot from the antique probat into blog’s waiting arms! Score. Barista vet jen prince shoves ethiopia misty valley in blog’s gaping, shamless maw. score!

thanks to blog’s texty cohorts who pointed us toward the basement. four hours down, and we’re speeding (spro-eding?) toward the big planes. gasp.

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spro-tripping, ridiculously

High now - like everyone else in sea-town! Of interest: The zoka kiosk is MUCH less hopping than the vivace one @ same corner.

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spro-tripping, haphazardly

Stumptown capp - never has this blog been so grapefruit bludgeoned. where’s the choc?

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spro-tripping, coincidentally

its total seclusion complete (the coffee controversies of the day? whaa?), this blog finds itself in a taxi proximal to coffee mecca — where the maccs from vivace are aliiive.

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speaking of pure taste experiences that have nothing at all, in any way to do with rank status-mongering …

when it comes to those “ellusive” and “exhilirating” coffee experiences, this blog can hardly think of anything more joyous than a good cologne and coffee pairing involving, possibly, a “coffee taster’s helmet.”

what will these studly taste geniuses think of next — that is, when they get back from trotting around colombia hulla for their rare, cold-cupped beans? espresso massage? supraspro? milan-grown “terrace” varietals?

key quote: “yes, it truly can.”

(hat tip, reader X)

p.s. reminds this blog of a whiskey-drenched coffee profile we read once …

p.p.s. question is, is rod lazar ripping off barack obama, or is obama ripping off lazar?

UPDATE: strange. this blog’s rss reader tells us that the world barista champion wrote about this very taste guru with his customary restraint (”My new favourite site ever“) sometime yesterday. but, ah, the post would appear to have been “moved.” not a fan of “killer so-spro,” james?

UPDATE: one thing that gnaws at this blog, late at night: that one day soon we might become a coffee snob … driving people away with our insufferable inscrutability. but that’s why rod lazar gives us hope. the true snobs, they’re all offended!

UPDATE: that thompson owen, of sweet maria’s — you know, the one with the “driest sense of humor on the planet” — is either strangely obsessed or intimately acquainted with that ista-bar czar, rod lazar.

Posted in shameless robusta filler, happening elsewhere | 18 Comments »

what we need is a platinum cupper’s card

CI conspiracy theorizes so you don’t have to: is there some clued-in coffee person on the new york times staff — someone, say, with very close third-wave relations — behind the paper’s curious recent tandem of quality coffee coverage with snarky, skeptical starbucks riffs? or is it just deeply american to root for the indie coffee shops and resent the indie-turned-juggernaut?

alas, the coffee juggernaut in this case is showing a creepy propensity to buy your favor with cheap status tricks! the times’ ron lieber cheerfully shows us coffee-drinker status-seeking at its most egregious:

“…the goal is to keep buyers from straying, by offering, say, an elite status with special perks that they must qualify for each year.”

because, you know, it’s just so hard to compete with taste.

“It’s amazing this stuff works so well,” Mr. Lipp said. “What we’ve found is that people can be bought for a cookie.”

including, apparently, the author of this piece:

“Rewards are nice, but recognition is better. So if I’m one of Starbucks’s best customers, I want to have elite status, as I do on American Airlines. I want shorter lines, better freebies, special seating (Aeron chairs, preferably) and electrical outlets reserved just for me and my laptop.”

points for brutal self-effacement! alas, cue the painfully familiar CI screed about why a taste revolution IS granular — slow and painstaking, not easily turned into a mass movement.

these status-inflators create waves, but sort of, you know, obscure the point, eh? true taste trickles in your mouth a little bit like a droplet of coffee surprise. or something.

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CI models what it hates!

truth is, this blog stumbles erratically and self-loathingly toward the well-worn narrative arc of most junkie coffee sites. broad, anything-goes enjoyment gives way to self-conscious issues blogging, which segues to Matters Only of Very Great Import posted on the internets. the more we experience, the less we share.

which is not what this blog wants to be when it grows up. shucks, this — bloggy navel-gazing — is not really what should be. in the end, it’s the self-sopping that drags down all of those formerly enlightened places.

so, frankly, it’s not just the presidential visits and mindless brouhahas that bog us down. it’s schizophrenia, in its purest sense.

help this blog.

Posted in screeds | 2 Comments »

coffee, spread out

the jebena boil: “at the still point, there the dance is.” … pic by jake

it shook all the wobbly, week-long sickies right out of us. just clunked ‘em right out, and ended too the related seven-day spro fast with a sock to the jowls …

here we were, sitting in a rough semicircle at the fine coffee establishment that by now you all know sits by the perfume counter at belk’s department store, and we’re getting a live ethiopian coffee ceremony. with an OPEN FIRE on a sunday afternoon. in the middle. of. the mall.

hudgens, it seems, has a new-ish employee, a gliding, gracious ethiopian, named tigest, who did the honors — nearly two hours of swirling and smiling in regal native garb for one batch of coffee grounds. this blog (which has never been to ethiopia, but assumes, like all americans, that what little it knows about a single african country surely applies to all african countries regardless of their placement on the continent) believed the process to be Profoundly Indicative of the Cultural Pace and Attitudes. it was peaceful, firstly. also, a very obvious emblem of daily life.

the roasting process, being the phase most likely to attract security or set off electronic shopping mall detection systems, took place swiftly and with a symbolic measure of green coffee tigest had picked up somewhere in north carolina. using a traditional long-handled roasting pan, she tossed and swished over a propane burner for what seemed like mere seconds, when the chaffing and cracking and heavy smoking commenced in short order and the batch showed up hissing under our noses for a whiff, gaudy n’ shiny, a mixed roast ranging from still-brown to a hearty french. a blend.

sometime near this point, we agreed this indoor inundation of roasting aroma made fine, fine payback for the constant olfactory affliction shannon has long suffered at the hands of the belk perfume counter. they couldn’t compete with this waft, and NO ONE would be asking for any acqua di gio today. stetson, maybe.

raw incense curled away from a dish. the traditional companion snack — popcorn, in this case — was fire-popped and passed around. the coffee grounds went into the bulbous clay “jebena,” and began to bubble. of interest to this blog: tigest’s practice of pouring off a bit of the liquid in a cup, then waiting for the coffee to begin to boil, at which point she’d reintroduce the poured-off stuff as a coolant to keep the brew in the right range, and also from getting too bubbly. pour, replace, swish about. adjust flame. glance over shoulder to see if anyone in belk has called, “fire!”

each demitasse was warmed with a small slosh of initial coffee, then each fully filled and passed around. as you might imagine, it was one-note strong. nothing overly bitter, or rank. just a clean, constant streak of BLAM, right in the middle of your tongue. hot straw and other earthy materials, maybe. wake-up coffee. black, somewhat crisp and loooong in the finish. being fresh from the throes of a coffee-hating, weeklong illness, we drank all of ours.

they reuse the grounds. ah yes, only three times here in our modern era, although the older ethiopians still do a four-rounder with the same soggy mound. so, then. settle in for round two (”huletegna”), which was more like cloudy drip coffee. then round three (”bereka,” or good luck), which came in like a very earthy tea. as a sort of ceremonial dessert, she did a new set of grounds — the mall-roasted ones from minutes earlier — with a bit of powdered ginger.

potent, almost chewable, and probably the best drink of the day.

what you got, though, was the grace of the thing. the low-key, slice-of-life realness of sacramentalizing through every one of your senses the bread of a culture’s existence. with friends, in the evening, a ceremony can take three hours, tigest said. a day can hold four of them. shannon, doing the math, asked if there aren’t other activities that they might sometimes enjoy.

in truth, the approach seems just woven into life’s fabric, which made it particularly relevant to solis jake, he being about to adopt from the country. whole new meaning to the term, “trip to origin,” eh? even on the mall tile, the ritual was enough to stop plenty of mallers for a gander. a clothing store owner inquired about the mystical circle of sippers. tigest never stopped gazing around and grinning. and security, they never showed.

covert-mall-fire-pan roasting

ritual

one coffee, but a blend.

one theory for the brew’s smoothness: the ‘cense had saturated our nasal cavities.

tigest, at her craft and lifestyle
all pics by jake.

Posted in subjective swilling, playing with (roaster) fire | 10 Comments »

breaking: this blog is sometimes snarky

burbling up from has-bean steve’s riveting photographic coverage of a trip to coffee origin is this nagging concern: that guatemalan water apparently shrinks your pants. what must it do to the coffee?!

UPDATE: sigh. we actually like euro pants. it was a floppy joke, aimed at a very cool guy. and an excuse to link to his sweet action trip photos.

Posted in shameless robusta filler | 8 Comments »

USbc: just like the pros

the usbc live feed — in double-take mall stereo — with free accompanying shots from c-n-c’s hudgens.

as long as we were jaw-hanging in front of the u.s. barista championship live feed, this blog figured we might as well jam something in that jaw — signature beverages, for example. thus, our own private USbc, with gory ripoffs of real live sigs! or, perhaps, the most surreal sigs to shake the stage and judges’ composure in minneapolis this weekend.

* you might be under the impression that perennial barista contender billy wilson failed to make the finals because he accidentally grabbed the unhomogenized milk for his cappuccinos. might we submit that the, ah, BLUE CHEESE beverage had something to do with it? ahem:

sure, it looks all decadent and affogato-ey. we even wondered if the overwhelming stench might make the spro taste all the better — by contrast. alas, we let this beverage sit so long in the photographing that by the time we got around to swilling that shot of PNG red mountain it was thoroughly infused with putrifying fromage. or was the putrifying fromage thoroughly infused with spro?

in any case, this blog immediately went streaking off, its hand over its mouth, in search of a brookstone store where we could deposit our dry heaves. then came one of those damp, post-traumatic periods where the whole body tenses and trembles, acutely aware that the slightest stimulus could push you over the edge of the Humiliating Cliff of Public Puking. a slight southerly pollen breeze? RALPH! a tiny glance at the offending spro cup? PBBFFFTTSSNXXXGG.

shannon, for his part, had some trouble serving the next customer with a professional visage.

we should note that billy didn’t actually use blue cheese in his signature beverage. he only conjured it, verbally and with bay leaves and such. but, frankly, the mere act of conjuring is now more than enough to make us … you know.

* if the taste judges appeared to hold poker faces when competitor patrick adam pierce talked up “the world’s hottest pepper” in his signature beverage, they were weeping inside. so did we:

frankly, we either got a bum pepper, or all the mean tongue spikes leaked out and got neutered in our spro. it wasn’t so much hot as it was a taste of summer road burn and overheated inner tube.

* the big beverage trend this year, of course, was sea salt, and we can sort of understand the multi-competitor phenomenon. we partook of our salty chunklets in the upper-class boho method: pour salt on public counter top. moisten pinky and daub in the granules. lick. chase it with the red mountain and you get … nothing. nothing high, nothing low, and barely any of the peanut middle. virtually all the flavors of our png were completely neutralized, rendered moot, void and slightly saline by the offsetting brine.

this makes a certain measure of sense, especially if your routine follows habanero boy. the poor judges, they’re likely to mightily mistrust themselves and err on the side of charity, no? a six for balance!

there is, of course, the other consumption method:

(photo blurred to obscure any suggestion of illegal activity.)

by this point, alas, we’d coughed and heaved enough for one afternoon.

Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »

coffee domination? domination?!

the most startling southeast coffee tourist this blog has ever seen …

sparky. there is now a southeastern coffee tourist. he and his ma blew through shannon’s c-n-c while we were jaw-hanging in front of the usbc live feed. so startling, really, we didn’t have much of a reaction. hoffmann did the coastal tour, sure, and daynjah dan before him. but they had professional reasons.

apparently, this guy is hitting only the toppest notch places. octane. volta. etc. so odd, it sounds like something this blog might do.

on the downside, he’s a follower of whynatte.

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usbc: crickets

disbelief: that when this blog, in its work tie, stumbled into the vicinity of a computer at 5:20 p.m. looking for the name of this country’s new national barista champeen, there was no one to tell us — nary a typewritten word within reach! that for all the live, gooey goodness burbling everywhere on the innernecks there was nothing written, put in stone or pixels, about the slicked-over l.a. personage to have taken the wreath. the intelly one-two clobbering act. the reduction of favorites and previous scepter-holders to the secondary rungs of the elite. the latest triumph of zesty single-origin spro.

so we covertly jammed in the left ear bud, scrolled around for the archived awards video — taking care to not erroneously click the great florida healing revival — and pretended to consume the drama live and loud. it was 5:38 p.m. and we were coughing loud, unnatural cubicle coughs that sounded a lot like the guttural utterance, “schanikes! it’s kyle!”

we hate to imagine the lack of caring you may have for this perspective. you had live video, you might snarl. what more could you demand from your rocking sloth’s chair?! alas, you’re right. we deserve nothing, we far-flung fanboys — and yet we finally got specialty coffee convention coverage to swim in. not independent-minded commentary, or quite public-oriented reportage, but indeed a giant leap in the direction of outreach. openness. community.

we guess there’s hope for this club. now someone just write the words somewhere online: “kyle glanville, u.s barista champion.” so we can find them.

a minute later … it was written, in the bowels of this place, at the moment we finished this post. don’t tell this blog it doesn’t have eerie mind-bending powers …

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usbc: bleary blogging

it’s hard to discern the bigger trend: the sea salt in the competition signature beverages, the simultaneous spro, the widespread use of gravy boats or the sheer staggering volume of online barista hair jokes aimed in the general direction of those coffee persons most follicularly endowed. to say this blog was in tears is to say that brett walker has a bit o’ facial scruff.

* and on the third day, the official blog of the national coffee smackdown got some soul. some lumpy, globally conscious, quasi-relevant meta-soul. we now agreeably recommend it and wait for twitchy to snottily up the ante. (UPDATE: more meta here.)

* if you’re a creepily juggernaut-ish chicago espresso powerhouse, and you own six of 24 semifinalists, does putting two of them in the finals count as a win, a loss or a draw? do you huzzah because your odds have improved? do you weep over the .333 batting average? or do the sweets and the bitters complement, like an optimally balanced espresso score sheet?

* you knew this already: watching a barista competition tells you nothing. gauging the live online patter all day, you’d think the smoothest operators were, in this order, albina’s billy wilson, intelligentsia’s mike phillips, aldo’s belle battista and octane’s danielle glasky — none of whom made the finals. as in politics, you might think this defeats the purpose of punditry. but you’d be wrong! uncertainty breeds punditry, friend. like gators in a swamp.

* so ben helfen is cokers for finland, yes. so much so that he gratuitously weaves it into conservation. but look, when you find a way to wear the finnish flag during competition, you can’t lose! it’s like a global job advertisement! HIRE ME PLEASE!!! a wild guess: ben will arrive in ideal european coffee climes long before the rest of us dreamers.

*watch for ‘em in the finals: gravy boats. bouillabase basins. saucy skiffs! when it comes to barista gear, they’re the new anfims.

Posted in happening elsewhere | 4 Comments »