Strait from Fox News. You must read this to believe this. Yes, every freak’n day! Not missing one single day. Even to church. Even to the proctologist. Even to the middle school dance. And what do you think Favre thinks about this, if he knows. Wouldn’t you know he thought it would have been rather ridicules?
I just can’t imagine it. My mother would have stopped this crap on the second day. The last phrase in the article is “His mother, Carolyn, washes the jersey every two days and has had to do some mending of the jersey.” I bet! I figure there has been some stuff growing on this thing. I can’t imagine she caught it every single two days and never missed a washing. And HECK, he is 11 years old and in 2003 he would have been eight years old. I went from waste high to an adult at eight to as big as an adult by twelve, this kid must be a midget (not that there is anything wrong with being a midget!).
The Barista Exchange is like MySpace but better in many ways. First off, it is by the coffee community and for the coffee community, so you won’t have to worry about your children being approached by a hairy 40 year old to meet in a van down by the river. Second, it just has better functionality – it works. Third, and the best I think, is instead of a site like coffeed.com or the Barista Guild the invited includes amateurs, or home enthusiast.
You can see “my profile” which is really a “home page” like on MySpace. It includes photos, music, a blog and something for random thoughts and such called the “comment wall.” I logged onto my MySpace site today for the first time in ages just to see what all was there. I updated the profile and such, but I just never “got into” the whole MySpace thing. The only reason I ever had a MySpace page was so I could get on a guitar site that used MySpace and required an account. I found an old girlfriend from WAY back (actually she found me) and that is about it. Oh yeah, because my profile wasn’t “up-to-date” my wife’s nephew saw it back in the summer and thought that I was trying to attract some wo-man! Heck, I had to update that real quick!
I have opinions on the whole sustainability push in specialty coffee. I have voiced them before, but in a way I think was faulty and a little “hot headed” due to a circumstance I was in at the time. AndyS described how I feel, but without the argumentative posture I can sometimes take.
I just found an interesting article by the lady, Trish Skeie, who coined the term “Third Wave.”
To quote her quoting Nick Cho, “The first wave is all about consumption,” says Nick Cho of Murky Coffee and portafilter.net fame. “The second wave is about enjoyment and defining specialty, and the third allows the coffee to speak for itself. The third wave appreciates each coffee for what it truly is and takes whatever necessary steps to highlight the amazing unique character in every coffee.”
The girls received a ceramic “tea set” for Christmas. I have already instructed the wife to double up, at $4 per set you can’t go wrong .
Look how tiny they are. I just proclaim it is tea party time and the girls come running. Anna will usually say “Is it tea or espresso?” I fess up and they don’t care, espresso it is!
I am having trouble with my camera. I can’t figure it out right now, I have too much going on. But, once I get it right, I am going to redo a lot of these coffee related pics.
I wasn’t previously aware of this article until it was brought to my attention today. It is four months old, but will be good reading for a long, long time to come It is a News & Observer article with Dan Kehn and the Home-Barista.com guys at Counter Culture’s Training Room. I think they were doing test for the Titan Grinder Project and the reporter did a great job.
The is the work of the wife. Need I say more? I mean really? The funny fact is I went Christmas shopping today and when I got back to the computer there was a search for “Latte Art” in Google. She wants to get better!
I wish I had more pics of this morning. It really was fun. We had a guest over, Mark Hughburger. Mark is a really good friend of mine and a fellow truck driver from Melbourne, Florida (where his family lives) and Dalton, GA (where his heart lives). Mark comes once or twice a year and last November I spent two days in Melbourne with his family. They are really a fantastic lot of folks. BTW, his dad is a retired U.S Navy Captain with 30 years of service. He was the one of the first captains of the U.S Navy Los Angeles Class Submarines.
Anyway, Mark is here and the house woke up to it’s first real, truly “3rd Wave” (gasp, ROFLOL) morning. The machine was crackling with the boiler running and all of a sudden the shot started pouring. I had the grinder dialed in on the fourth shot!
Mark watches in amazement, as he has no other exposure other than $B. Mark and I also went to Open Eye yesterday and they just blew his M I N D!
Watching the ristreto. It was glorious! Just glorious!
Drip, Drip, Drip! Wonderful.
Barely covering the bottom of the cup. The Italian way was achieved: one gulp of sweetness.
And finally, Mark’s Christmas gift to Nikki and myself. Two $B (we forgive him) 16 oz cups with chrome plating. Only a truck driver will truly appreciate this gift. They are amazing!
Well, the saga has begun! I have a friend of mine who has a KA PL espresso machine and a matching KA PL grinder who has had great success pulling high quality shots. Because of this, I held out so much hope for my KA PL grinder. I was so very happy with the KA PL as a French press grinder or as a drip grinder. But, I knew almost immediately that the PL grinder just wasn’t going to be able to keep up. The burrs went hot on me very quickly and eventually it started to throw out a coarse grind and the more I pulled and tried to dial in the more and more coarse it was getting. Out of several (I lost count quickly) shots I may have only pulled one acceptable shot. I knew what my problem was immediately: The grinder. Eventually the KA PL locked up on me.
I took the grind adjustment knob off of the front and even with a screw driver I can’t pry that burr and axle out of the receiver. When I do get it back going, it may just need some new burrs (hopefully), at which time I will retire the KA PL to French Press duty – which hardly anything does a better job (M. Prince thinks so and I agree).
So, in any case I went through that nice lb of Ecco CafeTraditional Northern Italian Espresso Roast like a banche and only received one good shot from it. Totally not the fault of Ecco!
SO, Wilson, HOW DID YOU FIX THE PROBLEM? Well, Scott Conary to the rescue! Scott had a Mazzer Mini with ETL/NSF certs that had a brand new set of burrs. We agreed to a price and I drove up yesterday to pick it up at Carrboro’s Open Eye Cafe & Carrboro Roasters.
*I can’t get these turned right, sorry about that*
Anyway, I was immediately impressed, but as I mentioned earlier today in a post on HB the speed of the machine is slow, compared with a $2,240.00 Robur, but I will manage. Eventually, patiently, I will find a used Robur that needs some T.L.C. (You may be interested in this Coffeed.com discussion on the 3 phase Mazzer Robur – what an amazing piece of work (but three phase? What do you need three phase for? Isn’t single phase 220v enough?)
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now go for “throttle up!” I don’t have pics, because things got tense!
Basically, we flipped the breaker about 30 or more times trying to get the right wiring configuration. European, UK and USA standards are not only different, they are complexly different and to top it off my S87 had been “jury rigged” on the wiring side. So, we basically had to play Russian roulette and we lost about 30 times!
I had a couple leaks and it took a few minutes to get that settled, too. Oh, btw, we used two Wirlpool WHC-DUF water filtration kits. These are 10″ kits and they worked perfectly except Lowe’s didn’t have a softener cartridge so I am going to have to order that online. So, right now, the two 10″ housings are installed and only one has a water filter in it being used. I have great water pressure and all that is working great.
The first thing I did was use about 1/4 lbs or less of some 8 O’Clock whole bean coffee the wife picked up at Wal-Mart for me to use just to get the grinder out of “French Press mode.” Once that was accomplished I turned to my Crema Coffee Roasters Espresso roast that was 10 days old. I had1 lb of it on “standby” just for the hope of getting this thing hooked up in time for Christmas. Also, I have 1 lb of Andrew Barnett’s Ecco Cafe Northern Italian Espresso that is five days old. I used almost half of the Crema roast before I reasonably had good results, but I never pulled what I would consider a “bad shot.” I made two capps, the first for the wife which had fantastic texture and the second one for me. The second one had better volume and poured better. Capps are going to take practice.
On the Ecco roast, I will be reporting at the end of the week. It will be six days old tomorrow and I will be pealing it open first thing in the morning – about 05:30. I will make some spro and some capps for the wife and myself and then save the rest for Thursday because I have to go to Grand Rapids, MI.
So, that is the “low down.” Expect details and pics near the end of the week. Also, you may want to head over to Home-Barista.Com at this forum thread for some details.
I opened up my Counter Culture Coffee Kenya, Nyeri Kangocho Lot 4392 which was roasted on the 5th of December. I believe in letting coffee sit for about four or five days, maybe six on some roast. So, at five days this Kangocho is fantastic. I imagine tomorrow it will be just that much better.
My wife walked in the office this morning with all the hustle and bustle and stopped the clock just to say the morning brew was fantastic. If it can stop her in the morning, it really is something special.
I have actually had George Howell’s rendition of this as an espresso and I must say it was by far the best espresso I have ever tasted – flat out!
Get your speakers turned up, because the volume is a bit low and watch the screen. It is an analysis of the “Jingle Bell” Christmas song and played backwards you can clearly tell there is an attempt at physiological weirdness.
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