Chestnut Hill Coffee Co. full review

The Chestnut Hill Coffee Co. full review and pictures may be found over here on a dedicated page.  I hope you enjoy and expect more coffee shop reviews in the near future!

Little time & less coffee

I just haven’t had any time to even think coffee for the past couple of weeks. I have been going back and forth from North Carolina to Florida and then up to Philadelphia and of course back to North Carolina. It takes about five days to making the whole turn. Right now I am in Vineland, NJ and it looks like this ship has run out of steam. I cannot find a load out of here so it looks like it might be time to find some good coffee .

Chestnut Hill – Review Coming

John Harnell and the gang over at Chestnut Hill are simply showing Philly how its done. Review to come.

Insight: Technology, Connectivity and Trucking, Part I

Sometimes when your passing that 80,000 lbs behemoth Peterbilt on the highway you remember the days, as a kid, you thought “Wow, I want to do that when I grow up.” Well, here is some insight on how hard this business is and what technology means in this business.

I was in Plant City, FL on Thursday and Friday and the broker that I was going to use just couldn’t get the load he had planned for me put together. It would have been a half load of strawberries and the other half was in the air and not known (that was the problem). I would have been going to New Jersey with the load.

So, after spending a half-day on Friday of just setting around and waiting, for this broker to get this together I started getting seriously nervous. If you know anything about Florida, it is a state that has very little production other than produce, especially this time of year until June. What that translates to is when you take a load to Florida you better have a real and effective plan on getting a load out of Florida. When I was contacted by a broker asking me to go to Plant City, FL from Maxton, NC the first thing I said was, “Let me call to see what is happening in Florida.” And I did and the Florida produce broker said “Yeah, come on down, I need four or five more trucks right now.” So I did come on down to the “bikini state.”

The load down was strait forward, no glitches and I unloaded at 14:30 EST Thursday in Plant City, FL. My produce broker told me to go rest and he would get things going no later than 10:00 EST on Friday. I tell you, being in Florida on Friday is dangerous, as you could get stuck there the whole weekend if you can’t find a load. Sure you can “dead-head” (drive with no load in the trailer) on home, but with Fuel at $3.40 per gallon that just isn’t an option anymore. So, when the time rolled around to 12:00 EST Noon and no load had come together for my produce broker, I was getting nervous and by 14:30 I was dead serious scared. I called the office and the secretary had her hands full, so she couldn’t get online and find a load or post my truck. I took my mobile phone, the Samsung A900 (about 1 year old) and tried to log onto the Internet Truckstop which is a load board system that gets trucks and brokers working together on almost a real-time basis. You can find loads and post that your truck is available. There are other systems too, like “Getloaded.com” and others. We use IT and GL. The phone was only a year old, but let me tell you, using it for web surfing is like using a feather and ink to write a letter in MS Word! I literally had to select “find loads” and then scroll down for four minutes!!!! Then select which type of search I wanted and scroll down after it reloaded the page for four MORE minutes. It was horrendous. I finally was able just to post my truck as “available.” Even that was so archaic that I was about to pull my hair out.

It was finally about 15:30 EST when I could get myself “posted.” I was about to go postal. Usually, if you don’t have a load in the state of Florida by 12:00 or 13:00 you are not getting a load – period. I posted the truck and started walking to Grampa Johnston’s BBQ right there at the market. It kinda felt like I was eating my last meal! I was down in the dumps! I was going to sit in Plant City, FL until MONDAY!

I didn’t walk 25 yards from my truck and the phone rang!….See the next post for more info and how this all was solved.

Insight: Technology, Connectivity and Trucking, Part II

Oh man.  Was I relieved to hear my phone ringing.  It was a broker who badly needed to cover a load of tomatoes going from Plant City, FL to Philadelphia, PA.  And the price was good too.  So I am loaded, right?

Yes, I am loaded, but I start thinking of how in the world I am going to keep from this happening again.  If your “disconnected” from the outside world in the year 2008 in the trucking business, you might as well be out of business.  I have a friend of mine who doesn’t have a laptop, doesn’t have a friend he can call and he is struggling to the point that he has less than 90 days to figure out whether or not he is going to stay in business.  He is 40 years old and reluctant to work with new technology.  In other words, the business is “moving on” and he isn’t willing to move on.   And now that the “writing is on the wall” he wants to do some investing in technology and now doesn’t have the money to invest.

I wanted to write more and be more detailed about the phone, but I am running out of time   I had a choice between putting a laptop in my truck and just that act, the very act of placing it in the truck will cost me about $400 in mounting hardware and the LCD monitor, along with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.  Or I can upgrade my phone!  So I did, this thing is fantastic.  The HTC Touch by Sprint (CNET Review).  I guess if CNET is reviewing your phone, that means it is “cutting edge,” right?  I don’t know the answer to that really, but it seems to be cutting edge.  The lady at the Sprint store asked me what I would like to see and I said, “The very best thing in this store!”  I think it is the best, at this point.  It seems to be the response by Microsoft to the Apple iPhone, which I would rather have but don’t want to switch my carrier, as I have five phones on this carrier.

I KNOW this much:  I can post my truck on the load boards in 1 minute!  I can perform a state to state or state to multi-state search within 2 minutes, as opposed to 15 minutes before for either function.

More to come…

FTW & Panther City Coffee

Here I sit at Panther City Coffee and I am experiencing a real good time and really good coffee.

With their LaMarzocco Linea, LM Swift (of which I am skeptical), 5 kilo roaster and tons of coffee loving geeks!

Claude and Zachary are now good friends and we are surrounded by good coffee.  Claude has actually enjoyed some D. Shomer coffee in Seattle, having the master personally pulling the shots, and Zachary is a c-g frequenter.

I must thank Melissa Muckerman @ Octane Coffee Bar in ATL for jumping on her Apple for me and finding the bar!

@ Octane

Here I sit @ octane typing away on Melissa’s Apple.  This thing is nice, yet weird, but weird in a functional way.  Ben is pulling shots like a nut and giving me about half what he is producing.  They are almost out of spro and I am putting them out for the day! LOL!  Three shots and a capp and I think I am not drawing the line here.  Fort Worth comes by 10:00 AM CST, so I have a good ride ahead.

Coffee World, I will see you on Monday!

Waste :: How to stop it?

It all boils down to this: 1.25 lbs for six people.  With triple baskets in one naked portafilter and a double spout portafilter that made 18 double shots and seven cappuccinos.  Don’t you think I am wasting too many beans?  Because I used part of one bag and a whole 1 lb bag, I had probably four more double shots to dial in the grinder.  That is two dial double shots per segment.  I also had one double shot that after tamping and turning the pf over to get rid of the loose grounds and the basket just emptied out in the box.  Also, the same thing happened with Mark when he was pulling shots.  So, add 2 more to the 18 and you have 20 triple baskets used, plus the seven triple baskets used for the capps.

That is 27 triple baskets for six people in the house this morning.  Don’t you think this was too much coffee going through the grinder?