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More espresso stuff
Apr. 23rd, 2009 04:34 pmGot the machine from Italy, delivered pretty quickly. the Flickr stream is here. Not quite as Streamline Moderne as my other machine, but it pulls a real nice shot.
Clarabelle's Cousin
Apr. 12th, 2009 01:54 pmOkay, the vintage Italian espresso machine thing seems to have taken hold.
( You know the drill )
( You know the drill )
I like coffee, but day-um...
Mar. 2nd, 2009 01:31 pmOkay, so I’ll cop to roasting my own coffee. Mostly because the stuff you get from the market is old – in some cases, really old – and with coffee, freshness makes such a huge difference. Not to mention that most of the stuff you get from specialty coffee shops still isn’t that fresh, and the style seems to be towards over-roasting (hey folks, real espresso isn’t burnt black and oily so that all you taste is carbon. Unless, of course, you’re a big chain trying to disguise the taste of less than premium coffee beans), and over charging. Premium greens are a couple bucks a pound at most in the quantities that big chains buy, roasting doesn’t cost them that much, and then they charge you $15/lb because they put a mermaid on the front of the bag. Greens cost me about $4-5/lb on average. The occasional, really special lot that would be well over $20/lb in the fancy coffee store might run as much as $7/lb from the greens supplier I most often buy from. I’d say that roasting coffee has actually saved me money over the long run, as well as getting me much better quality coffee than I’d have otherwise.
( “More )
( “More )
They've gotten some interesting new beans in at Sweet Marias - a new lot of aged Sumatra Mandheling from the '03 crop and a Sumatran Batak Peaberry, plus the Yemen Mokha Sana'ani.
I like the combination of Sumatran, rather than Javanese, with the Mokha for a traditional Mokha-Java type blend, although just a little of the funkiness of the aged Sumatran can go a long way. I also like to add a little bit of the monsoon aged Malabar to it. Needless to say I've ordered a little bit of these so that I can do a couple of special roasts.
A friend of mine was recently commenting that he had thought oenophiles were a little over-the-top until he started looking into the home-roasting crowd. Gee! d'ya think?
I like the combination of Sumatran, rather than Javanese, with the Mokha for a traditional Mokha-Java type blend, although just a little of the funkiness of the aged Sumatran can go a long way. I also like to add a little bit of the monsoon aged Malabar to it. Needless to say I've ordered a little bit of these so that I can do a couple of special roasts.
A friend of mine was recently commenting that he had thought oenophiles were a little over-the-top until he started looking into the home-roasting crowd. Gee! d'ya think?
