Lee: “Nov. 29.” Me: “Yeah?” Lee: “The last time you wrote a blog post.” Me: “2. That’s the number of stores Quills has opened since that date.” I’m sitting in the second of those two stores right now, a disarmingly beautiful space that is at once both cozy and comfortable. We opened this space on… [Read more…]
October 28, 2011
Nothing lengthy to share here, but I do have a couple of short thoughts regarding brewing: Over-extraction and under-extraction are terms to describe extraction efficiency, not brew strength. In fact, those two things — extraction efficiency and strength — are often used interchangably when they are, in fact, totally separate and only incidentally related. Stir… [Read more…]
October 5, 2011
I’m sort of jumping the gun on writing this, but, considering the long hours and seemingly endless days of test-roasting and taste-testing, I think can be forgiven if I let spill a small portion of the proverbial beans. Besides, Michael John Butterworth requested more than one blog post a month, and I’m not about to… [Read more…]
September 30, 2011
Some of you were aware that, last week, I took a little trip to Seattle to take in the city, hang out with Ryan and Molly Soeder, and enjoy Coffee Fest and its related festivities. Those handful of you who don’t add excitement and enrichment to your life by anxiously awaiting my every tweet and… [Read more…]
June 28, 2011
One coffee professional recently told me, with regard to building an espresso blend, “Espresso is so varied and personal.” I liked hearing that a lot. In a sense, it was comforting to me, since all of my espresso roasting and subsequent blending had been, for the most part, very much against The Rules. In the… [Read more…]
June 24, 2011
The other day, I received the Walküre Kaffemaschine in the mail. It’s the smaller Karlsbad model, 038, for those keeping score at home. Made entirely of porcelain, it comprises four pieces in all: server, filter, dispersion piece, and lid. You really have to see it in action to make sense of how it works, and… [Read more…]
June 23, 2011
So, it all started with this. Collin Moody and Neil Oney, caring coffee guys that they are, decided to chime in with a little advice. If Collin had his way, I would use a dirty sock, while Neil wanted to see me drink some instant coffee. Either way… gross! Of course, me being me, I… [Read more…]
June 19, 2011
Editor’s note: I’ve written and re-written the start to this post about ten times now. I kind of wish I had an animated GIF showing exactly what I typed so that you could see proof of this, but I don’t, so you’ll have to take my word for it. (Too bad, ’cause it would look… [Read more…]
June 15, 2011
“With great power comes great responsibility.” Though it seems others before Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben employed this maxim, I do tend to think of its influence upon my thinking as being rooted in Spider-Man. These days, I certainly feel it; Peter Parker I am undoubtedly not, but greatly responsible? Absolutely. I’ve been blessed and tasked… [Read more…]
June 13, 2011
Since Mr. Darren Middlename Jennings not-so-subtly hinted that I need to blog more, I’m going ahead and writing. A while back, I wrote about how I was going to blog, every day, some little tidbit I’d learned about coffee that day. For a while, I kept that up on my tumblr site, but I’ve dropped… [Read more…]
January 18, 2012
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