So. Mrs R has been teasing me about my hipster coffee for months.
Shes out of the country for a month. I’ve just had a delivery of coffee which she order for me online. This is a $70 bag of coffee and very very good.
Shes a keeper. Clearly.
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update on this, three pines coffee is legit, they carry Heart beans, and they serve sparkling water with their spro, which is basically a guarantee that they know what they’re doing. They don’t open until 8 on the weekend tho :(
Other places worth mentioning:
Cafe Juniper, a bit outside of downtown proper, decent espresso with what I think are locally roasted beans, in a nice space (an old church that is now a coworking space, lots of room and great natural light and stained glass), opens early.
Alpha Coffee, hypermodern (apple store aesthetic), with a weird military worship vibe (looks like it’s owned/run by vets), spro is acceptable but not noteworthy, it’s best attribute is the location
heading out to see the salt flats this morning
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Sounds cool. How close is the closest one to the airport?
these are all downtown, I took the greenline from the airport to city center, they’re all in walking distance. Using Getaround to borrow a 2013 Hundai Sonata today to drive out to the flats.
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Round 1 at Three Pines, cow-orkers blurred for their safety
Round 2 later with the wife,
Amazing space at Juniper:
Another one I forgot about, Ascoli Espresso, very minimalist (they have those elcheapo plastic patio chairs from home depot) , competent espresso.
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I’m currently brewing some coffees that seem to prefer longer contact time. Normally people say “grind finer!” but that’s finnicky and doesn’t always lead to expected or consistent results. I’m also not a big believer in being able to consistently influence this with your pour. Instead, my favorite adjustment here is to change the paper. However, what if you need an extremely slow paper? My preferred option in a pinch is to modify Chemex filters since they’re relatively cheap and easy to find.
This probably sounds complicated but it’s something you can do in 10 seconds. One way is the Lance method which is slightly tricky, but I use a simpler method:
The edge nearest him is a fold and the edge nearest the bottom of the image is open. Cut the crease (blue arrows) through only one ply of the paper from the open edge to the folded edge nearest him. That will give you two flaps. Fold one flap up, fold the other side of the filter horizontally back over the crease (blue arrows) like you’re closing a book, and then fold the flap down over that to make a square. Now when you open the filter, each side is 2x2 paper ply instead of 3x1. Finally, place a flat V60 filter as a template in the correct position and cut to make a perfect shape. I made a proper template just for this purpose but it’s not necessary.
This place looks amazing.
The Yemen and pink bourbon were super easy to extract. Now I’m brewing a Costa Rica microlot and Ethiopia Sidamo, and so far the only result I’m getting is bland coffee. Not sure I could even tell them apart in a blind cupping. I’ve thrown the kitchen sink at these with grind size, temperature, and contact time and nothing is changing. Can’t tell if they’re underextracted or just bad, and that’s the reason I’m still considering a refractometer.
There’s an Amazon lightning deal on the Fellow Ode for $229. Dunno who is looking for a grinder but that’s a good price, even if it has the old burrs. You’ll probably swap them at some point anyway because the appeal of this grinder is being a platform for 64mm flats, of which there are many options. Don’t think there’s a cheaper way to experience flat burrs.
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Bought a bag of pink bourbon based on the discussion here.
It’s not from a roaster I know.
Tried today. Certainly wasnt bad, but nothing as exciting or floral as I was expecting from a highly recommended variety.
What should I be looking for? Maybe I just need to adjust a little.
The one I had was totally wild. There’s no way you could have mistaken it for normal coffee. Just the aroma of the grinds was crazy, on par with some really great geshas I’ve had. Flavor was candied and sugary like fruit punch or a strawberry lemonade.
Ah. Thats disappointing. I’ll keep looking, see if I can find one from a better source.
I guess my advice is Do Your Research if you don’t know the roaster. I noticed a few people using air quotes on pink bourbon and some others apparently suggesting that some of it is fake. Not fake as in counterfeit, but like of dubious origin or something and not a true pink bourbon. It’s a hybrid species of yellow and red bourbon, the problem being that it’s very difficult to grow and identify when ripe. Same advice for gesha.
May have noticed something here. I decided to cup this Ethiopia to see if I could make it do something. I was watching it closely, and at around 3:00 there appeared to be a second round of turbulent offgassing. I need to test this again and next to a coffee that’s extracting easily to see if that’s a reliable sign of CO2 level. The cup itself was disgusting with no sweetness or sourness, and I wonder if it’s the extra gas making carbonic acid.
The most expensive gesha I’ve ever bought was one of the blandest coffees I’ve had, and it was from a fairly respected roaster. It wasn’t bad, just not any more special than than a mediocre $15/lb coffee, and I paid about five times that amount. So in some ways I guess it’s the cost of doing business, but it’s certainly irritating because it makes you wonder where the problem lies. There are certainly unscrupulous roasters that will put the big upcharge on rare varietals of low quality.
How much of this do you think is just personal preference? That is, maybe you didn’t really like it that much, but most others would have.
It’s 0% if you’re asking how many people would think it’s worth $75/lb. There’s a chance I couldn’t extract it properly, but it didn’t have the dry aroma or any of the cup profile properties of any of the other geshas I’ve brewed. It smelled and tasted like a standard $15 Central / South American coffee. I’ve had some amazing geshas for as low as $24/lb so I basically refuse to pay insane prices now.
Maybe I should talk about this more, but I spend a not insignificant amount of time doing detective work to figure out where roasters are getting their green from. What I’ve learned is that in most cases, roasters who are charging more for their coffee aren’t really paying higher prices for higher quality green than I normally get from roasters who charge less. Instead, it just seems like you’re paying for the overhead of retail coffee shops in most cases. The green cost on an exceptionally good coffee is only about $9/lb.
this is an insane video, I am shocked at how expensive some of this shit is considering how shoddy it seems to be, and I am assuming hoffman got like 9000 lifetimes worth of lead poisoning while making this
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Shades of "hitting the machine with a hammer. $10… knowing where to hit it… $10,000
Green coffee. $9 per pound
Knowing which coffee to buy and how to roast it…
Side note. I went looking for this meme to post here. I didnt find one… but I found this.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/06/tap/
Apparently this story goes back to at least 1908. How cool is that?