Recently in coffee Category

but what hte heck is a "coffee can"?

in december, we visited the not-small-enough caribbean island of guadeloupe. while there, we visited a coffee plantation (two, actually). on the plantation, we found someone who spoke enough english to allow us to buy a quantity of green, unroasted coffee. i had thought this could be accomplished entirely in french, but it turned out that they didn't normally sell unroasted coffee, and in fact, the unroasted beans they sold us were white, not green. they had a parchment on them which was not chaff, and not fruit, but some thick pithy layer in between. we bought it anyhow.

we were pretty sure that the coffee did not come from some allotment of unroasted coffee to sell. we're pretty sure it came from the "display" unroasted coffee that was laying around all over the plantation. yep, we suspect they went outside to the "here's how the slaves used to hull the coffee!" display, loaded up our bag, and sold it to us at a premium over their roasted coffee. we bought it anyhow.

when we got home, it took dozens of hours to remove the parchment, bean by bean, by hand. then it took a month for me to refresh my roasting skills to the point where i was confident that i would not ruin the coffee by over or underroasting. then i roasted it.

and... it sucks. it's the worst coffee i've ever had. i can't stand it. on guadeloupe they said it was the best coffee in the world, of course, and that huge coffee producers add it in small quantity to improve their blends. so that's what we tried today: a tiny amount in a proven good blend of light rwanda and dark indonesian coffees. even worse than by itself. what a horrible aftertaste. bleh.

my personality, like frank's black, is my gift, and my curse.

i am not satisfied with "it basically works" or "good enough". i crave perfection. it is why i enjoy video games like "demons souls", and my all-time favorite, "planescape: torment". both games are the D&D video game equivalent of "groundhog day": you die, and die, and die again until you get things just perfect, then you win.

knowing about my quest for perfection, I gave away Silvia, my espresso machine, a while ago. silvia offered endless opportunity for the quest to perfection. i could play with her all day long and occasionally get the perfect cup of coffee -- the legendary God Shot. but as my hobbies multiplied, i found that i didn't want to spend all day chasing a shot. i wanted to have the shot and get on with things. that just wasn't happening with silvia, and also, espresso makes an unbelievable mess in the kitchen.

but i missed having espresso. so i decided that in 2012 i'd get a new machine. i did my research last year: what was the state of the art? it turned out, to my surprise, that the most excellent machine for me was the same machine I was lusting after in 2006 and 2007: the Quick Mill Andreja Premium. In 2011 my espresso knowledge was woefully out of date, but I did a smart thing: I remembered that I knew everything there was to know back in 2007, and if Andreja was my choice then, and there wasn't anything new on the market, then Andreja was the machine for me. So I ordered it. It arrived yesterday.

I went out and bought some beans at my local coffee shop, because I was woefully underprepared -- I did not have fresh espresso beans ready. That turned out to be a good thing: I wasted a half pound of commercial beans getting my grinder "dialed in" -- that is, adjusted so that it produced the proper size coffee grounds for my purposes. And then, just when I got the grind to the point where Andreja produced the proper 2oz shot in about 25 seconds, I tasted the coffee.

Man, did it suck. Bleh!

Fortunately, last night, I roasted a half pound of Sweet Maria's Moka Kadir blend, to about a Full City+, a little light for espresso, maybe. Certainly, way too fresh for espresso. Coffee, after roasting, gives off CO2 for a couple of days. If you put really fresh coffee into an espresso machine, it tends to gush out uncontrollably as the gas release is accelerated by the brew process. But I was desperate for a decent shot out of my shiney new toy. So I went for it.

The first two shots choked the poor dear. I had ground the beans too fine, and no water was able to get through. Still, Andreja handled it like a champ, and didn't complain. I apologized and adjusted my grind. This was the sort of thing I hated about espresso: always adjusting, never tasting.

Then I pulled the third shot. Third time's the charm. Holy cow.

I did almost everything wrong that third time: my grind was still too fine, my tamp wasn't level (I have a single spout portafilter handle, and the spout is off-center, making it very difficult to get a level tamp. fortunately, my new tamp stand will be here soon :D), likely the machine wasn't at the optimal temperature.

None of that mattered. Good beans + reasonable approximation of good technique + Andreja = awesome shot. Perhaps not a God Shot, but so close to a Silvia god shot, with so many screwups, that my mind was blown. I'm still shocked at how great that shot was, with so many errors on my part.

I think I'm on to something here. I wanted effortlessness, and I've got it. It still makes an unbelievable mess (in the very literal sense of the word, unbelievable) and exposes all sorts of problems in my kitchen layout and lighting. But with very little effort, my coffee knowledge is rewarded with amazing espresso, and not endless tweaking frustration (this is, of course, making the big assumption that my next shot will be as good as the one I'm blabbing about now!)

For your viewing pleasure, meet Andreja:

andreja and her support crew have taken over part of the kitchen. hops hasn't complained yet, and once she starts steaming milk, and eventually, i bet, making americanos, she'll be happy for the coffee bar.

i wanted shiney. andreja is shiney. good thing i had a shirt on when i took this picture

andreja is ridiculously large. i thought silvia was large, andreja is way bigger. forget about under-cabinet. t-mobile G2 for scale.

i see you runnin round town with the drink i love
and i'm like, "fuck you!" and "starbucks too!"

with your vanilla chai latte and a soy milk brew
well i'm like, "fuck you!" and, ah, "fuck milk too!"

that shot of sweet maria's "espresso monkey" had roasted marshmallows in the finish.

roasted mother blanking marshmallows!

that was awesome.

i broke my vac pot :(

only been using it a week and a half and i broke it. i broke it i broke it i broke it :(

and then i pulled two sink shots of espresso monkey while dialing in my grinder. argh!

i was washing the top half of the vac pot and tugged on the sink nozzle to switch it from spray to stream. the tug pulled the nozzle right off the god damned faucet and since i was tugging with the hand holding the vacpot top, i smashed the glass straight into the sink, shattering the tube.

sigh.

then i proceeded to waste two shots of espresso because the grind was too fine.

but the third shot was pretty darn tasty.

this morning's espresso was awful, its only redeeming quality was that it was not thin bodied.

i drank it anyway, hoping that, like Darth Vader, there was some good within it.

Maybe I should let George Lucas make my espresso, it might turn out better.

it wasn't a god shot, but after an initial veil of bitterness (a defect, in my opinion), creamy chocolate gave way to berryliciousness, which slid down leaving a peppery trail.

a slightly short pull, not quite a ristretto but not a full shot. had to dump a shot because i'd ground it too fine. but my temperature setting now seems right, my grind is about on, and apparently my tamp hasn't totally degraded.

as you can see: the insanity has returned.

this batch of beans will only last me a couple more days. i've got another roast on deck, aging a little, slightly less roasted -- but then the fun begins anew, with grinder adjustments, temperature tweaks, and pounds of grinds on my kitchen floor. so it goes.

just had a vac-pot brewed cup of a panama. it was a little watery -- i think i didn't grind enough beans (argh, and had a bean receptacle malfunction, too, so lost some beans there), i think they may have been a tad underroasted (city instead of city+), but most importantly, not a hint of a trace of a whisper of the alluring flavor that i desire so much and find so abundant in the guat.

one more try tomorrow with more grinds, for science, then it's time to stockpile some guat.