Recently in coffee Category

today, a lot of things happened.  here are the ones i recall, in the order in which i recall them happening:

entered the final week of the 2010 diet, round 1
i dumped a fairly large pile of stock
hops started her new job
i deadlifted 300 lbs
i enjoyed roast #100 on the gene caffe roaster
the apartment was certified to lack termite infestation
(mailed something at the post office)
my agents picked up 6 lbs of tasty dates
i purchased my first high-grade briar
wrote some pretty good code, with unit tests
(meerschaum arrived from turkey, held at post office)
i verified that the cesare barontini and dominican glory were both good ideas
i resumed, to some extent, blogging.

today saw a fairly conspicuous convergence of major one-time events.

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.

while hops is away, i've been brewing with my yama vac pot.

i had a moment of tragedy yesterday when i tried to brew with my bodum vac pot, only to discover that i can't brew a single serving in it -- i had to dump my ruined beans. argh!

the yama takes the guat and greatly accentuates that special something -- that nutty/nutella flavor that i value so highly in coffee, and am usually unable to achieve. tomorrow perhaps i'll try some panama and find out whether this flavor comes from the vacpot or maybe the roast, or if it's specific to teh guat. if it's the guat, i sense a big time coffee order in my near future.

hops is a wizard on the chemex (which we found for $2 at a church basement sale -- SCORE) and i likes me some chemex coffee, but if only the vacpot can bring out my cherished coffee flavor, i'm there. plus, it's fun to watch. yay, physics!

i had to dump 4 sink shots before i got the grinder dialed in to the point where the shot even looked right, and afterwards, i got an overly bitter, flat-tasting cup of coffee.

still, it was espresso. thick and creamy and chocolatey -- underneath the ick.

by the time i get these beans dialed in, i'll be out of them. hello thrice a week roasting routine.

actually, i might not get these beans dialed in -- i think they may be overroasted. upon grinding i smelt a huge dose of blueberries, none of which made it to the cup.

tomorrow: more tweaking. and by tweaking, i mean tweaking.

twitch

i sent an email last night to chris coffee to find out if i could put the rocky doserless replacement spout on my now doserless rocky doser. his reply: "to be honest, i have no idea".

maybe not as helpful as "i looked and the nubs on the spout won't fit in the chute on your rocky", but it did save me $18 plus shipping. i looked on the internets and found a dude who placed a nice chrome funnel-like object in his doser (he kept the doser bottom, which i can't do without keeping many of the doser's problems). i have a funnel like object: a funnel! i took one of my brewing funnels and chopped off (rather poorly, i might add. this mod definitely lacks polish) the bottom. this i electrical taped to the already-electrical-taped doser top. coffee grinds still shot out the bottom, so i tried using a different receptacle. this worked much better, in my test, no grounds were lost -- as long as i held the little cup in place. rocky's torquey motor caused the cup to move to the left (redshift, as it were) during the grind. one toothpick and some more electrical tape, and that problem was solved.

now i have a very clean rocky that can grind unattended and not lose grinds to the doser, and not worry about fixing that damned piece of stupid metal (which i now seem to have lost) that makes the doser work. it's a bit ugly with all that electrical tape, but it sure has more character, and who said coffee was pretty?

i intend to re-begin drinking espresso. for that, i need rocky. which is to say, i need rocky so i can grind my non-espresso coffee, using the macap for its god-intended purpose: grinding espresso.

rocky was stashed away in a cupboard. i took him out, cleaned him off a bit, and plugged him in. he still worked. i cleaned out the doser and decided i may as well disassemble the doser and rejigger the doser fin mod.

you see, rocky is a pretty darn good grinder, but he comes with a number of design flaws. one is the finger guard in the bean hopper. i removed that ages ago. another problem is the doser fins: they don't really contact the bottom of the doser, and thus leave lots of grinds in the doser. most grinders with dosers have this problem to some degree or another, it seems. 2 out of 2 for me. but rocky is particularly bad.

so i disassembled the doser, only to remember: there's that god damned piece of little metal that is pivotal to the operation of the doser, but falls out when you disassemble the doser, and you can't put it back in, and it sure looks like mine was slightly defective and too short anyway. i got frustrated while trying to put the doser back together and realized: the doser sucks anyhow. if i were to get another rocky, i'd surely get the doserless model. so 10 minutes of unscrewing later, i had the doser completely off, and i re-wired the power switch for good measure.

rocky has the power switch on the side, but there's a slot with a placeholder thingy in it right in front. i swapped the switch and the placeholder and now rocky can be turned on from a convenient location.

while taking off the doser, i found that the chassis ground wire was connected to the doser. now, 6 months ago i wouldn't have known what a chassis ground wire was or how to rewire it, but tonight i did it with confidence (and plenty of multimeter testing). i'm sure i'd pass UL muster.

the doser was off, but, once rocky was put back together, i faced a new problem: the grounds would shoot out the recessed grinder chute and all over the place in every direction. i tried a number of tricks with tin foil, fashioning crude chute extenders and side-shields -- none of which worked. finally, i put the top half of the doser back on (the see-thru plastic bit) and electrical-taped it to rocky (the top half screwed into the bottom half which screwed into rocky. the bottom half was the business part and putting it back on was not only a pain, but would defeat the purpose of removing the doser).

the taped-on doser-top looks pretty lame and will become jiggly with a hard knock, or probably even just with age. but it removes the mess of the exposed doserless chute, and it also removes the mess of the doser itself. i see on the internet that for 18 bucks i can get the little chute that goes on the real rocky doserless, and i've got a pending email to tell me whether that will work for me.

now all i have to do is clean up the grinds that are all over my kitchen now.

all over.

man what a mess.