Last weekend, during the Fourth of July,the girlfriend and I decided to go on a little camping trip up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, kind of by Truckee. I also saw this as a great opportunity to try out my newly purchased toy from Sweet Maria’s: the Clever coffee dripper along with the Coleman camping stove that I found at a rummage sale for ten bucks.

The girlfriend just rolled her eyes when she saw me packing up my new clever coffee dripper and bag of ground Tanzanian Blackburn estate along with all the other camping essentials such as the marshmallow roasting sticks pictured in the background. She has learned to live with my obsession as best she can, even accepting the fact that this perhaps the only picture I took during the whole trip.What a woman.

Anyways, this little setup was definitely an upgrade from my previous excursions into campfire coffee, especially the propane stove which makes boiling water on hell of a lot easier then using the campfire.  I almost did buy one of the kitschy little coleman campfire percolaters to try out (the Finn in me happens to like percolated coffee) but then decided that this was a better way to go.

Okay, enough meandering about, and let me get to my newest little toy.

Being the sort of guy who likes body along with smooth taste, I figured the clever coffee dripper was just the thing for me. The folks as Sweet Marias raved about this new fangled coffee filtercone contraption that combines the best of both infusion and drip coffee making  making for one great cup of coffee. The way it works is that it is like a normal filter cone except that is has a neat little stopper device on the bottom that keeps the brew from coming out until you place it on your cup.

Wow, neat huh?

This allows you to seep your brew like a french press for a few minutes to get that body that you crave while at the same time filter it out so you do not get your teeth speckled with grounds. It works with pretty much any coffee cup allowoing me to make a quick mug of joe before I run off to work.

Last week, I also discovered that using Chemex filters in the device makes for a even better cup of coffee (although it will never truly replace the Chemex maker which is just to damn pretty) since the filters will give you a smooth tasting cup no matter how long you happen to let the brew seep. I made a cup of India Kattehollay Estate peaberry that just blew me away.

It is also microwaveable, although I have trouble figuring out how much time I need to nuke it for to get the water temperature right.

Wink wink nudge nudge

Beany is getting quite big. I am soon  going to have to repot her into something a little bigger. I might do this later today if she seems dry enough to ensure a easy transfer. I also need to buy a better lamp, perhaps one of those florescent  jobs that has one of  those plant spectrum bulbs. These being Oaksterdam, I am sure I can find one some where….

Behmor stuff

Aside from tending to Beany, I have am still messing around with my Behmor . Lately, I have been toying with the various profiles, seeing what I can do to coax the beans to a darker roast without setting my kitchen on fire. Toying with P3, I found that I can get to that elusive second crack before the time runs out by starting the beans at 13 minutes and then tacking on the additional two and half minutes after I started it up.  This lengthens the final and hottest cycle pushing the the inner temperature of the beans  up to the breaking point.

I have been trying my best to wrap my noggin around the roasting curves and have even started penning my own rudimentary curves into my roast log to better understand  them. I know if I keep it up, it will eventually come together.

Eventually

This is oaksterdam aftrall

I will be sure to post a pic of my hand drawn roast curves in my next entry….

Beans for sale

My attempt to sell freshly roasted Rwandan G-N beans via ebay has been a wash. I sold only one pound this month and have decided to go back to the drawing board. Oh well, it was a fun experiment. On the other hand, I am still glad I invested in a ten pound bag of this bean. I see that it is no longer for sale and I now have a little stash that can last me a while.

These beans have also enabled me to learn how to better tweak my Behmor curves.  While I did , for the most point, enjoy the 8 different pounders that came free with the Behmor, I found having a surplus of one type  allowed me to keep adjusting my roasts until I found exactly what I wanted. This is something I am going to consider next time I place an order.

Although, variety is also the spice of life.

this is Oaksterdam after all

Being a pleasure slave to the Chemex, I decided to donate my old Black And Decker coffee maker along with my whirly blade grinder to the breakroom where a work. It was my attempt to break me and my coworkers from the siren call of the Starbucks that is located just across the Home Depot’s parking lot.

Sadly, it has not really work. I am the only one who seems to use the  coffee maker at work . Everyone I work with prefers the coffee flavored drinks that Starbucks provides, eschewing actual coffee. And, those that drink coffee, prefer the copious amounts of cream and sugar available at the coffee shop.While I will be more than happy to bring in the fresh roast, I refuse to bring in any condiments.

Hey, what can I say, I like it black and bitter  baby

Its not like I am trying to open up a free cafe. For a while,  I  would brew up a pot and encourage everyone to try it, but nobody would and I would end up drinking it myself. My urine then started smelling way too much like coffee,  so now I just make a few cups at a time and guard it jealously.

Also, I have to admit that I myself cannot resist the Siren Call of the Starbucks at times. Not so much for the coffee, but for those tasty brownies and muffins that they make. Mmmm chocolate brownies so unhealthy and good.

And yes, I do on occasion get a cup of their coffee of spring for an latte or misto. Thier’s is a decent coffee, if not a little strong and unispiring.

It is also good to use as a board of comparison to my homeroast.

Funny thing about the Starbucks, or even Peets for that matter, is that I usually cannot drink it without a bit of half and half in it. If I don’t, I tend to get a bit of rot gut. Yet at home, my brew needs to be black and bitter at all times.

Hmmm, fascinating  and someting to ponder further on.

Aint she perty?

My sweety pie decided to surprise me by ordering a coffee plant from some company in Indiana called Gurney. She was so excited about it that she could not wait the 6 or so weeks that it took to deliver it and blurted it out to me the same night she placed an order. I spent the next month “nesting” preparing a  good place to keep my new child.  I decided to keep it inside on my little indoor garden table that I set up to keep my plants happy during the winter months. It is still a bit fragile and under a bit of shock from traveling across the continent to arrive at out apartment in the Bay Area, but I am sure I will get it to thrive in no time.  I did a bit of research on maintaining coffee plants and know that I need to be careful with temperature and light and that it needs ample amounts of nitrogen in order to thrive. I am ready for the challenge and I am more than ready to reap the rewards that will come in three to four years.

Who know what the coffee beans that this baby produces will taste like. The Gurney Nursery was a little vague as to its exact heritage. They just label it as an arabica variety. I know I probably will not be starting a profitable indoor coffe plantation anytime soon, but perhaps I could have one for strictly personal use within a decade or so. Lets see, they say a average coffee plant produces about one pound  of beans a year, and since I drink about a pound a week (give or take), it will take about 60 full grown plants to keep me rolling in the beans.

Yeah, that could be workable.

Hey there player haters,  here is the cup I purchased during our one night in Vegas. I had originally intended to get one that said  “Venetian” on it to commerate our stay, but this one with the skull kind of jumped out at me at the gift shop. I also like the dice. This cup is sort of a false advertisement, since I am not really too much of a “player”. In fact, I think I blew only 20 bucks on the slot machines while in Vegas and spent the rest of the time being dragged around to all the various sites and attractions. But then again, Vegas is not really about gambling  anymore. It is really anout the attractions and the shows.

So anyway, lets get down to brass tax and discuss some coffee shall we.  At this very moment I am trying to roast up a whole bunch of coffee to send to all my friends in family for the Holidays. This has been my grand plan for the season, but I am now getting muddled by the overall logistics of it. You see, I want to send this coffee out nice and fresh, but I am having trouble getting it all done with my little Nesco roaster with its quarter pound capabilities. It is times like this, that I wish I had a Behmor, which is capable of roasting a full pound of beans at a time.  Oh well, maybe next year.

On top of that, I was also planning to spread the holiday cheer with my new favorite bean: The Tanzanian Blackburn estate, but I am actually down to just a half of pound and I really do not have time to order more from Sweet Marias at this moment.  I really dig this coffee, so much so, as I was roasting up a batch last night to send to my brother, I started harboring thoughts about keeping it myself as it finished roasting and the sweet caramel smell of the bean permeated the air.  Bad BS, bad, bad.

I guess that besides the Tanzanian, I am probably going to send out a bunch of the “coincidentally perfect” moka java blend, which I also really enjoy, although not on the same level as theTanzanian Blackburn.  I also have some aged sumatra lintong in my stash that I plan to give to a select few.  Given the size of my family, I just hope that my little Nesco makes it through the season and that the  postage does not break me. I also hope that my little spreading of the homeroasted cheer will help  turn my family onto the whole fresh roasted coffee craze. We are a coffee drinking clan, and I do not think that any of them would even think of buying sanka, but I know that they still like
to buy the stuff in the can.

I bought a black and decker burr grinder from Target a few months back hoping to get with the program and increase my overall coffee experience. They say that Burr grinders offer a better taste experience because they give you a more consistent grind and do not wreak havoc upon the tasty oils within the bean that the whirly blade type grinders do.

Cruising online, I found several options for fancy burr grinders ranging from about a hundred to two hundred bucks for a fancy commercial use one. Being cheap, I searched further hoping to find one that was more in my price range. I almost bought a used one off of ebay before I found that Target, the lower middle class man’s Kmart, actually sold one for around 20 bucks. So I went ahead and bought it figuring that if it sucks, at least I am only out a Jackson and I do not have to wait  for some dude from ebay to get off his butt and mail me his grandmas used one.

So, all in all I am happy with the results of the grinder. It seems to have enough settings for my range of coffee producing devices and with a little tweaking I have figured out the ideal notch for each. It is also a nicely streamlined machine  with an appelaing black and stainless steel finish. However, in their efforts to make it look pretty, the boys and girls at black and decker gave up some functionality for its form. The little plastic container that catches the grounds is fit a little bit too snug, making it a bitch to pull out at times. There are little grip lines on each side of it, but they really do not help and since I am cursed with uber dry hands, I cannot get a grip on the sucker if my life depended upon it. Some mornings, I feel like shouting “Hulk Smash!” and  throwing the device on the floor to crack it open and retrieve my precious, precious coffee.  After watching The Jerk (that eighties flick starring Steve Martin)  on Comedy Central, I gave thought to  Super gluing  a little handle on the device but then figured I will just make a bigger mess.

Another thing I do not like about the grind chamber is that the grounds have a tendency to stick to the edges of its plastic walls. I usually try to give it a few good whacks to try to dislodge the grounds but then end up using my fingers to scrape it out since whacking it too hard ends up sending coffee flying all over my kitchen.

Well, with all that said, the little grinder has made my coffee taste consistently better, and I now know why all the coffee fiends that  post on the various coffee related   sites that I am part of insist on using them. I guess I will live with my flawed grinder for a while until I can afford a nicer one.

I cannot believe that I am already down to only two bonded filter papers for my Chemex coffeemaker. It seemed like it was just yesterday, that I bought a big honking hundred pack of the guys from Sweet Marias.  I guess that is what happens when you use one filter a day for the duration of the summer. I have to say that I  kind of like the whole Chemex brewing method since  it has been the primary way that I have enjoyed my coffee these past couple of months. Sure, I would still occasionally break out the French Press and even use my Black and Decker brewer  from time to time, but really, it has been the Chemex that has seen the most use this summer.

The Chemex was designed by a guy ( I think he was a chemist) who was in search of the perfect cup of coffee and while the hour glass design of the carafe is the most striking feature of the coffeemaker, it is the special filters that are the true secret to its success. They are much thicker than most other types of filters and seem to allow all the good coffee flavor in while keeping all the bitter oils, grounds and sediment out.  I do not know what type of “special fiber” they use when making these filters, but I know that whatever they do, it sure works.  Also, the conical shape of the filters  allows for more uniform extraction, since the water is forced to seep through all the grounds before it exits at the  apex of the cone.

The Chemex does have a few drawbacks. The filter paper, while  great at giving you a perfect cup of coffee is rather hard to come by. I have only been able to get it at Sweet Marias and now I am faced with a dilemma of having to place an order today or to go without them for a week or two. Also, the papers are extremely absorbent, making it hard to judge how much coffee is going to be in the pot at times. You cannot start out with four cups of water, and end up with three if you do not take the time to pre-wet the filter paper before your start to brew. The act of brewing can also be problematic, especially if you are looking to brew up a large amount of coffee. The top of the Chemex coffeemaker fills up fast and you have to wait for the first part of the water to drain before you pour the rest in. This is not only time consuming, but also not ideal for the perfect mix of hot water to grounds. To get a good cup of coffee, the grounds should be interacting with hot water that is just off the boil(around 200 degrees) and when you have wait too long before adding more water it cools off and  you do not get the optimal amount of flavor. Another thing about the Chemex is that it does not retain heat for very long, even with the optional glass cover forcing you to either drink the coffee rapidly, or to put it into a thermos.

Even after all the troubles that I have just listed about the Chemex, I  must say that I am a true convert and will probably end up placing an order for more filters so I do not have to go back to some other primitive form of brewing. I still plan on exploring some other methods of brewing including vacuum brewing and the aeropress, but at the moment I am a Chemex man all the way baby.

” Wow man that is the darkest coffee I have ever seen,” commented the new guy at work as I pulled out my little ziplock baggy full of pre-ground Yemen Mokha Sharasi that I had roasted two day prior.

“Yeah,” I replied as nonchalantly as possible, hoping to contain my excitement that somebody at my “day job” might actually be interested in my little coffee obsession. ” I kind of got it a little too dark this time, because I left it sitting in the roasting chamber a bit too long as I was tooling around on my computer.”

“Wow man, you roast your own coffee?” He asked in his stonified so-cal accent.

“Yeah, my girlfriend got me a little Nesco coffee roaster last christmas, and I have been going nuts ever since.” I replied, still hoping I do not sound too much like the coffee fanatic that I areally am. “Its really fun, and the coffee usually tastes better.” I added  wondering if maybe I should pull back a little, lest he actually wanted me to brew him a cup of my limited take to work supply.

“Thats cool man, my mother is  really into gourmet coffee too and I kinda got into it because of her.” He said as he watched me pour my precious, if not a little too dark grounds into my little bodum single cup drip coffee maker. “Did you ever try blue mountain?”

“Jamaican blue mountain? Yeah that stuff is pretty good, if you can get it fresh,’ I replied, hoping I did not sound like too much of a coffee snob as I poured some hot water into the top of my little coffee maker. Jamacain Blue Mountain is great coffee, but almost impossible to get fresh, it is also perhaps a bit overhyped, but I decided not to start yapping about it, lest I alienate the new guy.  So instead, I decided to bring up Kopi Luwak, for the sake of conversation…

“Man, I don’t think I could ever bring myself to drink anything that came out of some animal’s butt” was his reply.

“Well they do wash it off, but I can understand where you are coming from,” I said as I took a first tentative sip of the Yemen Mokha. I had let this roast sit way too long in the hot glass roasting chamber after it had finished and it it had got overly dark on me. Dang distracting Internet! The taste was a little rustic and charcoal like for me. “I don’t think I could ever bring myself to plop down 150 bucks for a pund of it anyway,” I continued as I tried my best to enjoy my coffee, ” but, I have tried Jacu bird coffee, which came from a bird’s butt.”

“Ewww..”

“Actually, it was pretty good,had a real nice peppermint aftertaste.”  I commented, wishing I had some tasty Jacu bird coffee at the moment, instead of the burnt swill that I has drinking.

As much as I love my little Nesco  counter top coffee roaster, I have to admit that using it as often as I do makes for one hell of a mess in my kitchen. Chaff from the the roasting process covers my kitchen like a layer of volcanic ash. While the chaff cup, prominently displayed in the picture above, does a pretty ok job of collecting some of the free floating particulates, it does not trap all of them. Also when I try to dump out the chaff cup , a lot of the wispy floaters tend to escape. It also does not help that my method for cleaning out the chaff deposits from the base of the machine is to blow them out onto the counter, leaving the mess for a later time. Perhaps, I should invest in a dust buster to help take care of this little problem. Or a shop vac.

Chaff, for those of you not in the know, is the outer parchment layer of the coffee bean, that tends to flake off during the roasting process. Some beans, when roaste,d release copious amounts of chaff, overfilling the chaff cup, while others release minimal amounts. I think the amount of chaff a particular bean has has something to do with the way it was processed and cleaned as well as particular genetics. While chaff is annoying to a everyday neat freak who like a spotless kitchen, it really does not effect the overall taste of the coffee. At least, I do not think it does.  I have, on occasion, roasted coffee and got tons of chaff  within the batch (usually because my screen was clogged), and I could really see no adverse effects of grinding the stuff up along with the beans. In fact, I think it might actually add a little bit of flavor to the pot.

Still, my kitchen is a mess and I know that I am probably breathing in a good amount of these little free floating suckers everytime I decide to do another roast.

I had bought my first grinder to grind my own beans around ten years ago, after a friend had introduced me to the wonders of the French Press (thanks Jackie). It was a whirly blade type that I had bought from a Miejers superstore. Oh boy, did I think I was some hot stuff, grinding my own beans. No more coffee in the can for me, from now on I would drink the whole bean gourmet stuff and nothing else.  I scoffed at my peers, telling them that did not know what they were missing, how coffee tasted so much better when you wait until the very last moment to unleash the power from the bean. I figured that I had reached the peak as a coffee connoisseur with my little Mr Coffee whirly gig grinder.

To quote a Zappa song:” How could I be such a fool?”

Now that I have upped my level of coffee consciousness, it has now come to my attention that you standard blade grinder is not the optimal way to prepare your coffee. Sure, it is fine for the regular hoi polloi who do not care about the subtleties of the coffee taste experience. However, if you you consider yourself a true coffee aficionado, only a burr grinder will do. That’s right, a burr grinder. Apparently a burr grinder will give you a much more even grind than a whirly blade grinder will and also cause less damage to essential oils in the coffee bean. A good burr grinder will also allow you to adjust the grind to match you brewer with much greater precision than relying on the counting method.

So suffice it to say, I could not sleep peacefully until I got myself a burr grinder. I did not know how I could of gone so long without one. Imagine, drinking substandard coffee all these years and not even knowing that I was.  I immediately began my search. After perusing Sweet Marias website and ebay, I came to the conclusion that a good burr grinder was probably going to cost me a pretty penny. The top line models were going for around two hundred smackers, and I could not find a used one on e-bay that I could get for less than forty. But surely, one cannot put a price tag on better tasting coffee right? Wrong. As much as I needed to get me a new burr grinder, I also had to face the fact that I had bills to pay and groceries to buy.  So I went a checked out was was going on on my local Target Superstore and Lo and Behold they had a little Black and Decker burr mill grinder on sale for just twenty five bucks! Sure, it was smaller and much less industrial with fewer buttons and settings than those other ones, but it seemed like a good starter. So I bought it.

Somehow, immediately after I took it out of the box and placed it on my kitchen counter, I managed to snap off two of its little plastic peg legs. However, since this did not seem to affect its stability, I decided not to return just yet. Its little hopper holds an adequate amount of beans and it seems to have enough settings to suit me. It is a rather loud device, but no louder than my old grinder.  You also need to keep pressing on the button to finish grinding your beans, but this is only slightly inconvenient for me. The only thing I really do not like about it, is the way the grounds container is made. It is a bit of a pain to try to pull the little plastic receptacle out9especially in the wee hours of the morning) and the grounds tend to stick to the sides of it. But besides that it is a pretty neat little machine and my coffee is tasting a little better. Since the machine only cost 25 bucks, I do not expect to last forever, but hopefully it will do until my budget gets a little bigger.