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Not being one to give up on a idea, I have been actively experimenting with storing Fresh roasted Coffee in a Food Saver Freeze and Steam Bag. I bought a couple of packs one day from  Target when there were on sale. I had a theory that the vents in the bag would be ideal for storing freshly roasted coffee, and had spent many hours in various department stores examining the package and pondering “what if?”

A pack of these bags is a little pricey (ok like 15 bucks-but hey) and I would always end up putting it back. But this time they were  something like 2 for 15, so I figured I had better   take advantage and reward myself with a little research grant.

This ended up causing another dilemmna: Should I get one box or several. I could get one save some money, and if it didn’t work, so what. But then, what if it worked? Then it would be better if I had bought several and saved even more money. Who knows when another sale was going to happen? Then again, what if they did diddly squat for my freshly roasted bean?Then I would be stuck with a bunch of bags I really have no use for. I would have to start freezing vegetables andother crap just to justify my purchase.

This chicken egg situation had me frozen in place for  around ten minutes before I decided on getting one pack of freezer bags (which I might use) and one regular roll (Which I will use) figuring that this would be a good way to hedge my bets.

Anyways, the jury is still out on these freeze and steam bags when it comes to the storing of freshly roasted coffee.

The pros:

They work for bigger behmor batches

Last month I roasted up a full pound of a Kenya Nidaro Nyeri (for some crazy reason)and then stored it in one of these bags.  The bag stayed firm after sealing for about two days. The coffee came out brilliant. I got  the same results with a 12 oz batch Maui Grown Red Catui. The degassing bags that I have will hold only around 9 Oz, so these work great.

The vents seem to work

Since the bags remains nice and tight for several days and does not inflate, it means tha the CO2 is getting out somewhere. So , the bags must degas somehow.

The Cons

One time use

Unless you cut them at the tippy top and then store a smaller batch in them, these bags have a one time use. The valves also do not seem to be as effective the second time around. 

So I took the taste challenge…

I wanted to see if my palate could tell the difference  between Starbuck’s new instant coffee (just add hot water) and stuff the has been brewed the proper way.

After much contemplative mouth swishing, I correctly determined which coffee was the Folgers 2.0 and which one was the Pike Place blend. The assistant manager of the store looked a little heart broken, so I told him that it was really hard to tell the difference.

It might have been a lucky guess too. I think they purposely used some older brew  for the Pike Place in order to throw the testers off. Still, I guess the stuff was not too bad, better than most of the instant crap, but it still lacked the total flavorocity of fresh roasted coffee.

According to what I over heard, the VIA is actually microground coffee, meaning the grounds are so fine that you can drink them. They claim that it is just like drinking a cup french pressed coffee. I guess thats pretty accurate, it is a lot like sipping on some stale french pressed.

Therein lie the rub…

Well, I might need to use the dollar off coupon they gave me and purchase some VIA for some further testing, I am pretty sure I know what the problem is. Coffee starts to lose a lot of its flavor immediately after you grind it and expose it to air. I can only imagine what microgrinding it does.

Then again, maybe Starbucks has a special process where they microgrind their beans in a  vacuum sealed chamber to keep it from degrading until it reaches their costumers cup. Maybe the have a special facility in space or on the moon where they produce the VIA packets in a near total vacuum to ensure no flavor escapes.

Or , maybe they assume the average joe drinker is not going to notice the difference underneath all the cream and sugar anyway.

I am leaving on a jet plane….

Okay and now I am back again

Why is it that the week you go on vacation ends up feeling like only a weekend? Perhaps this is a overstated sentiment, but still that is what our (the girlfriend and I) whirlwind week in Maui felt like. It seemed like as soon as we jumped in our rented mustang convertible and headed off to Lahaina, we had to turn right back around and drive it back to the airport  to get on the plane and go back to Oaktown and back to work.

If it wasn’t for the 300+ pictures, the suitcase full of coconut bras and grass skirts and the depleted checking account, I could swear that we were hardly there at all. Okay,while I am spending most of this blog bitching about how short vacations seem, I must admit that we had a whole lot of fun on the Valley Isle. We created a lot of nice memories, got some tanning in and even dipped our toes ( and rear ends) in the warm ocean water.

For those who have never been to Maui, there is a whole lot fun stuff to do than just sitting around and baking in the sunshine. The road to Hana was an adventure, Iao point was inspirational, The Eco adventure Zip line was a rush, as was Ufo Parasailing, even the full body massage from Zensations was worth it, oh and I cannot forget the magnificent luau at the Hyatt Regency that featured a kick ass fire dancer . But of course, for me, the highlight of the trip happened to be our visit to not one but two actual coffee plantations.

Maui Grown Coffee…

Okay, so everybody knows about Kona coffee that is grown over there on the big island of Hawaii and how smooth (and expensive) it is. Maui, however,  has been  gaining  a reputation for producing some pretty good coffee in its own right. While the coffee farms tend to be at a slightly lower elevation than the big island, the coffee itself is nice and earthy and above all much more affordable then the primo Kona stuff.

Another nice thing about Maui grown coffee, is that there happens to be a large coffee plantation that you can visit right across the street from the famous Kaanapali Beach.Suffice it to say that I was tickled absolutely pink when the nice guy at the Maui Grown Coffee Company (a store located by the smokestack in Lahaina) told me that I could actually just drive up there and take a up close and personal gander at actual coffee being grown

We had just come back from a tour of the Maui Tropical Plantation which also featured coffee but only got to see it fleetingly as we rode through on a little tram. So I was actually salivating at the idea of being able to walk through fields of coffee plants with ripe and ready cherries dangling before my eyes.

Okay, I am pretty sure that we were probably supposed to view the fields from the “viewing platforms” but I could not resist walking through the fields themselves and getting all up close and personal with the plants (just take a right at the little red truck).  My uber patient girlfriend also obliged me on this and even took a large number of great pics of the plants like the one posted above.

I felt like I was in heaven and wished I could just move right into one of the luxury homes that they were building on he property, but unfortunately we did not have 2 million conalis in out bank account having spent it all of coconut bras.

The nice guy at the Maui grown coffee company store was also more than obliging to show me the whole coffee growing, picking, separating, hulling, and processing process that their coffee went through and was also more than happy to sell me a big ol’ 10 lb bag of certified Red Catui green coffee beans that happened to be harvested on this vary same plantation.

The store itself only features one pound bags of the green stuff, but if you ask the guy if he has anything bigger , he will bring you the back where the bigger bags are. He also informed me that they actually have a annex in the port of Oakland where I can go pick up bigger bags (hundred pounders and such) of the stuff if I was so inclined to do so. After sampling a few different varieties there, I decided that the best choice would be the Red Catui which had a very appealing  taste and aroma. Maui Grown Coffee Company’s best known varietal is the Maui Mokka, but I wanted something that I could actualyl roast in my Behmor without too much trouble, and the Red Catui also seemed to taste a bit better.

Anyways, I will save that review for later

Aloha and Mahalo baby.

Here is a batch of the Rwandan Gkongoro Nyarusiza (or however the heck you spell it) that I roasted then immediately sealed into a Foodsaver Freeze and Steam bag.

I got a bunch of these bags on sale at Target a few weeks ago, They were half priced and I just could not pass them up. The thing about these bags is that they have little one way notches in them that are meant to release the steam when you decide to nuke a bag of vegetables.

Seeing these little steam valves on the bag kind of reminded me of the one way CO2 valves that come on many coffee bags. I figured that these bags might work the same way so set up a little experiment in order to find out.

For those who read this blog with some sort of regularity (it’s good to be regular) you now that I have experimented with saving freshly roasted coffee in food saver bags in the past only to find out that if I do not wait at least a day before sucking and sealing, the bag ends up blowing up like a balloon from the CO2 that is released after the beans sit a while.  Well this is really fun to look at and might make a great emergency pillow, I do not think its the ideal way to store freshly roasted coffee.

So anyway, i roasted up a batch of my new favorite beans then immediately stored them in the freeze and steam bag (which ironically I do not plan to freeze or steam) and then let it sit overnight to see if the  bag would either inflate or become slack like a spent balloon.

The next day I was happy to discover that the bag has the same han solo frozen in carbonite consistency as it had the morning before. This means either the one way steam release valves actually do work like a degassing valve or that the RGN does not give off a lot of CO2.

Anyways, I guess I need to do a little more experimenting to find out but I figured I would let the rest of your roasters out there know that this might be a viable storing option.

Or, I guess you could just invest in some coffee bags with degassing valves.

But if you like to play star wars. It is a pretty fun idea.

I got some nice 8 oz degassing bags from the Green Coffee Buying Club  last month. Here is a a batch of Tanzanian Blackburn Estate AA resting in one after being roasted. This batch was sort of an experiment with my Behmor in which I Roasted 13 ounces on the 16 oz (thats 1 elbow to you slines*) setting. I roasted it on P3 for about 19 minutes. I heard the first crack 17:30 into the roast and the second crack came 30 seconds into the cool cycle.

Now you may ask why I did this. Especially with the remainder of the beans that I have been raving about for the past year. Why would I waste the last of my precious batch one  a foray into the unknown. Well, to tell you the truth, I have no idea why I did it. I just felt the need to fill the bag.  A compulsion that came to me last week.

It all started with the Mogiana…

The  Brazilian Dry Process Mogiana to be precise. This bean turned out a real kick in the head (in a good way) and I had decided that I wanted to share this with one of sibs who happens to be addicted to coffee almost as bad as I am.

I wanted to give her a bag of this stuff. But I did not what to give her a bag that looked half full, which my new bags look when I roast up  only 8 oz.   I thought that this would look kinda tacky, so I decided to fix the problem by going for whole LB of the Mogiana (she loved the name btw). This gave me a whole bunch of beans, enough to fill the bag plus have a little left over for me.

This however then gave me the idea of always making enough to fill my new bags. Xmas is coming up after all and I do not want to be sending out tacky looking gift bags that look half full. So, the experimentation has begun.

Roasting 12 to 10 oz’s on the pound setting also gives me the benefit of hitting a darker roast that I can never get to before the cooling cycle in the Behmor hits. And now that I know a little bit more about the curves,I am pretty sure I can handle it.

Of course, I have been keeping a close eye on it to make sure no fire starts.

Here is a pic that I took at a coffee shop that sits next to the Grand Lake Theater here in Oakland’s Lake Merritt District. The place has a  skull theme throughout, which makes it cool in my book. It has pretty good hot dogs too. Their coffee is called “Smokey Joe’s” and lives up to its name, being very dark and smoky. It is pretty decent with enough cream, although the cup I bought did taste like it had been sitting around for a while.

Since the place seemd pretty quite and the guy behind the counter seemed almost dumbfounded that he actually had a paying customer who, yes, wanted to spend 6 bucks on a hotdog and a cup of coffee.

Times are tough I guess.

I do hope this place makes it if only for its cool decorum and I might try to make it a point to stop by once in a while to get a hot dog. I do what I can to support the local community.

I will  pass on more Smokey Joe coffee though.

I got enough of my own to drink.

Maui Moka

Speaking of smoky, I got a pound of Maui Moka From SM the other week in preparation for my upcoming vaca to this tropical paradise. Since the beans are on the small side and Tom from SM advised against using a Behmor to roast them, I decided that it was a good time to break the old Nesco out and give it a whirl…

The problem, however, was that my Nesco skills have gotten a little rusty and I got the beans a little bit too dark. I set it at 27 and let er rip, only to have to hit cool  with 3 minutes left after seeing sparks. They still tasted ok, but I think a little to the left of Vienna would be  preferable. Nice thing about the Nesco is that I still got two more tries to get it right.

I also got some Brazilian beans that really have a kick to them, but I will talk about those at a later date…

Hello y’all

Well, I told yah that I would get around to posting up one of my hand drawn roasting curves, so here it is. This recent one is a bit nicer than the others, since I decided to actually use a little carpenters square to make it look all prett so that I might obtain a better understanding of what is going on to my roast. This little blots  on the right are actually some of the finished product that spilled out of the drum and landed on the paper as I was doing my bet to transfer them to a storage container which happens to be a washed sauce jar.

As you can ascertain, this is the Jacu Bird Bean  roasted in my Behmor at P2 for 14:10.

Okay, it is probably hard to realize that I roasted it for 14 minutes and 10 seconds, but I did. First I started the machine at 10:10 then, in order to extend to last leg of the roast and get a darker result i tacked on 3 minutes. Then as the the time was running out I added another minute and thirty to make sure it got to where I wanted it.  I heard the first crack kick in at the 13 minute mark and the second crack happened as the roast went past the 14 minute mark prompting me to hit the cool button.

P2: love it leave it throw it a party

While Profile 2 has given me trouble in the past resulting in uneven roasts, I have discovered that with a little tweaking, it becomes the best way to go dark without the Behmor shutting down on me. This time, I got the Jasu bird nicely dark to the point of full city plus which is a real accomplishment  with the Behmor especially if you do not skimp on the weight

The poop on the jacu

I knew I was on to something special when I got a good whiff of the Jacu Bird Beans and decided I could not wait until the next day to give them a try.Making coffee the same day as the roast is usually reserved for desperate times but something told me to give this roast a try.

To my surprise the roast tasted great even the same day and got even better throughout the week. This years Jacu Bird Crop is even better than last years. it has a smooth mouthy feel and a great peppermint aftertaste that may or may not be attributed to its unique processing. (for those who do not know, this coffee bean first goes through the the digestive track of the wild Jacu Bird before it is collected cleaned and shipped).

In fact, it is one of my favorite beans of the summer and I plan to grab some more before it disappears again and comes back next year with more hype and a bigger price tag.

I found this comic in a used bookstore (walden pond bookstore in Oakland) the other day and decided that a guy like me just had to have this. I haven’t read it it, just kind of thumbed through it to get the general gist. The writer is not quite as off the deep end as as I am about coffee( not many people are) but the story itself seems offbeat enough.  I just might get around to actually reading it when I finish all the Discworld novels.

I liked the cover anyways

Speaking of Too Much Coffee Man?

This is a question that I am constantly asking of myself each morning as I work my way through my third, even fourth cup of coffee.

“Four mere cups! Pff!” You say? That it takes a whole pot just to get you out of your bunny slippers?

Well, I say to you

These are not just mere little coffee cups. I drink out of a big fricken cups that delivers 20 oz’s of the juice per fill up.   And the coffee that this joe swills is no  Folgers Fricken Crystals either.  The Chemex allows me to make it strong yet keep it smooth.

By the time I get to my Fourth cup, My neurons are snapping like nobody’s business and my urine smells just like the Folgers Fricken Crystals your drinking.

Still, I do not merely drink just to piss Folgers.

I drink to experience the subtle nuances of a particular origin, to revel in the smoothness of the Kona Kowali, to feel the brown sugar goodness of the Tanzanian Peaberry tweak the edges of my tongue, and the peppermint after taste of the Jacu Bird Coffee lap up against the roof of my mouth.

Sure, my quest for new taste sensations end up getting me a bit overly jazzed up. But that comes with the territory. And, I will admit that there are times, especially in the wee hours of the morn, in which I swill the stuff more for the sake of kick starting my day then to experience the the different tastes from plantations around the world. Still, I imagine even the most refined sommelier likes to get ripped on a bottle of Chianti once in a while.

Well, Now i gotta go roast me up a batch of Guatamala Fraijanes- Finca Agua Tibia which I am told is a real kick in the taste buds, So I will see you folks later.

Last year, as you regulars might recall, I could not stop yammering about how much I liked a certain coffee from Tanzania called the Tanzanian Blackburn Estate AA. I still find myself yacking about it and I have been hanging on to the last remnants of a five pound bag that I won off of Ebay (which I will have to get around to finishing up before it starts to get moldy). Anyways, just like the third season of Dexter (which should be out on DVD next month) I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the 2009 Blackburn estate crop to show up on the Sweet Maria’s  site.

Well, the wait is over. Sort of anyways.

According to Tom of SM, who knows way too much about coffee, this years Blackburn AA crop suffered greatly on its trip from Mt. Oldeani to the port and he has decided not to carry it but did pick up the slightly more pricey but still worth it (5.65 a pound) Peaberry from the estate which somehow made the trip without getting faded or old tasting in the process.

Since the guy seems to know what he is talking about  (just take a gander at his site and tell me this guy is not a uber coffee nerd), I am going to have to take Tom of Sweet Maria’s word for it that the AA  is not worth it and stick with the peaberry for now. At least it gives me an excuse to use the extra drum that I bought for the Behmor (see picture).

I roasted my first 8oz batch of the stuff at P3 (the defacto profile) starting it at 12:00 and added an extra 3:30 after start to help lengthen up the last leg a bit.  I heard the first crack at the 2:20 mark but I cannot be sure since peaberries seem to want to crack real quiet like. The cool cycle hit before the second crack came and the batch came out looking pretty Full City.

The taste was not fully there the day after but the next couple days my tastebuds woke up to remember that smooth brown sugary taste that Tanzanian Blackburn estate is all about. It is definitely a good cup, if not as mind blowing as last years crop and I can see myself getting a bit more of it from SM before it runs out, especially since the India KatteHollay already is out already. (hey I just cannot have a paragraph without a statement in parenthesis can I)

If I can find it on theCoffee Buying Club or Coffee Buyng CoOp, I just might pick me up a few LB’s of the AA just for experimental sake, otherwise, I guess I must continue my search for a new favorite coffee (and then make sure I buy enough so that it lasts me).

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.