insects and Coffee

Holidays are tough on getting good coffee…

Things are pretty square at the new job, rather easy that is. Nothing new; banking, paper work, scheduling, covering for the folks that don’t show up for work (what is that about?). I do miss hanging about that LAB though… it has been over a two weeks since my last cupping. I have been sick, and on holiday… but none-the-less two weeks!

I did pull a few shots of Ritual Cafe’s Red Flag Blend last week in the LAB; Oliver was down that way and picked some up to bring back>>>

Notes on Ritual’s Red Flag Blend:

Roast Date 12-06-07 : Extraction Date 12-18-07

18-19 grams : 200F : 1.25 to 1.5 oz. : 24-30 sec.

Fruit, Fruit, Fruit… Papaya with Lime… Lemony, Bright (not like a lime bomb tho), Light Body, Tropical fruit, pineapple, thin, Touch of earthiness >>> like oak or peat? Big African flavors. Overall pleasant.

It was literally a few shots, only had enough to pull three doubles and it was gone. First shot 12 seconds, second 29, third 25. Not the best scenario to judge an espresso blend. That and I got it nearly a week and a half out of the roaster.

Over all thought: Liked it, not my favorite… need to give it another go under better conditions. Oliver took similar notes the week before.

Well, I’m back from Mexico.

Things have changed in my job a bit, I am now the Manager of one of our cafes, just a stones throw from the roastery… tis’ to be a temporary thing until we find someone. I don’t mind the job, it’s just not my passion. We’ll see. Maybe it will grow on me, I have always wanted our Baristas to have more passion about the Coffee… maybe this is the way to get them there.

Like I said… Back from Mexico. I took a trip to Atlanta a few months ago to train our staffs in our new cafe in Decatur, and just as with Mexico, the first few days I saw no Insects. When I was in Atlanta I got a little creep-ed out by this, as if the Atlantins had dusted the city with a cloud of bug-death. I’m not fawned of poison; what kills bugs probably kills me.

Turns out my eyes were not opened to the Insects that are out there. The different ways they fly and crawl and noises they make. After a few days in Atlanta I wondered how I could not have seen them all. The bees and wasps are the size of small birds over there.

It was the same in Mexico… just did not see any Insect life the first day and a half… not even mosquitoes, although I did get two bites. After that I started to see them… Ants are big in this part of Mexico, the Yucatan that is. Some of them so small it was hard to get in close enough to shoot them, others so fast and furtive they too where difficult to shoot as well.

Alas I did get a few good photos on this trip, I’ll try and get them up on my Flickr page soon.

Here is a nice shot I got just before dark in Playa del Carmen. >>>

Ants ravaging a dead honey bee, hauling her of to their sandy borrow.

Side Note: No good coffee to be found. Well, at least nothing totally rockin’.

The Pig was a good pig, the best Pig ever. 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way… Years ago I decided to stop having favorite coffee cups because all of my favorites had very short lives; dropped in the sink, dropped on the cafe floor, left on the bumper of my truck, on and on. So, no favorites no pain (easy to say, I still have secrets tho).

So, my favorite Tamper, the old model Compressore (slightly different than the new ones you can get now), which I hide and lock way when I’m not workin’ the machine, the Tamper I told Ellie she could not use because she was a porta-filter tapper (sorry Ellie)… well, it flew out of my pocket while running from the cafe and bounced down the sidewalk. :( drag! Handle beat to hell and the piston is all nicked up on the edge. :(

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The good news is my Special Lady had a demitasse picked up for me from Grumpy’s Cafe in NYC. I brought it to work today to christen it. I did that with a single origin Brazil that we had in the LAB. Peanut butter and grape jelly, on whole wheat honey toast, with hints on almonds and unsalted french butter. So, good! Nicely balanced.

…and here it sits in my new Grumpy’s cup (not my favorite cup!). >>>

Other bad news… did not get to the Dominican Republic coffees today… going to have to get second hand notes from the roasters upon my return from Mexico.

Bob sample roasted up some coffee from the Dominican Republic yesterday. One of our colleagues (Byron) from the Atlanta roastery bought a farm there this last year, and one of the many things that is growing there is coffee. You guessed it, he sent us some samples.

We did not get it to the cupping table today as planned, at least I hope we did not get to it, for I did not get to it. If we do cup it tomorrow I’ll post some notes, if I missed out I’ll post the notes of someone else.

I’m very curious to see how it comes out.

Yes! The digital timer Mod works great. But… turns out, just as I had suspected, I need a tighter grip on the delay. The MDL grinds 16.5 grams of coffee in 2 seconds, and 23.3 in 3 seconds. And so, looks as tho I do really need to order the new IC for my circuit board.

Then, maybe I’ll rip in to the MDL or maybe take the Timer over to the Dancing Goats Espresso Bar and install it in the ROBUR (with the ROBUR I’ll have to bypass the switch, it has a starter mechanism in there that I am not familiar with yet—have not ripped a ROBUR switch apart yet).

Meanwhile, got a message from Roberto at NUOVA, he has a different Timing mechanism in his warehouse that may meet my needs with the MDL.

Here is what the current Timer MOD and box looks like (the external model that is, if I keep it as an external type I’ll have to trick it out in some retro-futuristic style) >>>

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Not very pretty, but hey, it works!

The most obvious is this web site, if you’ve been check’n it out in the past few days. I’ve been trying to tweak the CSS, not much luck yet. WordPress has so many little files and I’ve yet to figure out which ids and classes go to what, and how.

On to good things, I have not gotten the go ahead quite yet to rip in to and install a digital timer Mod on Nuova’s MDL (the grinder in on loan from them), and so I’ve made this external timer Modual that I can plug the MDL in to, or any thing for that matter.

I’ll be trying this out tomorrow, in spite of not having my newly programmed IC yet. The IC in my timer Mod has 1 second delays, I want 0.1 second delays (more control). I need to order the part from the original programmer… and well… he lives in Australia. It is going to take a little time. Maybe I’ll have it when I get back from Mexico. Yep!Heading to Mexico for a week, out of the dark wet Northwest for a bit.

We’ll, i’ve moved things to a new host… and so, starting over with the blog.

Going to jump straight into things and if i find any thing from the old site that may be interesting i’ll try and move it over into the archives at some point.

On to the exciting things!

I just got a new grinder from the folks at NUOVA Simonelli, the MDL… at first I thought that it might be too much of a machine for me to handle: on, off and that is it — 19 grams in 3-4 seconds, or there abouts.

The first stumbling block with this grinder was all the coffee spraying out into the dosing chamber leaving all the fine particulate stuck to the sides of the chamber, every once in awhile dropping to the bottom effectively changing up the grind on me. With NUOVA’s MDM the same thing happens. This is easily fixed on the MDM by holding your fingers in front of the throat of the grinder until the it clogs up and starts dropping the grounds straight down in to the doser. This was not the case with the faster MDL. With the MDL this clog would blow out very quickly. I messed around with a lot of ideas and finally came up with this…

I modified the throat of the grinder with this bit of plastic (from a milk jug) to stop the coffee from spraying out of the burrs, now the coffee drops straight down; no more static, no more spray.

Hands down my new favorite grinder.

Fast. Very fast. Too fast. I am now working on installing a digital timer.

—elvin