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A neon and caffeine buzz, courtesy of Water Avenue Coffee in Portland.
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Smørrebrød. Don’t know how to pronounce it, but I can’t get enough of it.
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Why I love Portland, #3 — Coffeeland!
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen sum it up pretty nicely, albeit Harajuku style, how we felt about coffee in Portland.
The proliferation of coffee is enough to want a second stomach: good, decent (but never bad) (or, at least, we never allowed ourselves that), hand poured, self-roasted, made-in-America stainless steel kone — everything that makes even the snobbiest of San Francisco coffee snobs sip and sigh.
Again, perhaps it’s thanks to the winter weather that encourages drinking, distilling, eating, and steaming your face and warming your hands with coffee.
The curse of buying whole beans is that you can’t buy a whole lot of it, unless you want to drink stale beans a month from now. Which makes Portlanders an instant envy.
But after numerous minutes waiting for pour-overs (and many trips to the bathroom later), I caved and came home with a single bag of Water Avenue oak aged Sumatra.
Which then brings me to the second curse of having to finish the whole bag within the week, instead of saving it for unhurried coffee appreciation. And that bums me out a lot.
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afternoon coffee on Flickr.
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weekend coffee on Flickr.
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Brown boy holding Bluebottle coffee in a brown cup on a brown table. Brown.
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Men being jerks about their wives’ coffee in coffee ads from the 1960s.
Fortunately, I will never be in a double-suck situation of serving crappy coffee (hello, Chemex) to a jerk (hello, sense of self-worth).
I hope.
(via Boing Boing)
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post-coffee clean by yours truly.
Being a coffee drinker from Australia means that you’re taught and expected to shun drip coffee in any form — it’s a country with an “espresso or nothing” mentality. (The fact that Australians associate bad drip coffee with Americans may have something to do with it.)
Of course, none of this matters if you don’t care how your coffee tastes. But drip coffee is easy argument fodder — especially if you used to be espresso-only but now happily embrace the drip-side too. And I have defended it, many times; the pinnacle being at a friend’s roommate at their Christmas dinner. Real classy.
After that mostly amusing but still uncomfortable episode, I realised that it’s a futile argument to have. It’s just coffee.
But then again, what good are friends (or in this case, their roommates) if they can’t be open-minded about coffee? It’s just coffee.
The case I (try to) make is that the deliciousness of coffee will always be in direct proportion to how much care was put into the entire process — beans, brewing, the person who’s drinking it. Bad coffee is a combination of
- Great beans and a barista who wants everyone to know (and indirectly taste) that it’s her time of the month.
- A great barista using beans that are better off as diaper filler.
- A great espresso shot pulled by a kickass barista, who then proceeds to burn the milk.
- Coffee that dissolves.
- …ad nauseum.
So regardless of method, good coffee is coffee done right, exactly the way you like it. For at-home coffee brewers, you can start with a little research and the folks at Bluebottle are very helpful with this preparation guide.
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Coffee prices are going up — which, on a daily basis, might go unnoticed. But it definitely starts to sting when you find yourself paying $11 for a half-pound of beans when they used to be $8.
(If you’re asking why anyone in their right mind would pay $8, let alone $11, for half a pound of coffee beans — okay, so I buy Bluebottle and Mr. Espresso beans.)
(If you’re still asking why, then maybe you should pull your head out of your giant tub of Folgers. Just saying.)
Still, Coffee Bar puts it nicely in their blog post —
Now, there’s still plenty of crappy coffee out there, but never before have we been able to reliably locate within each neighborhood a go-to coffee source for responsibly sourced and prepared, high quality specialty coffee, and a top notch cup of coffee is still a relatively inexpensive luxury that we can all afford at a café or at home.
And that, folks, is why it’s worth the extra dollar. And cafés that make great coffee are nothing without you and me — the drinkers.
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More slo-mo goodness, this time with coffee and creamer.
From Modernist Cuisine, a 6-volume cookbook for the Ferran Adrià in all of us.
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