Damn Good Coffee!

Agent Cooper would be proud.  Multifaceted, visionary auteur filmmaker David Lynch has developed his own brand of specialty coffee.

Choosing only organically grown beans, famed film director David Lynch established an extensive, personalized testing method, and began to systematically narrow down the field of his favorite roasts and beans.  He eventually chose three unique coffee blends to package under his own label.

Pure Coffee Blog managed to get past all the viral marketing critiques to the actual taste of the actual coffee and declared it "delightfully fresh".

[Link courtesy of The Awl]

percolator coffee

When you have just enough training in specialty coffee to be dangerous, you tend to look down your nose in disgust at the very concept of percolator coffee. It seems like a dangerous recipe for over-extraction at best; on a more subjective level, most of us have painful memories of being served something out of a percolator -- probably at "coffee hour" after church -- that resembled not so much coffee as filth-clouded pond water.

It was, then, part madness and part experimental curiosity that led me to experiment with making "good" percolator coffee. The percolator, a classic General Electric model probably dating from the 1970's, was purchased in excellent condition from a nearby St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store for a reasonable $7.00 USD. I started with fresh beans as usual to the top edge of my handheld blade grinder's bean reservoir; a full-bodied blend taken just past full-city into a "medium" roast; I filled the percolator to the 8 cup mark, set the switch all the way to "dark", and plugged it in.

The resulting coffee was extraordinarily palatable considering my low expectations. In fact, it had many of the qualities of gold filter coffee -- moderate residue and oils, no paper filter aftertaste -- and none of the bitter tang of hyperextraction I had feared. I am not sure exactly how a coffee brewed by pushing hot water through coffee grounds, and then re-pushing said coffee through the same grounds again, etc., would produce such a fine, silky-satiny, even-tempered dark-amber brew with overtones of maple and brandy. It seems...counter-intuitive. And yet, our grandparents weren't crazy after all. They just shouldn't have used canned coffee.

I am filing this experience under "success" and will continue to drink this coffee in the future. Good luck with your own experiments!

coffee in celebration of life

My uncle Pete -- father, sailor, mountaineer, vagabond, poet -- passed away recently, and at the reception following his well-attended memorial, coffee was served. Specifically, it was Batdorf & Bronson -- a small-batch artisanal roaster in Olympia, WA, and his favorite coffee purveyor. Purchased from their retail specialty coffee operation, Dancing Goats, the varietal on offer was Costa Rica La Minita Del Sol. True to what it says on the package, the brew

features a brilliant acidity and luscious body that combine for perfect balance and illuminate flavors of maple syrup and freshly squeezed orange juice. This coffee is sweet and rewarding, with a crystal clean finish.

Pete would have enjoyed this coffee, I think. He had a great interest in Central American culture and history, and as highly trained a palate as anybody in our industry could ask for. He was a person who tasted life. It was very satisfying to share this coffee in his memory, and it will always remind me of him.

drive-by update

Hi gang. Whoa, four months of dead air? Embarrassing. Depressing. I have been writing up at storm at CWG on my "Diary of a Fading Rockstar" series, and working on some other projects I'm keeping close to the vest; plus my four year old keeps demanding that I "play Cinderella" in the role of Drucilla the Evil Stepsister.

Just as a placeholder I wanted to let you know that this site isn't dead and that there are wacky, even crazy ideas about coffee preparation and service coming up. One of my crazy ideas is I'm going to get some old -- sorry, I mean "legacy" coffee making apparatus, and sample cups from them in order to render a fairly scientific judgment.

I hope to acquire said equipment by Sunday, and hopefully will have something "in the can" for you to read Sunday night.

Until then --

Erik

Coffee Under Adverse Conditions

Some interesting coffee experiences can be had where circumstances are not particularly optimal for preparation. My favorite one of these was brewing coffee “cowboy style” on a camping trip - fistfuls of coarse grind tossed into a pot of water boiling over the campfire, strained through a paper towel. We were at a very high altitude, and water boils at a lower temperature there, so it also did not get quite hot enough to steep fully. Nevertheless, I remember sipping the brew out of a glazed metal camping mug and feeling such pleasure at the flavor and aroma in that setting of fresh mountain air and camp fire smoke. I wouldn’t dream of preparing coffee in such a manner at home, and most definitely not for invited guests; but it suited me fine.

This morning I was confronted by a cracked press pot carafe, and since it would have been a drastically inconvenient expedition to try and track a new one down before lunch, I decided (at my wife’s advice) to break out the stovetop espresso maker. I’ve been having trouble for a while now getting decent-tasting espresso out of ours; it is one of the old school models that’s molded out of aluminum, rather than stainless steel, and aluminum appliances can be impregnated with unpleasant odors and flavors that can be passed on to the food prepared in them. Also, it may be superstition on my part, but I just find that espresso made in stainless steel models tastes better somehow.

I’m not skilled at brewing stovetop espresso like my Italian wife is; I inevitably have temperature and timing issues, and the process seems to take forever. What I have been getting out of our stovetop unit is one of those “coffee-like beverages” I discussed earlier - black hole shots of the sort that are sternly denounced in the specialty coffee retail profession (instead of a regular surface-covering cap of crema ranging from nut brown to copper red, one finds a ring of weak colorless crema or even just bubbles around a black liquid surface; this product screams “Bitter!!!” to the trained eye). In addition to the black holes, the espresso is murky rather than luminous. The flavor profile is like a list of “how-not-to’s” - bitter, oily, acrid, harsh, leaving an aftertaste, etc.

My remedy in salvaging something drinkable from this decoction was the one used by people the world over: milk and sugar. The resulting beverage was drinkable. There were interesting qualities to be noted in the flavor profile; although bitter, oily, acrid, harsh, and leaving an aftertaste, there also was an interesting body quality that lingered on the tongue, and the ghosts of some of the mid-range flavor qualities lingering in the finish (citrus, wine, etc.) One might say that drinking this cup was like settling for a below-average Chianti so that one has something to wash down a plate of spaghetti with.

You are probably wondering why I even bothered to drink this beverage rather than pour it down the sink. The reason is that my fascination with coffee includes endless curiosity regarding the bad coffee experience. How does bad coffee happen, why do so many people tolerate it, and how can it be prevented? In my case, the bad coffee experience was entirely my own fault, and very easily explained by a multiplicity of causes:

1. The espresso was not fresh, but pre-ground and stored in a paper to-go cup with tape over the hole in the lid. I’m not even sure how long it’s been sitting there.

2. I was just too damned lazy to get my behind out of the house to Bed, Bath & Beyond or Target to buy a replacement carafe for my press pot.

3. I used unfiltered tap water.

4. We have a stainless steel unit somewhere in the house, possibly the garage, and finding it would have solved a lot of problems with the product that came out - but it also would have taken effort on my part, which I was unwilling to expend.

I could go on, but I think this is sufficient to paint a picture. Many of us want a coffee-like beverage in the morning, but are too lazy to go the distance required to having one better than merely potable. You could go to the local small-batch roaster for a cup of something decent, but the massive chain shop is on the way to work and has a drive-through. You could make your own at home, but you ran out of beans last weekend and haven’t gotten around to refilling your canister.

While it’s only human to be lazy sometimes, there’s no reason to settle for a reduced quality of life because of it. Effort, as it turns out, is a major component of any sort of enjoyment or pleasure. I think that we as a culture have become addicted to convenience, valued over and above quality that requires us to reach a little further. The tendency to indulge impulses of laziness - the “Why bother?” impulse - is less a moral failing than it is a symptom of depression, and anybody who’s paying attention to the way things are in the world has one or two good reasons to be depressed. But more importantly, the lazy way is not necessarily the easier way. We just have to make efforts directed towards pleasure a part of our daily routine. Not to make to fine a philosophical point about it, but remembering to keep one’s supply of fresh beans stocked is a hallmark of taking care of the business of taking care of oneself. When writing your grocery list do not hesitate to consider the status of your coffee canister. If you’re a regular coffee drinker, a half pound per week should do it (more than that and you risk overstocking). Remember that coffee is food. You’re drinking it for more than just the buzz, you’re drinking it to satisfy a sensual desire. If you think of it in those terms, you’ll be less likely to deprive yourself.

Coffee For the Non-Coffee Drinker

I have found that the particular tastes, expectations, desires and demands of the “non-coffee drinker”, in regards to drinking the drink that they do not drink, to be fascinating. On a regular basis, I am called upon to prepare a beverage for the person who introduces themselves by saying “I normally don’t drink coffee. What would you recommend?” Others who might more accurately describe themselves as “infrequent coffee drinkers” have done so just enough times to acquire a taste for something that almost tastes like coffee, but as little as possible; still others desire the taste, but none of the other things that go with it (caffeine, sugar, fat, etc.) As a coffee drinker and server I am called upon to step out of myself and imagine what it would be like to (apparently) not like coffee very much, but perhaps just a little.

This is no small challenge, but it could easily have been a bigger one. Some grateful visitors from the midwest recently expressed, with some emotion, their relief at being served coffee “by someone who actually drinks it”. They then proceeded to describe, with distaste, coffee servers back home who had no taste for what they were serving, and therefore were unable to provide a product they had any personal or emotional stake in. Needless to say, my visitors were unable to derive any satisfaction from that coffee experience. It was a pleasure to provide that for them, but it was also educational for me, because it reinforced a suspicion of mine - reminiscent of the old adage (which I shared with them) to “never trust a skinny chef”. Coffee is food, as I have said before; and if you don’t taste the food you are making, how can you know whether it is any good?

Fortunately, I like coffee, and I have some strong opinions about what makes it good. Because of this, I also have opinions that need to be overcome if I am to sensitively provide service to people with different tastes than mine. I still have trouble with the concept of the raspberry mocha, for example - for me, it seems tantamount to pouring ketchup on a juicy slab of prime rib - but I think I am able to serve one that will satisfy the person who orders it. I can find the good in it - the fleeting aroma of good espresso as it disappears under a flood of syrup; the magical, alchemical intermingling of espresso and chocolate; and, well, I do like raspberries. I could really enjoy drinking some espresso while eating some fresh raspberries and fine dark chocolate. So, that’s the key - using my imagination.

Another instance in which this challenge crops up for me is serving decaffeinated coffee. Coffee that has had the caffeine removed has been altered, and there is just no way around this. Caffeine is part of the intrinsic flavor of coffee just as alcohol is part of the intrinsic flavor of gin. I can’t imagine drinking non-alcoholic gin. Now I have drunk good decaffeinated coffee, and recently; but it is a different beverage, a changed beverage, and as such it is not the one that I prefer. Coffee - and espresso in particular - contains several volatile chemicals in addition to caffeine that are stimulating, a rather complicated mixture of oils, esters, acids, sugars, etc. Some have been found to be vasodilators (i.e., chemicals which cause the capillary vessels to expand, thus increasing blood circulation, giving one that slightly “flushed” feeling), others raising the blood sugar level, some actually helping to release endorphins, and so on. The very act of drinking a hot beverage is in itself stimulating. It’s not the lack of caffeine as stimulant that I am challenged by; rather, it’s the lack of caffeine as a building block of coffee’s complex molecular flavor structure. Everyone knows what it’s like to try to cook from a recipe, get one tiny thing wrong, and have the whole thing go in the trash. Getting the salt and pepper wrong on a plate of eggs can make them completely inedible for me. It’s the same with the caffeine in coffee - without it, the coffee just tastes kind of funny.

However, I think it is to my credit that I have mastered the skill of proffering a beverage which I do not (okay, okay - seldom) drink. So far, I’ve received only positive feedback on the decaffeinated espresso beverages I’ve served, and as for the decaf brew, I never let it sit past the expiration point. I feel confident that I have the ability to craft something that might not please me but may please another, and I consider that an achievement worthy of some degree of pride.

That having been said, I offer to you an example of one of the moments that truly make my job worthwhile: A text message from a hard-to-please customer shortly after serving her a beverage I’ve definitely had to learn to make the way she likes it.

Coffee By Any Means Necessary

Coffee is food, but it is also an experience. As such, whatever parameters one chooses to frame that experience are a matter more personal than scientific. Everyone comes to coffee with a different set of biases, expectations, and desires; it is entirely up to you whether you enjoy your experience with coffee, whatever the circumstances, as there are an almost infinite number of methods for mediating, reducing, or purifying it.

My brother (a more than 20 year veteran of the industry) and I enjoy diner coffee, which we sometimes refer to jokingly as a “coffee-like beverage”. It’s rather like the cigar and wine aficionado who occasionally will light up a convenience store stogie with some cheap alcohol in a paper cup: Within some parameters, less subtle tastes may be called for - the backyard barbecue, the church potluck, etc. Coffee is a social drink almost more than alcohol, as it is consumed in the daylight hours when our mate-prowling masks are hung up in the closet. Because of this, it is sometimes necessary to drink “bad” coffee with sugar added for social purposes. In actuality, the only truly “bad” coffee I have ever had was in a resort in Mexico, a drink I hesitate to even grace with the name, unmatched in its foulness; it bore a certain resemblance to standing water in bird baths, or dredgings from an estuary. Because of my deplorable addiction to caffeine, I was forced to drink this concoction, which was clearly prepared with nothing but contempt.

By contrast, I have had “coffee-like beverages” in roadside diners that, while inferior in most respects, were prepared with some friendliness, if not actual love, that were quite passable, even palatable. Even a tepid or oleaginous cup can be tolerably ameliorated by a bit of maple syrup left over in the pitcher from breakfast. French roast is another type of coffee that seems self-defeating in that any recognizable flavor profile has been annihilated by the beans having been roasted beyond all recognition. Still, when you’re in a recording studio at 3:00 AM trying for the 96th time to eke out a memorable solo, a cup of steaming French roast seems like a godsend. Conventional wisdom in the coffee industry is that a full French roast is a way to squeeze the last bit of profit out of an inferior crop; but it may be argued that, like blackened catfish, what was originally a method for retrieving opportunity from the brink of disaster now becomes something people look forward to on the menu.

In light of these observations I want to report on a couple of recent “coffee-like beverages” I succeeded in enjoying. The first was a decoction of Vietnamese coffee, pictured here.



The coffee is served as it drips from a small metal filter basket directly into the cup; the grind is set to espresso, so the drip is glacially slow. One’s meal may be half over before the coffee is ready to drink. The beverage itself is charcoal-like, a true unabashed French roast, with overtones of kerosene. What’s more, when cream is requested, what one gets is sweetened (with corn syrup) condensed milk from a can.

This may sound abysmal to the sensitive, but to me, as I gnawed on a skewer of Mekong style grilled pork, it seemed fitting, it smelled evocative, it tasted curiously good. It is a rough-and-ready coffee experience, one suggestive of war zones and streetwise creature comforts. It is coffee that at one time or another was the best that could be accomplished with the materials available, and has since then become a regional delicacy. In fact, most haute cuisine bears a similar history; a solid majority of the dishes listed on the prix fixe menus of French restaurants were originally considered “peasant foods”. As for the coffee, I consumed every drop and regretted none.


Another recent potation to grace my palate was a canned iced coffee beverage from Tasco, purchased from one of White Center’s myriad Southeast Asian grocery stores. Reminiscent of Starbucks’ “Frappuccino” - albeit obviously “creamed” with some sort of coconut-derived glycerides that are probably lethal to the cardiovascular system - it was sweet, but not too much so, and reasonably pleasant tasting at room temperature. Couldn’t they have added some sort of whey or milk solids to make it taste less like palm oil? Of course to do that they would have had to add a lot more preservatives, and as it is the ingredients list is refreshingly short.

Part of the enjoyable experience of consuming this decidedly augmented coffee product was shopping in an Asian grocery, looking at all the pictures on the thousands of different cans - most without any English on them at all - and trying to guess what was in them. Fortunately this particular product was friendly to the illiterate Westerner.

In both of these instances, context is all. Available cuisine is often the most common mitigating circumstance surrounding coffee consumption; one can tolerate a mediocre or even sub-par shot of espresso after a sublime Italian repast, and the same is true of Southeast Asian cooking. What I am curious about and would like to explore is the taste of outstanding gold-standard Vietnamese or Thai coffee. Perhaps it would come in the form of a piping hot press pot of coarsely ground single origin coffee from the region. I can think of more than one small batch specialty roaster in Seattle that may offer mainland Southeast Asian varietals (as opposed to the already familiar Indonesian, Sumatran, or Javanese coffees). I will investigate the matter, and report back my findings.

Coffee + Soy or Coffee vs. Soy?

A question out there for you folks who for whatever reason mix soymilk with your espresso, drip, press, or other form of coffee. [If you find this subject matter disgusting, please move onward to the next post, and have a nice day.]

Has anyone found a brand of soymilk that does NOT break up into curds on contact with the acids normally present in coffee? Silk brand has a "creamer" product that holds up fairly well [some sort of emulsifying agent no doubt - hopefully not high in trans-fats or anything; i'll go read the carton later], but what if I want a soy cappuccino? Or is this simply a crime against both God and Nature, and I am simply being punished for my puerile habits?

Any and all comments warmly appreciated.