I want some coffee!

The new Berkey 'Royal' water filter is really everything it was said to be in terms of water taste. But the proof is in the cup and I was emphatically not impressed with the first taste of Colombia Timaná; C, however, thought it was great. When it comes to water, one of the things that can ruin a cup of good coffee is water that lacks minerals (think water softener). But the Berkey does not remove dissolved minerals from the water. And as good as it tastes I have to think that's right. We use #6 Melitta filters to drip our coffee (not this but close). I expected good things with the great water coming from the new Berkey. But to my taste the coffee was blah and I thought more acidy. Both C and I have years of using Melitta filters, in my case going back to about 1955. I remember reading the instructions that came with that porcelain filter holder telling the user to pour about 1/4 of the water to wet the coffee, let it sit about 45 sec, then slowly add the rest of the water...

We have used local tap water that has run thru a Brita filter for decades. We use it for drinking water, for brewing coffee and for cooking. One of those 'basics' I have taken for granted since my parents bought their first one sometime in the late 1970s. At that time my father didn't think Angels Camp had good tasting water. Redwood City where I lived had ok water but I tried one anyway and when I realized the Brita removed all that chlorine taste I was sold for life. Fast forward to 2017. C started having problems with her gut which got worse by the day. She struggled for months of gradually worsening discomfort and finally went to the doctor. She struggled another couple weeks waiting for lab results that came back positive for giardia. A few weeks later I started showing similar symptoms and went through the same treatment: 5 days of metronidazole then as many probiotics as I could choke down every day to get my gut back in working order. C took about 6 months to get ba...

That's our traditional question every morning as we finish eating and uncover our coffee for the first sip. It's a morning ritual that doesn't vary much and I look forward to it. It gives me a chance to talk about what I roasted. I skip the flowery descriptions that are in the cupping notes below- they're mostly lost on us. This morning's Colombia Timaná was pretty good so it rates a +1 on may makeshift  -1|0|+1 scale... no fractions allowed. Celia was delighted but I thought it was missing something. Yet the preceding day I was very happy with these same beans. So it appears it's sensitive to the brewing process which recently has been changing. (Guess I'd better do one about that too.) This morning we had Colombia Timaná Vereda San Marcos from Sweet Maria's- Cupping Notes: The dry fragrance has smells of sweet baked goods, oatmeal raisin cookies, banana bread, and more. The wet aroma is along the same lines and shows sweet dried fruited smells at C...

I like to put labels on the degree of roast but, lacking structured experience (training by someone with cred), I have to plagiarize from sources I respect. The label I assign to a roast to keep track of what I've done and the code (C, FC+, etc. below) fit with the cupping notes that Sweet Maria's provides for their offered green beans. I pirated these images from the Sweet Maria's article " Using Sight to Determine Degree of Roast " . His article is better than my summary here but this is a reminder for me of what I'm looking for ina roast.. Roast Name     Symbol  Description  Image  Temp  City  C  Lightest brown roast for the  variety involved (varies);  texture is smooth but not  polished. 1C is ended (hard to  determine as there's not a distinct  end)..    ~ 426°F  City +  C+  Roast is a little darker than City  and the beans are starting to look  a little polished; no oily drops ...

I posted a little about buying green beans from Sweet Maria's. SM really makes it easy since they cup everything they sell and make those result available to the customer. Helps me feel I can rely on the descriptions they write (not a universal approach with coffee importers). Even with detailed cupping notes it can be hard to choose what we are going to like. There are a lot of coffee flavor & aroma subtleties that are lost on me. But thanks to buying enough coffee that just didn't work for me, I have settled on a few personal guidelines- If it doesn't say something about "chocolate", I probably won't bother If the notes suggest a light roast, I won't bother If it makes reference to tea flavors, it will probably be lost on me, so I won't bother The obsession with chocolate flavors (I'm talking dark chocolate here, not the too-sweet version that comes from Hershey's) is kind of a negative interpretation stemming from disappointment with cof...

... and it's not easy! Those roasts that can't be saved no matter how long they rest have to be remembered! The results of tasting the coffee for flavors and aroma characteristics is called 'cupping'. It's usually done blind, meaning the taster isn't told what it is they're tasting so they aren't prejudiced by a favorite. My simple +1 to -1 scoring system pales in comparison to the SCA/SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association and the affiliated Specialty Coffee Association of America) scoring system of 0 to 100 demanded of those completing their certification process. Their system evaluates the subtleties of specific flavors, aromas and characteristics of each coffee evaluated in cupping. But that takes training and that's not going to happen. The cupping score (upper left) shown here, called a 'spider' diagram, is from Sweet Maria's and is the evaluation  they gave to these beans from Colombia. Inzá is a town (in the 'department' ...

The Aillio Bullet I use to roast coffee has a few features that help make those of limited skill (that would be me!) appear to be smarter than they are. As I mentioned before, the 4 determining sensory inputs that guide the roast are sound (1C and 2C), sight (mostly color), smell (which can be illusory) and temperature. One of the reasons I wanted to buy the Bullet is that it has what I think is a good temperature measuring system. The Bullet provides... Bean Temperature from a thermocouple Drum Temperature from an infrared sensor Bean Temp (smooth green line at left) originates from a thermocouple probe located in what the designer hopes is the center of the bean mass as the beans tumble inside the drum. The user can defeat that carefully chosen geometric location simply by choosing a different batch size than what was intended. As a user I don't know if my typical batch size of 550 gm of green beans causes any errors or not, but being consistent from batch to batch should cancel...

Outdoors! To paraphrase Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court : there's more than one way to skin this cat. A few ways of roasting that come to mind are to roast the green beans... over a fire in an iron skillet (remember Dances With Wolves?) in a hand cranked popcorn popper on your stove in a hot air pop corn popper in a purpose-built hot air roaster (called a fluid bed roaster) in a purpose-built and sophisticated gas fired drum roaster or a simpler version like a BBQ mounted drum on a spit in a purpose-built electrically-heated drum roaster , either inductive or radiated in a flour sifter with a heat gun (yes, I'm serious!) and, according to Thompson Owen of Sweet Maria's, you can even use a gas fired oven or a last resort, with a heat gun and a dog bowl ! Flour sifter roaster What won't work is a microwave or anything that involves water directly. And roasting in your oven will get it done but (as linked above) the likelihood of a good t...

... and a lot more fun! During 2018 I noticed sales info on the Sweet Maria's web site about a relatively new roaster made in Taiwan called the Bullet. It's made by Aillio in Taiwan in small batches to tightly controlled specs. Pricey but it could handle a batch size of 300 g to 1 kg of greens (about 0.7 lbs to about 2.2 lbs). What is unique about these roasters is that the drum is heated inductively (like a residential inductive cook top). That would go a long way to improve response time to desired heat changes. The issue was (is!) that  roasters are scarce as hen's teeth. And at $2,600 they were about the price of a small travel trailer. Since thermal lag and batch capacity is an issue with the HotTop, and because the inductive heating and thermal capacity of the Bullet would address that, I was interested. When the announcement came at the beginning of 2019 that Sweet Maria's was about to receive a batch of Bullets, I figured there wasn't much chance...

... in A Dog House on Wheels . Roasting took a hit starting in 2009 when we got our first RV. We were reduced to buying roasted beans form Starbucks (Verona, either regular or decaf,  is still a great choice!). After traveling all summer we would head back to Santa Fe in the early fall and I'd get back to roasting. And I'd make sure we had some extra when we started out the next season. I don't roast while I'm on the road- power is always limited and roasters use a lot of it. There are purists that roast their beans in a cast iron skillet over a fire but I just don't have that skill level. Besides, it's so easy to get Verona! After we got a lifetime lease for an RV lot in an RV park in southeast Arizona ( SKP Saguaro Co-op ) in 2013, we found we spent less and less time in Santa Fe. So we decided to sell the Santa Fe house and commit to having only our RV as our only home in Benson. The 5th wheel went away in favor of a 'destination trailer' (closer to a...

... and I'd only just started. That first fluid-bed roaster was a great intro to roasting. But it was noisey! The beans crashed around inside the roasting chamber and made a terrible racket. That bean noise masked the sounds the roasting beans make that the person roasting needs to hear to track roast progress. After a few months I learned a guy named Ron Kyle (he started RK Drums ) was finding homes for his first prototype lot of coffee roasting drums. Those first few were something like $80, but I missed that by a few days and got one from the first production lot for $120 (#105 as I recall). I had to supply a propane BBQ and a motorized spit. But we were into freezing weather so I dragged my feet after ordering the drum. Before I could roast the first batch of greens, Ron sent me a note and asked if I was interested in an industrial spit drive motor since most BBQ spit motors weren't up to the job for 4-5 lbs of green beans and they ran at the wrong speed (too slow). I said...

... began in San Francisco. Roasting started for me in late 2003 when I wanted to try my hand at pulling espresso shots. We'd become addicted to cafe con leche while in Key West and wanted to be able to make our own. We had just bought the Santa Fe house and were back in San Francisco for a couple weeks to gather up the basics to bring with us plus get the movers loaded. A quick look at the local Safeway on Noriega made it clear a bag of beans labeled "Espresso" wasn't to be had. I already knew about Sweet Maria's across the Bay in Oakland- that's where I'd bought the coffee grinder. So I already knew that they were a supplier of green coffee beans. I found a cheap fluid bed (hot air) roaster for something like $75. And green beans were a bargain compared to a can of Yuban. "Wow! This was going to save a bunch of money!" Yeah, right. I ordered the roaster and a sample of greens. The new espresso machine (a Giotto which looked similar to this ne...

... and I guess this is it. I've been a coffee drinker since about 1949 when my paternal grandfather offered me a cup with my breakfast one summer while I was visiting. I'll never forget it... it was disgusting! I must have spit rinse water for 15 minutes. My grandfather (JO to acquaintances, Oscar to his friends, and Pa to me) was greatly offended by the wasted cup. We were only 4 years out of WW-II and coffee was still hard to come by. In truth, timing probably had little to do with being offended. He was frugal by nature and horrified by waste. My grandmother Ida (I used her given name; the photo is circa 1912) was nearly in hysterics (which did nothing to help Pa's mood). When she stopped laughing long enough, Ida doctored the coffee with milk and sugar and, as we all know (and with apologies to Julie Andrews), "...a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down". But I was embarrassed and thought I probably would never make it in the world of big pe...