I have to start somewhere...

... 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 people if I didn't get over it. So in my weekly letter home to my parents I broke the news about what a wimp their son was. Support was mixed: "it's alright to have cream & sugar", "you'll learn to like it", "maybe it was old coffee... he never throws anything out!"

Turns out my mother was right (mothers are like that!)- it was old rancid coffee. I tried a cup once I got home to Reno and found "Hey... that's not bad!" It took another year to get past cream & sugar, but by the time I was 12 I was hooked.

In 2003 I was with the woman who earlier that year had become the 3rd Mrs. Bowman. Celia's as passionate about coffee as I am. When I brought up interest in starting to make espresso for us but couldn't bring myself to spend the $$$, she reminded me that neither of us drink alcohol, so why shouldn't it be ok to spend a few $$ on an espresso machine. Within about a day it morphed from getting an espresso machine into getting an espresso machine, a grinder and a small fluid-bed (air) coffee roaster.

All was going well except that tiny roaster could only handle enough green beans for a little over a cup of coffee. So after 4 months of steady use, the little FreshRoast roaster went away to be replaced with a drum mounted on a spit and heated in our BBQ. That was an amazing experience.

I read everything I could find on Sweet Maria's web site. So I knew about first crack and second crack and roasted everything the same way. It took awhile to learn there was more to roasting than that.

That's sort of the start of things. This will end up in a bio I suppose.

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This blog is a crutch for me. It will serve as a record to remind me what I was thinking (or not thinking!) when I did or planned certain things. I'm getting old enough that details sometimes slip into the background and it takes me awhile to recall. I'm hoping this diary will speed that recollection.