coffee

I'm old enough to remember instant coffee was the norm.  Stores were full of top shelf instant coffee with bottom shelf bricks of vacuum packed ground coffee that could have spent years in warehouses and grocery store back rooms until there was room on the shelf.  

Product placement is a big deal in retail.  The best sellers are at eye level and the bottom half is for the cheap stuff.  This store has their best coffee at eye level and the vacuum packed crap well below it.  Pay attention next time you go to the liquor store.

These pictures are from the 1986 movie, Manhunter.  Granted, this store was in Florida but it's a typical coffee isle across America at that time.  

A few things about coffee.  

1. Coffee begins to degrade two weeks after roasting.  

2.  Coffee hits it's peak flavor three days after roasting.

3. Mr. Coffee type coffee makers make a shitty cup of coffee.

4. There are thousands of different types of coffees to choose from.

My point is, anyone can overcome the banality of the store bought stuff and experience coffee the way it was meant to be.  That is, roast and grind your own from green, unroasted beans from some of the best coffee regions in the world at a price much lower than the outdated stuff on your grocer's shelf.

When I first got into roasting, I had no intentions on spending hundreds of dollars on a roaster just to make coffee.  I did it the cheap way with a 9 dollar pop corn popper and a hurricane lamp chimney.  

There's two methods of roasting coffee.  Fast and slow.  Fast roasting takes 90 seconds and slow roasting takes 15 to 20 minutes.  Fast roasting seems to bring out the flavors and nuance that slow roasting destroys.  This unit will produce a medium roast in 6 minutes, which makes it damn near perfect for my purposes.   

So much for the 20 dollar investment.  What about the green beans?  Tons of places online that sell green beans for a couple bucks a lb to $40 a lb for Jamaican Blue Mountain (my personal favorite) and everything in between.  It's like buying a car.  A Ferrari would be great but you don't have to settle for a used Yugo, either.  You can start with Guatemala, or any other central american country, and work your way down.  Look into Coffee Bean Corral.  They usually have bargains.  I've been buying beans direct from Kafetos in Guatemala for about $35 for 5 lbs.  Not bad.  Berman is another place that has tons of exotic coffees from all over the world with fast delivery.  It's easy to amass a collection of boxes full of different coffees, just to see what they taste like.  It's a free market with lots of competition so the prices are stable with lots of good sales to make room for new stock.  I'm not concerned with shelf life at all.  I still have some of the first beans I bought years ago and they roast up and taste just as good as the day I got them.  And they sat in an unheated garage all this time, in a paper bag.

Roasting is like making pop corn only messier.  When coffee is roasted it blows off chaff and fills the area with lots of floating coffee skin.  Best done outside.  Ask me how I know.  The chimney has a duel purpose.  To let the chaff out and the beans in.  This unit has no start button so it's plug n play.  Best use gloves so you don't burn your hands on the hot, glass chimney.  And that's pretty much it.  

Before I got semi-serious about roasting, I used to fire it up and let it run until the beans were black and oily.  In other words, burnt.  Too much heat kills the flavor.  Instead, listen for first crack.  It comes a couple minutes after startup and happens when the beans release moisture.  Second crack is when they release their oil, stripping all the good flavors, like burning toast.  

I prefer to roast 45 seconds after first crack is done.  A nice roast with all the good flavors.  Of course, the grind and brewing method could make or break it.  A conventional coffee maker won't pick up the subtle notes and tones that lingers under the surface.  A vacuum system will make the best coffee but the cheapest one I could find was over $80.  Best to invest $20 on a french press.  

Just for example, I was drinking Marsellesa coffee from a Mr Coffee type maker and it was good.  I tried some in a french press and I was shocked this very same coffee had floral notes and deliciousness the Mr Coffee destroyed.  Live and learn.

Here's my $20 french press with some Guatemala.  Yummy.

When I learned there was no such thing as an espresso bean I was shocked.  Espresso is the method of making espresso, not a type of bean.  The beans are usually house blends of at least three different beans.  The stuff you buy at the store are usually leftover beans roasted black for espresso.  Maybe this is why most espressos taste the same. 

This got me thinking of blending specific coffees to make my own espresso.  Here's my first espresso blend.

Brazilian 50%

Colombian 25%

Guatemalan 25%

Roasted together at medium, about a minute after first crack. 

It was ok.  I suspect my espresso maker wasn't up to par.

I knew some Cubans who made espresso by filling a sock with a pound of grounds and soaking it in a bucket of hot water and letting it steep.  That stuff was rocket fuel.  

I should point out I was out of the picture for a few years.  Not that I was sick or spent any time in the hospital or became a vaxx casualty.  I've been an anti-vaxxer since before the Gardasil fiasco.  This covid bullshit was even worse and I felt it necessary to immerse myself into research and compound my own medicines, since I refuse to see doctors or visit hospitals.  I came up with some interesting natural cures as a result.  The medical community has been weaponized as well as every other construct in life.  And it's weaponized against us.  

We all lost friends and relatives during this thing we're experiencing through death, cancellation, or drifting apart.  No one's been spared that and it's turned the world upside down.  We all know this was no accident, even those with koolaide hair and those responsible will pay.

There's so much that happened the last few years that it would be impossible to cover a fraction of it in a single post.  I'll try to put some puzzle pieces together in the future.  Hang in there.

Ok.  A post about coffee after a few years of total absence is like ignoring the most disastrous period in history but I have my reasons.  I choose not to dwell on the negative today and offer a cup of coffee instead.  

We're all in this together and if we stick together, even the far left, we can beat this.  

It's simple.  Don't comply.  Ignore any and all mandates.  Don't believe a word they say.  Find other ways to get the truth and get the truth out.          

Now, get out there and brew some coffee.