CI traverses the ‘misty valley’ of the shadow of death
December 5, 2007 – 11:41 pmwhat you need, having wrestled a rapacious u.s. immigration bureaucracy to the ground, only to lose your case, at the eleventh hour, and be forced to dolefully ship home to africa one of your true friends, a person who had been the Upstanding Model of immigrant law-abidingness and cultural contributiveness and who had been eagerly embroiled in a semester of Deep Secondary Study … what you need is the, er, sweaterized ethiopian idido misty valley. sixty pounds of it, the jaw-dropping, gobsmacking, mind-altering stuff, to share with friends and ruminate over and drown your snotty snorfles in.
*sob* she is gone and our faith in the system is well nigh dead and the seasonal cheer, for us, holds only gruesome, flinty daggers. but we have the idido!
using a highly managed hot-air roasting approach, we’ve managed to take this coffee’s blueberry smash in the teeth a bit more subtle, teasing out instead some sort of harvest cornucopia of maple and barley and sweet gum. mildly rustic. juicy. and, after 60 seconds in the cup, completely different all over again.
between this blog and the cyrpriot and solis jake, we have enough sacks of the unroasted product to last us to the spring. might just park it here for a bit, mentally speaking, and refuse to indulge in other marvels. stay indoors. write savagely morbid villanelles. brood the holidays into submission. blarg.
Ahhh, the infamous Idido! I have enjoyed the city/city+ so much, I have only been able to force my hand once for a batch of Silvia offerings. Dare I say, I find the dark berry a little too domineering, I would prefer a little more complexity. Don’t hear me wrong, this is a very enjoyable cup! Dark berry, maple, toasted bread (like the edge of a blueberry muffin) and sweetness that intensifies as it cools. Just not a lot of African-shuffle on the old palate (personal preference). As an aside, I have opted out of juggling the lids on this bean.
BTW, are you talking about Clodia being deported?
actually, my espresso roast for the idido isn’t anywhere close to 2nd crack. it’s a very light city+ — and it’s awesome as spro. i’d argue that you can have your complexity and your spro both …
to get this, though, i have to use the lid-juggle. with my i-roast, i run a warm-up stage for four minutes, then a quick two-minute ramp-up, dropping the first lid halfway through to keep the temp moving up. then a long, hot final stage, during which i drop the second lid whenever the temp stalls. this takes it through first crack, which lasts for like two whole minutes.
once i’m sure that first is done, i’ll count 30 seconds and then lock in the final lid, causing the chamber temp to shoot up to its third-stage maximum (450 on my read-out). i’ll leave it there for about 5 seconds, then hit cool. not even a hint of second crack. so basically, first crack plus 30 seconds plus a brief temp spike.
your dark berry, maple and toasted bread doesn’t sound much different from my barley, maple and sweet gum. we could be hitting roughly the same area.
and yes, it’s claudia who was forced to leave — the reason for all the silence here on the blog. spent days and days using every connection in the book to find her another visa. immigration folks misled, lied, whatever, and one day she was deep in study at the institute. next day, she’s headed back to the village. depressing, in case you couldn’t tell.
Pulled a Schulman-like-city+-down-dosed-idido for me and the wife this morning. I jumped the gun a little (this batch should sit for another 12+ hours), but found hints of strawberry and very little (if any) dark berry (however, my sinuses get the best of me on the a.m. shift). I’m going to play around with the brew temps over the next week to try and take the edge off the acidity. I bet you could lock the bioluminescent jaws of the Cypriot if you pulled him a double off your lever machine! I’m still recovering from your EZ-tart-bomb from two years ago!
‘Twas good to chat last week. Dreadful news about Claudia.
nate: did you really just attribute a light-roasted, down-dosed, single-origin espresso to schulman?!?!?! please, no. that approach did not originate with a forum-prolific gearhead amateur. not that he hasn’t explored the dynamic …
as brightness goes, i’ve managed to eliminate most of it — little or no citrus to speak of in my idido espresso. i’d bet you need to stretch the gap between first and second crack a bit. of course, that may be harder to do, in your cold weather, without causing the roast to stall.
Apologies for my ignorance, Schulman is the only one I have read on the light-roast-down-dose approach (other than watching you do it). As far as brightness, I have tried to keep the roast profile at a place that showcases the bean’s defining characteristics, so brew temp has been my focus for balancing the cup. I pulled some darn tasty shots last night on the Silvia with the PID set at 229.5F (boiler temp — probably about 201-202F at the group). I set the PID at a high point that brewed a flat (burnt) shot and worked my way down until I found a sweet-spot that brought florals and fruit to the table without being dominated by acidity/brightness. Also, hotter temps seem to hone in on the chocolate notes which I prefer for milk drinks.
no grounds here for criticizing ignorance, obviously. i didn’t know if you were trying to get my goat with that reference or what.
the misty valley has a fairly broad range of roast and brew temp tolerances, i’ve found. but how do you know what “the bean’s defining characteristics” are? do those come from the sweet maria’s label, or what?
just being difficult. i operate on the same assumptions, but often find myself wondering why i’m striving for one thing, flavor wise, when i am clearly finding (and liking) something else.
with the idido, i actually am tasting very little of the blasting berry flavors that people talk about. and i’m on the verge of saying, “who cares?”
No shots being made about ignorance, nor attempts to get goats, just confessing my normal modus operandi.
Regarding “defining characteristics”, I think a whole book could be devoted to this matter. In my humble quest, I have found little to no definitive input on the subject. I would lump this issue in the category of : Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or is there something inherent within the object on display that transcends time, culture, and opinion?
Let’s use EZ as an example. Is it taboo to drag out the roast profile, leaving the cup dominated by heavy caramel rather than the subtle presence of jasmine, honey suckle, blood orange, mango, etc? In my mind, I can get caramel from many beans (even sub-par beans) but I cannot get the characteristics of a gesha crop from a Sumatra.
So, in my mind, these qualities “define” gesha and place it within a category of it’s own; and when I come to a table with gesha on it (like a crop I encountered tonight from Costa Rica) I come with a certain level of expectancy. This is where I would establish my “defining characteristics”. From there, I set paramaters in my roast profiling that interacts with those characteristics. (I normally seek to showcase those qualities, but if I do otherwise, I attempt to do it without totally losing them.)
This is not a hard and fast rule (I use a wide range on some beans like: Guatemala, Kenya, Costa Rica, etc.) but I am pretty dogmatic about it when it comes to most East African coffees (Idido included). The characteristics that “define” the origin are totally lost if not roasted properly. Can you still get a good cup with a different profile? Absolutely! However, the characteristics that “define” the origin (placing it on the map — so to speak) are lost.
Could a filet mignon be enjoyed well done? Possibly, but rare to medium rare is the sweet spot (on my palate . . . and most other red meat lovers.)
I am serious dude, if you made a post out of this philosophical question, the comments would be endless! I am not even sure there is a “right” answer, but this is how I tend to operate.
I would love to hear the blogwife’s input on this (yours are obviously welcome as well!) What would her perspective be in regards to objective beauty in visual art and would that parallel this discussion as a culinary art?
philosophically, it comes back to whether or not taste is relative. it’s strange to me that some of the third-wave pontificators have gone so far as to say that “taste is the only morality” (overused ruskin quote) but then shy rabidly away from saying definitively what’s good and bad.
now, if taste ISN’t relative, then perhaps there’s a range of “goodness” to be found in an absolute set of characteristics. furthermore, maybe the reluctance to make clear calls on “goodness” and “badness” is just modesty, since none of us yet knows anything remotely close to what coffee has to offer, and how to tap it.
but, hey, that’s the crux: is coffee just coffee, endlessly complex and not remotely close to being “decoded?” or are its endless variations rooted in something else? some other standard, that could be used as a rough guide for deciphering the strands?
i’ll get the blogwife to weigh in. you’re making me feel guilty for just “messing around.”
Waking up in the ‘burbs of Chicago this morning. Maybe I will weigh in with the old chaps at Metro and Intelli . . . stir it up a bit ; )
i really like Lana Lang on Smallville, she is actually an angel, very pretty indeed*~`