the way this blog’s mypressi twist comments are unspooling, we might just call for a lowbrow pocket spro-off between the new injection-molded marvel du jour and that supposedly pre-existing handpresso device, which appears to be made of, you know, metal parts. also, it’s french!

which is like saying the turkish grinder wins because it’s made of shiny brass.

oddest of all, perhaps, is that the makers of handpresso appear to have begun a photo contest featuring the handheld device in exotic locales. if only the folks at mypressi had tried such a stunt, this blog might have submitted a few …

p.s. wait, comments from attentive french people and academics? what is this blog, respectable?

lights your fire! if you know what we’re sayin’ …

spro from your pillow!

the beginning AND the end!

it suckles the flars!

pocket scooter fuel!

UPDATE: “… my favorite thing at the SCAA Expo!” – noted guru Peter Giuliano.

lewis, of course, is in colombia for this week’s national coffee competition as CoE’s newly installed “membership liaison.” sources tell CI that he actually saw the iron maiden airplane on the bogota tarmac. (first of all: TEH IRON MAIDEN! TEH IRON MAIDEN! secondly: don’t look, jon! you’re here to liaise with, you know, members!)

within hours, police were arresting “malcontents” who wanted concert entry “without tickets.” coincidence? we think not!

the only way out of this mess, as far as this blog can see, is if jon could somehow claim he was safely ensconced at the time in front of his computer screen, watching the united states barista championship … hmmm. looking at the time stamps, it’s a plausible alibi!

UPDATE: key quote:

rioters will have to “assume the costs of the stoplights and traffic signs that they damaged without just cause.”

stiff! still, this policeman seems to be implying that there could, indeed, be a “just cause” for tearing down traffic lights. in colombia, this may be true! and so this blog asks you, if a band of heavily haired, jangly-armed 1970s british rockers isn’t just cause, then what is?!?!

like most people who do it, this blog has secret, ulterior reasons for homeschooling its progeny.

we’ve discovered that if we let the unread coffee blog posts pile up in our rss reader — past 127, say — they start to disappear. goodbye, guilt! also, when you’re known to your acquaintances as a boil-brained coffee knave, there’s no telling what kind of gifts you might get:

the lever machine is now reconditioned. the southeast regional barista competition appears to be in swing, five months later than usual. and the blogfamily, with their shocking third-world coffee habits, have come and now gone. maybe we’ll see you around.

faced with a steaming, forlorn cuppa left on the bumper of an suv in morning traffic, this blog zoomed close to discern the brand — something along the lines of “french joe”! — and then, calling upon its evolved philosophical underpinnings, opted not to alert the driver.

justified taste snobbery, or a colossal failure to advance coffee consumption as a whole? this blog reports, you decide.

UPDATE: and perhaps even this post fails to adequately portray our moral self-righteousness! it’s true that we saw the cup and then sped diabolically away — but not before snapping this picture for triumphal use here!

UPDATE UPDATE: alas, had our sideview mirror not crept into the frame, we could have claimed here that we were riding the blogscooter on this morning commute. in order to, you know, cement our bulletproof feeling of moral superiority!

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: sparky. the weight of our strenuous holy rectitude is really wearing on this blog …

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solution: cabinet products!

1. Q-tip

2. pantry basics

3. dip tip in soda, coat with salt granules. scrub.

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result: bioluminescence!

there’s a windy, research-driven tome on water idling somewhere in the frontal lobe, about how the minor tweaks in water hardness do wonders for your spro. there’s a hearty screed waiting in the wings on the miserable lack of roasting help online — a void made more pronounced by how MUCH you can learn about, say, latte art and other madd barista skillz on these here webs that be interconnected. there’s the lurid pic of someone’s coffee-stained bicuspids (gonna be great!), a crotchedy review of that one-pound home roaster everyone bought and regretted, video proof that a past world barista champion secretly foments disdain towards the current world barista champion …

you get the drift. but if this episodic place of hackery is truly about fabulous coffee colliding with real life, then, well, what you get is sometimes a constipatory backlog due to complications stemming from the fire one started in the kitchen with one’s loaner roaster. and then the cascade of hades that followed, ranging from the maddeningly mundane (where DID those blogchildren put our shoelaces?) to the near-catastrophic (our vintage scooter broke down, in an intersection, and soaked this blog’s work tie in no less than a quart of premixed gasoline, necessitating Constant Mechanical Attention every evening for a period of weeks, &c, &c.).

so cheers to you! we’re now plodding through 14-hour work days in an effort to put in our mandatory time early enough to drive toward the barren midwest for the dully named “coffee conference.” oh, but the speakers! the topics! the promised presence of the madman, the barista-poet and nate the finger! unlike more festive coffee bashes, you’d be reasonable to expect deep reflective discussion on the, er, “moral, social and economic life of coffee.”

indeed. and we’ll barrel through the blackness toward that crucial swing state in effort to convince anyone we can to rethink a vote for the mavericky fighter pilot OR the changey hopeful inspirer and vote, instead, for coffee.

what’s this: 115 unread coffee blog posts in our RSS reader? they can’t all be caragay, can they?

and so this blog asks you, why should coffee?

oh, right. we’ve made it a specialty item.

UPDATE: “art also not feeling the hangover.” contrarian trend from a specialty item? nah. merely anomalous data from a rich population subset! we’re talking pickled bulls here.

UPDATE: “sarah palin wigs also not feeling the hangover.” yeah, but …

UPDATE: “smoky french chanteuse definitely feeling the hangover.”

note to that irish fellow, hasbean steve: nyah, nyah, nyah.

what will these studly taste geniuses think of next — that is, when they get back from trotting around colombia hulla for their rare, cold-cupped beans? espresso massage? supraspro? milan-grown “terrace” varietals?

key quote: “yes, it truly can.”

(hat tip, reader X)

p.s. reminds this blog of a whiskey-drenched coffee profile we read once …

p.p.s. question is, is rod lazar ripping off barack obama, or is obama ripping off lazar?

UPDATE: strange. this blog’s rss reader tells us that the world barista champion wrote about this very taste guru with his customary restraint (“My new favourite site ever“) sometime yesterday. but, ah, the post would appear to have been “moved.” not a fan of “killer so-spro,” james?

UPDATE: one thing that gnaws at this blog, late at night: that one day soon we might become a coffee snob … driving people away with our insufferable inscrutability. but that’s why rod lazar gives us hope. the true snobs, they’re all offended!

UPDATE: that thompson owen, of sweet maria’s — you know, the one with the “driest sense of humor on the planet” — is either strangely obsessed or intimately acquainted with that ista-bar czar, rod lazar.

UPDATE: sigh. we actually like euro pants. it was a floppy joke, aimed at a very cool guy. and an excuse to link to his sweet action trip photos.

p.s. you could argue, of course, that this blog’s involvement in greenville and atlanta made things less than memorable — scarring, even. in which case things might be overly memorable, no? but apparently not bloggable …

UPDATE: hoffmann, it seems, has “been rather unwell.” not too ill to read blogs, mind you. only to write them. hmpf! also, he seems kinda popular.

UPDATE UPDATE: then again, even counter culture’s glossy trip report has been out for more than a week. turns out hoffmann blogs about as rapidly as he pours latte art.

you might think the generous opportunity to crash with the blogwife at a certain east coast coffee juggernaut’s atlanta training center for a night would lull us into complacent, insidery back-slapping mode. you’d be wrong!

in another periodic bursts of bloggy public service journalism, this blog’s secret cameras bring you these shocking images from the high-powered coffee locality, where espresso and brewing standards, one hopes, would be at their highest. alas, it was difficult to fall asleep once these scenes were seared on our brain.

a forgotten espresso puck — left in the portafilter all! night! long!

five-pound bags of the good stuff — standing! open! for literally hours!

in related investigative work, this blog’s home espresso machine strangely stopped operating almost immediately after the champeen came through. the heating element, it seems, is suddenly kaput. obvious initial theory: hoffmann pilfered it! so lessee, that’s a total of one spoon, one heating element and a lot of sleep lifted — that we know about so far.

indeed, keeping our eyes glued to the fellow in atlanta, we managed to come up with the following photographic evidence:

well, ok, it’s hard to see. but there’s flatware in them gargantuan british bum pockets.