it turns out no one asked for just a cup of coffee. and out of many dozens of people (hundreds?) maybe four required sugar.

perhaps it was because this was a paying VIP crowd of handmade art patrons naturally prone to all things “craft.” but a real stunner for me was how engaged with new modes of coffee the indie craft parade crowds naturally were.

there was a bar of glass and salvage wood, and a glass and metal array of brewing devices (counter culture’s ethiopia yirgacheffe idido brewed on the bonmac pourover station, their kenya nyeri thiriku on a 5-cup siphon brewer, and a chemex/kone setup featuring gautemala la armonia hermosa roasted by me). basically an unmissable berry-forward option, an intense citrus experience and a complex, maple syrupy coffee.

helfen’s theory, and it’s a good one, is that serving in glass made all the difference when it comes to steering people out of the cream-and-sugar-adding reflex. he carted hundreds of the vessels up from atlanta, a decision that was transformational, in retrospect. also key: closeness. i had wished for a higher brew bar, but in reality the ability to lean over it like a table, plus a very narrow work space, made for a constant swirl of activity and an ability for drinkers to sort of get into the sensoryness, sans intimidation.

there was sugar and cream on hand — if someone asked for it. almost no one did. there was craft beer on tap right next to us, but plenty of folks still opted for the hot stuff. poor shannon became a highly repetitive lecturer on the forces driving siphon brew. and in the end, a buzzing thrum of people (we weren’t panicked, but also far from bored) made for an ideal context in which to open the senses.

as for this blog’s previous and fairly overtorqued questions of how much to SAY, it was suddenly clear to me how much enlightening contextual information should just happen, if you’re doing it right.

working theory: when it comes to customers, coffee words should essentially answer a person’s natural questions. his questions will arise from something compelling that he detects about your coffee. and if he has no questions, then your coffee is probably lacking in some regard and your attempts to enlighten him via words will often (but not always) be useless.

thus posits CI, upon consuming prodigious amounts of the leftovers and devoting itself to still more pernicious quantities of thought. *close tab*

p.s. having done many event-based espresso bars, it’s fairly astonishing how different in tone, pace and conversation a manual brew bar can be. that is all.

there are epic things you do with a headful of intentions. and then there are escapades where the big idea emerges only in retrospect. and so, this piece of food thought kind of sums up last weekend after the fact. if we’d read this before all the insanity, we would have claimed it as our motive:

(T)he cheapness of calories (both in terms of price and time) has led us to dramatically boost consumption. Food stops being something we make and create … and becomes something we simply ingest. Eating just gets easier. And then we get fatter.

(there’s all kinds of fascinating backup for this assertion. read the whole thing.)

But maybe we’re not just consuming more calories because they’re available at such a low cost. Maybe we’re also consuming more calories because each calorie gives us less pleasure. …

Because we didn’t make the milkshake ourselves, because that dinner only required a few minutes of work, we need to consume more calories to get the same baseline of satisfaction. The solution to this problem, of course, is simple: We need to take time to make dinner.

the idea, then, was to build an outdoor oven made of cob — sand, straw and backyard clay — and use it as sort of a social experiment. we would produce a massive stream of food over four days. we’d invite as many weirdly different people as possible. a cured pumpkin (rouge vif d’etampes) would be the seasonal centerpiece and live-brewed coffee would provide the glue, the aesthetic shorthand: “this is elemental. this is good. and it is made right here.”

yeah, huh, this sounds insane on the front end. but in the wake of it all, events appear infinitely more insane. an open-ended, uncontrolled, virgin experience of unknown proportions. what could go wrong?

this blog knew nothing about cob, despite building a primitive oven in chad years ago. but the barista-poet’s wife, a potter and sculptor and oven builder, supplied the verbal sense. kiko denzer gave us a blueprint. and michael pollan lit the fuse in his recent moving times piece about an oven-centered feast.

the upshot is that there’s a lot of foot stomping involved. carolina clay is orange and dense, and mixing in all that sand with your feet late in the fall is not unlike skiing barefoot on a frigid slope of cheese graters. then there’s all that pounding with fists, clobbering the rough mix into a perfect dome, the walls nearly a foot thick. at one point, the office boss asked if my knuckles were fight-worn.

two layers on, 1.5 to go.

the menu was loose, the schedule completely unknown. colleagues, neighbors, slight acquaintances, social mainstays were invited to drop in any time and bring something to cook, possibly even for their consumption later in the week. such ovens were once the centers of social gravity, and they require adjustment to others’ cooking and the oven’s pace.

so thursday night started slow. crusty pain rond, muffins, cookies and toasted nuts were the openers — post-dinner fare. a couple rather good baristas were in the house. the home espresso bar soon belonged to them. by friday night, the experience was swelling beyond belief. venison and garden root vegetables baked to perfection. sirloin rice pilaf, ribeye steaks, korean pork, sticky rice and local apple crisp stunned. men cooperatively manned the oven, and our hand-packed walls stored waves of heat for hours. neighbors stood agog and talked of topics we’d never broached before.

in true ‘le fooding‘ spirit, boxes of cold krispy kremes arrived late into the night. they warmed inside the dome, and someone soon yelled, “hot doughnuts now.” people we barely knew stayed late, quaffing off the syphon pots of sundried ethiopia yirgacheffe worka and growlers of rugbrod julebryg.

smoke wafts from where it shouldn’t, beneath the 1700s handmade brick and old growth salvage timber. panic. PANIC.

the devastation began saturday morning, after stoking the oven through the night and firing it up again for breakfast pumpkin and cranberry bread with orange glaze. the cedar base caught fire. it was a testament, really, to the shocking amounts of heat stored and radiated by the cob walls. after more than 24 hours of charging, they’d begun to push infernos of heat downward through layers of fire brick and sand and cob insulation — far further than we ever dreamed it would travel. the base lit up, and the new lifestyle seemed to have ended soon after it had begun. depression took hold. incredibly, though, a bit of ingenuity from solis jake prompted a chancy decision to press on. lunchtime was on track and dozens of pizzas in line.

waves of children arrived. savory pumpkin-herb chunks, local grass-fed beef, garden pesto, heirloom tomatoes, garlic bechamel, sea salt and heirloom peppers swirled in inspired mixes. the base smoldered, and still we baked. calebowski’s stunning mac and cheese lured the 80-year-old neighbor for a plate. open-faced sweet roasted squash and garden salad, sweet nutmeg pumpkin ice cream invented by the ladye and more crusty loaves piled on. at this point, frankly, consciousness began to fade.

and still the fire strayed where it didn’t belong. hosing and ripping ensued. it became obvious the oven wouldn’t last far beyond this frenzied stretch: it was fatally flawed. but dinner was on as soon as lunch was done, and newspapering people showed up with cast iron pots of crowder peas and squash and excellent spanish wine. apple sausages, more venison chops and baguettes went in. we stuffed the vif d’etampes with bacon, butter and cream and gruyere and baked it until tender. brie spreads, heirloom peppers stuffed with herbs and local goat cheese and pumpkin pots de creme sort of melted everywhere while the best photographer i know expounded on his master’s thesis. a family lean in the budget ate their fill. a psychiatrist floated in from a massage, in a state of zen. toasted rosemary walnuts emerged, but no one had room.

by this point, we smelled like fresh-killed pelts of some kind and there were gallons of growlers formerly full of fall ales clanking around. the yirg worka and el salvador matalapa tablom al amate cappuccinos gushed periodically. the brick arch that covered the oven’s doorway had cracked, but held together — barely. it was a metaphor.

in the end, this blog perceived compression: incredible heights of coalescing people and disastrous lows of failure tightly packed in a short time frame. it witnessed accommodation: people adjusting to people they’d never seen, adjusting to the cooking pace of the oven, altering their imported foods to the current spread, moving toward sources of warmth and away from showers of sparks. it was not altogether comfortable. and we saw social engineering: when we threw in the towel on a smoldering project, jake found a way to salvage it. the entire structure was an amalgam of insight from carpenters and potters and tile experts and designers. when neighbor jason put the local beef in someone else’s mac-and-cheese, it made an already gluteous dish supreme and deadly. when this blog became consumed with fire and ash, coffee nerds stepped in to produce streams of superior brew.

every meal, for days, the emotional progression looked something like this: expectation –> frenzy –> dread –> helplessness –> stunned delight –> relish –> reflection –> exhaustion –> interpretation.

in all, roughly 30 people waded into each meal. when the food ran low, someone else arrived bearing pots of something more. and as this blog slept off the throbbing sunday morning, the door rattled. a couple friends had come by for the final course. fortunately, an overnight yogurt was on the warm hearth, and we added pistachios and sauteed apples. it went down easy, but tinged with wood smoke. we all had some form of severe bedhead.

and there’s no question: it all tasted better because the participation was so thorough. it satisfied, in ways we barely understand. a week later, people keep coming up to us, shaking their heads wordlessly at the memory. and we’re pretty sure we barely remember most of it.

and so the idea was to capture the paradox in a short film, lasting roughly the length of the syphon process itself but featuring almost exclusively macro photography. in this way, the images act as an almost abstract sequence of bubbles and steam and rising liquid and swirling particles — a gorgeous build-up of forces and processes. then, with a second look, you actually get some insight into the process — the behavior of heated water, particle migration and extraction quirks, foam and aromatic elements. at least that’s what it does for this blog.

roughly 30 hours into the project, it’s clear we couldn’t have done it without the technical mastery and creative ideas of solis jake, of j4 studios. the coffee was byron holcomb’s dominican finca la paz, a nicely sweet and bready beverage, along with some other sample coffees. if you can hook in a subwoofer or boost your bass, this blog highly recommends it.

The Syphon Project from Jacob Forrest on Vimeo.

you might quibble that there are some moments of grit and odd interference. this is true, especially of the shot from underneath the syphon in which the coffee has dropped into the bowl and the air pressure is equalizing from above with a blinking red “bloop, bloop” each time an air pocket descends the central syphon tube onto the eye of the viewer. and there — unmistakably in the middle of the picture — are more than one particle of coffee, and some grime on the surface of the bowl to boot.

as carefully as we had tried to polish glass and employ precise barista skills, it was tempting to remove this shot from the sequence. but it remains included, in part because each time we tried to get a cleaner version of this shot we kept seeing coffee in the bowl — it seems to be a real (and seldom noticed) part of this brewing process, in other words.

in the end, it’s kind of nice to stare at but also impossible to resist indulging in some analysis. look at how completely the dry coffee resists the water’s moisture when plopped on top. it’s somewhat surprising, to me, how the particles arrange themselves on drawn-down. and what on earth is that mist swirling above that half-consumed bowl of coffee, and do we ever taste/experience that?

feedback welcome.

so, a short film was born of caffeinated highness and solis jake‘s superior technical abilities. bright lights. white backdrop. seven+ hours of shooting. plenty of juice. here’s a rough piece.

HD version here. more to come.

traveling to france seems to be the only trip this blog can’t contort into a coffee trip of some type.

but, ah, we will now strenuously avoid our annual tome on the deplorable state of coffee in france, just as this blog has tried to avoid the coffee itself this trip. abetting this effort: a stash of counter culture single-origin selections and one heavily distracted airprort TSA agent, who quite clearly targeted our airplane carry-on for scrutiny because of the nefarious-looking device within it. the fellow, however, was called away, and so we whisked the bag from under him and now drink fine siphon brews in a small franco-german village near strasbourg.

mouths have dropped, of course. eyes have widened at a brewing method so novel to most home brewers, yet already so ubiquitous in snobby circles stateside. weeks into this visit, the thing is still a spectacle. but instead of getting wound up in the mechanics of the thing, like stirring methods and coffee-to-water ratios, the recipients (mostly africa and europe-dwelling family members) tend to wade into a gradual exploration of what flavors this device has to offer. when it comes to new and wonderful coffee, in other words, they tend to take a long, warm bath in Taste instead of fiddling with the faucet and body washing aids.

failed metaphor alert! and yet, it seems kind of funny from this side of the pond how “scientific” the american approach can be. how ruthlessly mechanical, how very cause-and-effect this blog’s brewing debates and saturday experiments tend to become. south carolina drinkers always want to know how the danged thing works. they then tend to offer an instant opinion on how you might make it better. there is, of course, much to be gained from a methodical, scientific examination of coffee extraction. there is also much to be lampooned in the pontifications of a coffee drinker who wants to wax profound on every cup instead of just serving something excellent and getting out of the way.

but then, we’re in gothic cathedral territory. the stones for the local marvel were carved from the rocky hill beside our village. scientific prowess was required. but the point wasn’t to prove those methods, but to get to something else that transports you. the means was never the thing. this requires a sort of investigative vulnerability; it precludes a swaggering hubris.

so let’s apply this broadly, using absurd generalities, shall we? let’s! there seem to be numerous european coffee personalities who embody investigative vulnerability. they seem to be much respected for it. a significant slice of the americans, meanwhile, seem to carve entire identities out of something transient — a brewing method, a passing innovation, a staunch position in an argument. they are then loved or loathed, and sometimes both. exceptions are of course on both sides. but who’s counting? CI always categorizes simplistically!

alas, a caveat: it could be that an overly large sense of introspection and contentment is why french espresso continues to be so horrific. cultural navel gazing = deification of the mediocre and all that.

to compensate, this blog will now go measure its siphon burner flame height and correlate it with drop times in dry, northern french climates.

P.S. this blog, of course, normally uses the butane burner for its siphon heat source. getting that thing on board an international aircraft, however, was clearly a nonstarter. thus, the alcohol burner seen here, which required a sort of, ah, vulnerable investigation into the bowels of the fench supermarche’, in search of what they call “alcool a bruler.” #success.