Archive for category ‘subjective swilling’
Monday, August 4th, 2008
if this blog trolled the forums as it should, not only would its skin be pastier and its Monitor Eye achier, but it probably would have already procured the vital knowledge that vivace's espresso dolce might as well be called 'holy monsooned malabar,' for all its pale, puffy gassy-ness. indeed, ...
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Monday, May 26th, 2008
the jebena boil: "at the still point, there the dance is." ... pic by jake
it shook all the wobbly, week-long sickies right out of us. just clunked 'em right out, and ended too the related seven-day spro fast with a sock to the jowls ...
here we were, sitting in a ...
Posted in subjective swilling, playing with (roaster) fire | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
the usbc live feed -- in double-take mall stereo -- with free accompanying shots from c-n-c's hudgens.
as long as we were jaw-hanging in front of the u.s. barista championship live feed, this blog figured we might as well jam something in that jaw -- signature beverages, for example. thus, ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
hoffmann forces our hand with his blasted gentillesse...
until those anfim grinders went all messianic, we'd been so proud of our mazzer major. it's a big as the spro box! the same burly grinder the big boys use! thwacks like a pro!
truth is, it was supposed to have had slicey new ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
they laughed when CI said lem butler's competition espresso tasted like "new leather dress shoes in a malt custard dip" -- but only because they'd never wrapped the bouche around a pair of johnston and murphys! now comes the new yorker's john lanchester to tell us that "your palate and ...
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Monday, March 17th, 2008
"It's been one of my favorite things in coffee -- to feel stupid. I like it."
...
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Friday, March 14th, 2008
the world champion endures this blog's home espresso bar.
when this blog snorks that much spro it takes about 30 minutes, and then it's like having hot-air balloons in the midriff and sandbags on the shoulders. we don't know whether to start flapping around in the air or dig a ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 6 Comments »
Friday, March 7th, 2008
Nuthin good in indiana - 'cept nate the finger'S home bar. On to our snowy Cincy bash with barista-poet jon lewis.
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UPDATE FROM A NON-MOBILE DEVICE: did we mention the severe storm advisory blanketing cincinnati for the exact time of our scheduled ...
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Friday, February 8th, 2008
"experimenting," is what we call it.
when you serve the people you've turned into coffee snobs -- many of them former non-drinkers -- subpar shots of something uncontrollably bright and tangy. these aren't cuppers and geeks, mind you. just consumers who have tuned their papillae from uhf to vhf and ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
the newly published blogwife, knowing a thing or two about epic old english poetry and the kind of brew this blog is wont to pursue, decides to intertwine the two.
this is either comparative brilliance or the result of extreme fixation on two aesthetic qualities over a term of months ...
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Thursday, December 20th, 2007
does the notorious panel truck driver have the sweetest business card ever?
this blog doesn't know why it was surprised. barista-poet jon lewis once said he dreamt of "resolv[ing] international conflict through espresso diplomacy." he appears to have meant it.
the mailman was cold, and wearing some sort of zipping sweater ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 6 Comments »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
good authority: c-n-c's hudgens has ditched terroir for his regular coffee supply. judging solely by the price tags on the retail bags we flunkies buy off the counter, the boston-based terroir appeared to charge the roughly same for 12 ounces of regular priced single origin that north carolina's crema coffee ...
Posted in happening elsewhere, subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
what 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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007
well beyond two weeks post-roast, this blog stuggles still to communicate to you the subtleties of lem butler's competition espresso blend. heightening the mystery: a pragmatic decision to pull much of it with the lever machine at the studio of the bioluminescent cypriot, where a gaggle of the man's indentured ...
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Thursday, August 16th, 2007
moises, left, and marysabel say it could be the cold water that makes their coffee what it is. "or," marysabel said, "it could be God." fabio, right, ate a lot of dip.
what grabs you about moises hessera is that he rushes right past his verb conjugations to explain the finer ...
Posted in subjective swilling, mad coffee jaunts | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
the quasi-fresh, non-expert-roasted, crestfallenly cupped 2006 esmeralda stuns afresh as spro.
so maybe the entire theory is wrong -- wrong as a minty green bean color!
for if the great-but-not-immortal 2007 esmeralda so repeatedly ingested by this fortuitous blog really is such a subtle step down from the blubbering memory of last ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
Saturday, July 28th, 2007
this blog once churned 2,500 words about panama's theist hacienda la esmeralda gesha. it won't happen this year.
to wit: there is still nothing like it. there is no other place that we know of, no other seared plant granule, where the imbiber can ask for, and get, such a gentle, ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
breakfast, ready-made.
added to the ways we now know the panama esmeralda: stale, overroasted and unbearably forced through a lever device!
we could safely call it an evening of ignominy and crestfallenness, wherein enthusiastic coffee persons from as far as atlanta trekked to the bloghouse for the preeminent experience of cupping this ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
mesmeralda herself, emanating nicely on the zombie's third and final 13-gram try.
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while wrasslin' some absurd studio excellence blend (mystery poo thrown haphazard into the bioluminescent cypriot's roaster), and waiting for last year's beatific panama esmeralda to finish cooking, this blog ...
well, yes. that would be 2006 esmeralda, the auction ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 4 Comments »
Friday, June 29th, 2007
when the guy whose divorce was final yesterday slips off the wedding band for good and tells you that there's something warm -- an aesthetic comfort he's been looking forward to all day -- in the 8 oz. capp you've just handed him, well ... " "
then: " ...
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
... wherein CI scrapes the final coffee fest leftovers from the side of the casserole dish by comparing premium decaf coffees to formless new-age music!
it's phil's fault. the blogwife, being great with child, had reached the limits of trade-show-floor caffeine, and, being casually installed next to the counter culture booth ...
Posted in subjective swilling, mad coffee jaunts | 4 Comments »
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
the smooth 'n groovy parts
the not-as-smooth-but-no-less-groovy parts
this blog never said it was a beauty pageant. what it did say is that the memorial day gaggle was a mash of machines, tubing and burrs. also, swim trunks. also, a ne'er-before-experienced highlands sumatra, designed to assault our virgin tongues through each of ...
Posted in subjective swilling, bioluminescent cypriot | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
the lusty panama esmeralda, subject of so much swooning CI verbage, hath scored a fresh date with a seven-company coffee consortium that has purchased the 2007 auction crop for (deep breath, double-check the numbers) $130 a pound -- green. from the farm. or, if you prefer, $65,000 for 10 bags ...
Posted in happening elsewhere, subjective swilling | 7 Comments »
Monday, May 28th, 2007
now sodden with pool chlorine and SO shots and homemade hummus and eau de vie and sundry other liquid marinades, this blog can't remember much more than this:
there was a kitchen island, and it was groaning 'neath the weight of nate the finger's silvia with a newly installed PID, two ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
Monday, May 21st, 2007
yes, well, in today's edition of "startling places greenville hides its coffee," CI zooms in like a finely calibrated wire brush on one of those new, off-main-street shops with an idiosyncratic mix of ephemera that may well be ahead of its time. ephemera such as ... well, we quote, "coffee, ...
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Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
given the free-association crapshoot that is this blog's approach to describing coffee tastes (vital tools: darts. flavor wheel.), it's more than a little gobsmacking to realize that, hey, we got it right. (once, anyway.)
Posted in subjective swilling | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
the most startling flavor difference in the weekend toscano, pulled for the first time with a levered (declining) pressure profile: an earthy flesh-fruit and a light, creamy lipid layer. like unsalted butter, melted over red anjou pear.
Posted in subjective swilling, levered device | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 30th, 2007
forgetting for a moment that solis jake (who has been pulling shots with this blog since our insufferably spiffy three-krups setup in the college newspaper office) used the weekend cupping to show shocking favoritism toward other blogs, the very public and very collegial c-n-c event left us rolling molasses and ...
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Friday, April 27th, 2007
word reaches this blog that ryan goodrow, he of the fondling tamper motions and puppet show co-starring role, was at his resplendent, meticulous best one recent weekday evening.
it was the cypriot and bursch-head, actually, in d.c. for a trade convention involving the cutesy finial things they do, and admirably determined ...
Posted in subjective swilling, mad coffee jaunts | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
the hair bender at home -- 10 days old but kicking vigorously at 198.5 fahrenheit ... and far more of the stunning bar of cacao ramming itself down your gorge. the ivory coastal, thyme-and-molasses kind, not the prune-n-syrup ghanan variety.
our commercial obsession du jour forked us a bag, half of ...
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