Archive for category ‘subjective swilling’

under a bushel

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, ...

oops, we scored.

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.)

anecdotal leverage

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.

ketchup week: kiosking v

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 ...

ketchup week: murky tales from our correspondents

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 ...

bending hair, other items

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 ...

like a wildebeest to a sink hole ….

Sunday, April 1st, 2007

coffee and crema, day two: men's shirt sale -- the semi-annual! -- block-gorgeous faemage and a sweeter, honey-tangerine-heavy hair bender.

lassie come home

Friday, March 30th, 2007

on a blog fraught with hyperbolic overkill, what are the rhetorical options when you've stumbled headlong into a brew-place that's flabbergastingly good? litotes?! turns out that about the same time we first asked the geekers about passable espresso in this barren nexus of the country a guy in a kiosk started ...

in pursuit of puckish spro waifers

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

random oddities swirl about the less-is-more, petite-is-sweet notion of severe downdosing. will that prevent this blog from speculating wildly on severely incomprehensive data? why, no! * grinding "a lot finer" can produce a shot with the same volume and extraction time from much less coffee -- but not always. bean ...

CI veers erratically toward third-world betterment

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

grainy frame-grabs unanimously agree: the all-clad presso looks like it could also punch rivets in your forehead. while media-lavished coffee luminaries are off slurping or shunning native african brews as moods dictate, this blog's bush-dwelling relatives have no choice -- and now regularly torment our fine sense of quality consciousness haute ...

CI equates juan francisco with strong narcotics!

Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007

there comes a moment in the oozing afterlife of one's bloody wisdom tooth sockets where the soporific bliss of oxycodone tablets begins to wane, and the surgeon-approved thresholds for chomping another pill have not yet, technically speaking, been met. it's only been 30 minutes since the last one, say. or ...

it’s not ‘trombone case’ — it’s worse!

Monday, December 4th, 2006

a favorite wordsmith of this blog -- we like 'em windy! -- channels CI channeling sensory descriptor demigod chandler burr! comes now james lileks, on one of those pandering, muddlesome wines: Starts sweet and ends dry, and while it’s suitable, the bouquet might be described as Mummy’s Underwear. It was better ...

taste: now available sans snobbery

Sunday, November 26th, 2006

"they're leaves, and they fall off. once a year -- when it gets cold." introducing the village woman, who was seeing her first skyscraper, her first frantic interstate and her first mass leaf exfoliation from outside the atlanta airport, about the basics of american excess -- in a deliberate, logical fashion ...

CI: bumbling toward harmonic togetherness beverages

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

in this blog's head, "the rev" seemed dangerously candy-like. a fleeting contribution to the rampant sweet starches of fall-ish holidays ... in which case we would have served our test runs to the indiscriminate cypriot and been done with it. instead, what happened was not unlike finding a knot of ...

the rev: a building block

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

no, those apples aren't browning. they're ingesting a light coating of guajillo honey, which itself keeps them from browning. more in the morning ...

case closed

Tuesday, October 17th, 2006

continuing its proud tradition of public service, this blog should note that the previously referenced coke blak will, heretofore, be known as coke blek. saccharine faux-coffee tastes -- almost like a candy root beer barrel -- that do little but remind you of stale. and not even useful for road-tripping.

non-telling mediocrity descriptors

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

lunch hour: mindlessly pulling darker-than-ever shots of decidedly mediocre house blend 2. (tangent: i don't know why the cypriot buys this stuff. worse, i don't know why we morbidly plod over to his studio, day after day, in a futile effort to torque something respectable out of his quasi-mediocre e61 ...

note to cypriot: it’s not supposed to taste like coffee

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

who needs the crutch of a coffee flavor wheel when you can read the new york times' new perfume critic instead? it's like a word-of-the-day calendar confined to sensory observations! some chandler burr excerpts (courtesy cjr): "Dolce & Gabbana's Light Blue is an absolutely terrific perfume, rich without a trace ...

coffee: the original

Thursday, September 7th, 2006

this blog having spent a sodden night swilling quishr... heh. just wanted to be able to say that. street cred with the bioluminescent cypriot, you know. as it happens, the rumored dearth of "true" quishr recipes on the world-global innernecks is absolutely true. coffee luminaries throughout the epochs, of course, have ...

CI does the extraction factor juggle

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

the sulawesi, it tasted of baked hash. maybe some newt tail. extraordinarily gritty. thus, conjuring the notion that brew temperature is how one buys espresso solubles, the conclusion was reached that we were, ah, overpaying. that is, the extraction of oils was heavily tainted by the extraction of bean infrastructure ...

CI, personal research assistant to rich westerfield

Monday, July 31st, 2006

sacrilege in progress. somewhere off camera, the blogbrother is neglecting his backsplash-cleaning duties. note to rich: mesmeralda, in espresso form, loves you best at a spookily charbuckian 204 degrees fahrenheit, in this blog's humble estimation. in the face of a swelling onslaught of dissent as to the loveliness of 'lady ez' in ...

mesmeralda, columnized

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006

annnnnd, while we're immortalizing the words of the bioluminescent cypriot, we might as well note that the genteel columnist whose desk location dooms her to constant exposure to this blog's incessant coffee blathering attended last week's esmeralda incantation -- and found the accented one eminently quotable. About 20 minutes into a ...

shattering normalcy

Friday, July 21st, 2006

ah, well, it happens: you bask in a seven-shot esmeralda breakfast only to sordidly devolve into experimental afternoon shottage of twice-roasted cypriotic poo. we've all done this, i'm sure. there is nothing, i say, like despoiling the floral morning mouthcoat with a bit of liquefied michelin tire. you might call ...

coda

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

"Eef dat coffee was around and Napoleon knew about eet, he would have conquered Russia. Beethoven would have rewritten the feefth symphony." ...

smackdowney advancements

Tuesday, July 4th, 2006

hard to imagine, really, but nate the finger has voluntarily forfeited his spot amongst the south-bound chicago junkies journeying to partake of our free array of panamanian sublimity ... something about mumble-mumble, something "due date" something. which leaves us hosting the nate-less smackdowne de panama in two installments. one on saturday, ...

WBC: afar-blogging

Sunday, May 21st, 2006

james hoffmann's el salvador finca la fany bourbon used in his competition blends. with james safely in the world barista championship finals, it falls to this blog to make wildly unwarranted performance extrapolations based on a single component of his competition blend. stunning, really, how a crashing hoffmann had the ...

pointless oglery

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

amayzin' things happ'nin with the puro scuro tonite -- spicy, brooding, read-a-musty-volume things.

how we gush in the wasteland

Monday, May 1st, 2006

kite day at the beach, from which one might correctly infer a short-lived stay. something about nine-month-olds' ears not tolerating such windspeeds without grave, tedious consequences involving garlic oil and cotton balls... salient gist: more time to cafe loll, chez the rapidly improving muddy waters so recently joshed in these ...

profound(ly senseless) modifications

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

the basic boiler insulation job: not the results i thought. should have done this long ago, of course, but now that i've wrapped the flaming canister in a rubber-and-foil parka, it seems to hyperventilate. "please. not so much heat that we can't breathe." which was the point. coat ...

oh yeah: actual cup improvements

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

thought about wading into this nonsense, numchucks afly. but no. perfectly adequate meaty rebuttals have been filed. it's the new blog! no more superfluous echo-punditry here, no sirree. [my only succinct (!) take is here]. and so, we dragged ourselves back to the bar, where this blog is assiduously working ...