Archive for category ‘subjective swilling’
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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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.
Posted in subjective swilling, mad coffee jaunts | 4 Comments »
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
Posted in video, subjective swilling | 6 Comments »
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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
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 ...
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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 ...
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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.
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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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 4 Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling, screeds, playing with (roaster) fire | No Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 6 Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 2 Comments »
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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling | 4 Comments »
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."
...
Posted in subjective swilling, bioluminescent cypriot | 2 Comments »
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, ...
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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 ...
Posted in happening elsewhere, subjective swilling, playing with (roaster) fire | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
amayzin' things happ'nin with the puro scuro tonite -- spicy, brooding, read-a-musty-volume things.
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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 ...
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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 ...
Posted in subjective swilling, screeds | 2 Comments »
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 ...
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