College Station Coffee Delivery

After the overwhelming demand for my roasting seminars in Seattle, I've decided to offer roasting masterclasses in Budapest during the World of Coffee event (dates and location to be announced).  I've got a few consultations scheduled in the UK, Italy, and...

Thursday & Friday Roasting MasterclassesOn Thursday and Friday I taught three roasting masterclasses at Ada’s Technical Books, a throwback independent, charming bookstore.  In an age when we all too often order books online by default, Ada’s is the kind of...

I'm pleased to announce that my friends at Prufrock Café will be hosting me for two small group roasting classes on June 3 at their iconic cafe in the center of London.  The classes will be of an unusual format and attendance will be limited to...

Please forgive the technical glitch; upon releasing this post, the Eventbrite page for ticket purchases implied the classes were sold out.  They are not.  There are still tickets available.  I'm sorry for any confusion.    Given the...

About 10 years ago I participated in a cupping in Seattle of 20 Panamanian coffees from an online auction.  I had a very different tasting experience from that of the other professionals in the room that day.  While the coffees on display were all clean and...

My recent post Seeing through roasts generated much discussion, especially about which cup qualities may be more influenced by roast and which are more a product of a green coffee’s character.  As noted in the post, my proposed classifications were...

Budapest will be the world’s coffee capital for a few days this June.  Just added to the list of events is a demonstration of the Decent Espresso machine at 6pm on June 14 at Espresso Embassy.  Even if you don’t make it to the Decent Demo, you must visit...

A few months ago I was contacted by a Czech team that had published a coffee-brewing app called Brewtime.  They wanted some advice on coffee recipes.  I liked the app for its simplicity and user-friendliness, so I asked them to allow me to overhaul...

As you may know, I gave up on ‘YES or No by RAO” a while back.  The game didn’t generate that many questions, and the questions I received were rarely the type that could be answered with a simple Yes or No.  I spent much more time asking people to rephrase...

This is the first post of a new feature of short posts, thoughts, and notices, tentatively named "fines."Feedback is welcome, as always.  Espresso-Machine Service I have a question for readers:  If you have an annual service contract for espresso...

I’ll get no sympathy for saying this, but sometimes work travel is exhausting.  I know, I know, I get to work in places like Melbourne, Prague, and Florence regularly.  And most years I incidentally get to avoid much of winter.  This month has been one...

One of the first posts on this blog was "Batch Brew Basics, Part 1".   I've wanted to write Part 2 for a long time, but have been deterred by what I see in cafes:  almost no one has the basics down.  What's the point of an advanced post if almost no one...

Continued from Part 1Moka Pot image "Evoluzione" reproduced with permission by CLET, a brilliant street artist based on Florence.  Stop 6: FlorencePrague and Florence are probably my two favorite European cities.  Both city centers are famously overrun...

I recently spent a week in Italy, where the difference between the third-wave palate, if you will, and the palates of the rest of the population, couldn’t be more pronounced.  The average Italian coffee drinker prefers robusta to arabica (not a misprint), dark to...

Every once in a while I hear or read a misunderstanding of the role of fines in coffee extraction and flavor.  I’d like to discuss how coffee extracts, the role of fines in extraction, and how fines influence espresso and filter brewing differently.  This is...

I'm about five years late to the v60 party, but I've recently made an instructional pour-over video that I'd like to offer to readers.  Plenty of third-wave cafes offer hand pours, and of the ones I've tried, I've enjoyed perhaps 10% of them.  Uneven,...

Let’s have a quiz and a contest. :)Suppose you are to make these four brews using similar brewing ratios and a properly aligned EK grinder with settings 1–-11, with 1 being the finest setting, 11 the coarsest.)Cupping, to be sampled at 12 minutesv60, using 22g grounds...

Several readers recently requested a post explaining the differences in measuring extractions of immersion vs. percolation (drip) brews.  I have always wanted to write about this, but didn’t think anyone would want to read such a post :).   I’m glad I’ve got...

Among the more interesting things that happened in my coffee life this week:Seasoning my grinder with parboiled rice! Based on the online comments of Tom Chips in a 2013 home-barista.com post, I decided to try using parboiled rice (not raw rice) to season a new...

I know it’s not a novel concept these days, but I’m opening a co-op roastery in Los Angeles.  I had first attempted to partner with a…

I know it's not a novel concept these days, but I'm opening a co-op roastery in Los Angeles.  I had first attempted to partner with a friend to open a cooperative roastery in LA about six years ago, and that fell through, but I'm happy to announce that I've...

**************************Recently I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Lucia Solis, a fermentation expert who cut her chops in the wine industry.  Lucia has been working in coffee for the past three years as a “coffee-fermentation designer”: she helps mills...

Thanks to all of you who have expressed interest in tasting some of Lucia’s coffee.  Our original intent was to offer coffee from her project in El Salvador, but the crop was late and we decided that ultimately it wasn’t the best choice to showcase her work....

If third wavers are good at anything, it’s following trends and adopting new dogmas.  If I didn’t know any better, I would say that most young baristas are glued to Instagram all day, just waiting to see what trend they should unquestioningly follow next....