t o n x . o r g

it is 4:30am here in Greece, I guess that means its evening in Seattle. I’m not sure its jetlag that has me awake so much as its the strangeness and intensity of our activities here. I’m lying in bed now, having just returned from doing some roasting in the Evergreen space with Antonis Georgakopoulos, who will soon be well on his way to roasting the best coffees in all of Greece.

I’m finding very little time to do any writing or blogging but worry that if I don’t at least make an attempt at documenting some of these experiences now, it will all become a blur in my memory by the time I face the long circuitous flight home Sunday and return to work at Victrola Monday morning.

A number of setbacks in the roaster installation caused many aspects of our original action-packed training schedule to be compressed into the these final few days. Last night was the first test roasting of high quality coffees (as opposed to the cheap Brazil Rio coffee we used to season the roaster), and though I was unsatisfied with my own steering of those small batches, the results in cupping them today were very encouraging. So tonight I roasted 5 kilos of each of the many premium coffees we have and feel confident that we will be able to work with these in some blending experiments and give Kyle some materials with which to further instruct on the optimization of extraction parameters for espresso blends. The next two days promise to be very intense.

The roasting at night situation is partially a result of not wanting to cause a nuisance as there is currently no afterburner and our initial drum seasoning drew some notice from neighbors at one of the many nearby banks. We are doing some investigating of options to minimize this potential problem, and hoping Diedrich, the roaster manufacturer, will soon provide us details of the feasability and cost of providing an afterburner solution.

I am learning much more than I might have expected about roasting by working with a piece of equipment that is familiar in many ways but also very different. The dialogue with Antonis and Menelaous (who is well studied in molecular gastronomy and well-versed in the existing coffee theory) has been extraordinary. We came in anticipating a language barrier and instead find ourselves speaking very much the same language. This fantastic dialogue will bear much fruit, I think, and I expect it will continue even after we have returned home. It is a shame we cannot stay longer.

Today Kyle and I saw our second glimpse of Athens beyond the 3 block radius of the shop (which is around the corner from our hotel). A search for a late night snack with Antonis led us through some of the nearby areas. While a simple pre-dinner option was not to be found (actual dinner time having passed for most people and our theoretical dinnertime still to come) the chance to absorb more of the aesthetic novelty of the town is certainly a highlight, however brief. The Acropolis lit up at night from a distance is beautiful, even having forgotten to wear my new glasses which I’m not yet accustomed to.

Now it is nearly 5:00am and we’ve planned to be cupping again at 9:00am and conducting more experiments for some potential new beverages, which we are all pretty excited about - I should try to catch some sleep and upload this post later. With any luck I’ll find wifi during my layover in Paris to drop a lenghtier report before returning to the familiarity of life back home.

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