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I meet a lot of people working in coffee who express frustration with how far consumers lag behind coffee professionals in their understanding and appreciation of good coffee. It seems to be a common barista lament.
I don’t believe this frustration is well founded or fair, for a number of reasons. For starters, I […]

This tweet today from Jeremy Tooker of Four Barrel, who is currently traveling in Kenya, explains their no-free-refill policy quite nicely.

Tags:  coffee, coffee farmers, fourbarrel, refill policy

The pixels had barely dried on my previous post before I received word from someone involved in the unfolding SCAA negotiations with the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. The short of it is that there was solid reasoning behind keeping a low profile on the sensitive dialogue with the ECX, that significant progress was being made, […]

Today I got a rare communique in my inbox from the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America), the big trade group that promotes specialty coffee, sets standards, and holds our industry’s annual trade show. Currently a delegation from the SCAA is in Addis Ababa meeting with representatives of the controversial new government run Ethiopia […]

I’m letting go of one my favorite antique grinders.

This is a big Peugeot Freres A2 cast iron coffee grinder I picked up last year. It probably dates from 1890-1910. It has large conical burrs that are a bit bigger than a silver dollar and are reasonably sharp. The grinding action is smooth […]

Like a bright bat-signal cast across the twitterverse into the clouds of my highly distractible and overcaffeinated brain, I am called to the blog-cave today by a piece of purported journalism - the cover story of this week’s NY Press slamming the good people of Stumptown Coffee. Many wise and appropriate things have been said […]

As a teenager Kyle Glanville used to hot rod cars. As an adult he hot-rods coffeebars.

There is a lot to be said about Intelligentsia’s genre-destroying upcoming Venice Beach coffeebar, but I’ll skip the geeky details to point out perhaps the most interesting facet of the project: everywhere I go in L.A., […]

For the eleven folks who still peek at this dormant blog, wondering if I’ll return from my self-imposed blogging exile, the answer is (as always): “maybe”.
Last weekend I attempted with mixed success to liveblog the Western Regional Barista Competition in Los Angeles. I imagined a blog filled with some short, irreverent videos (like the […]

Congrats to M’lissa and Chris at Ritual who are making it official and announcing their engagement.

love is awesome.
Tags:  baristas, coffee, love

At 11:39am this morning I had the following strange SMS conversation with my favorite coffee-gear guru, Terry Z of espressoparts:

me: “have you ever put green coffee in the laser etcher?”
TerryZ: “no….. never. should we try it?”
me: “of course you should try it!!!”
TerryZ: “just a hole or do you want […]