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This past weekend, Emily and I visited the Charles M. Schulz museum In Santa Rosa, California.

They had an interesting collection of the Peanuts creator’s personal effects and exhibits of original strips. We watched the 1973 A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving in the auditorium. I am now filled with a hunger for the Fantagraphics Peanuts […]

Last week I attended a 3 day espresso roasting and blending workshop in Mill Valley, California hosted by Willem Boot and Ken Davids. It shed some light into areas of my craft that have been in the realm of voodoo and offered some guidance for further experimentation and refinement. It was a real […]

For your average in-the-dark coffee consumer, coffee at home has traditionally meant tossing a few scoops of Folgers into a filter and letting Mister Coffee dribble some hot water through it. In the long war of attrition against bad coffee, the forces of the Coffee Mujahadin have made some inroads against coffee-from-a-can heresy. […]

An old New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell is filled with amusing tidbits on the history of caffeine use. Among the books it draws from is Weinberg & Bealer’s The World of Caffeine which has been in my pile of coffee-related bedside reading for awhile. I’ll post a lengthier review of this book […]

The late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna saw coffee as a drug of the “dominator culture”. The history of caffeine use in western civilization is intertwined with the birth of modern capitalism, colonial exploitation, and the operation of Dickens-era industrial sweatshops. New York City - the living, breathing heart of Mammon - fuels its […]

On the return flight from JFK to Seattle yesterday, our carry-on luggage which originally consistied largely of fresh roasted coffee for our NYC peeps was replaced by two large sacks of New York’s best bagels from Ess-a-Bagel.

These Bagels were intended to be Victory Bagels to celebrate the end of the Bush regime with friends […]