The Reading Room

This is a bit of rant so bear with me... I hate to continue the mermaid bashing, but I was at a Target the other night that had a certain coffee company located inside of it and heard a conversation...

Sometimes being too cheap isn’t so bad? I have a shameful confession.  There is a product that I have been dying to try ever since it was introduced.  That product is Starbuck’s instant coffee Via.  They claimed when it came...

http://www.synesso.com/images/portfolio/Steeltown_lg.jpg" align="absbottom" width="540" height="480" />   I have spoken before about the unlikely places that coffee shops are popping up, and how I like to see that these shops can flourish is relatively unknown spots. Take this coffee shop, Steeltown...

One of the most underestimated tool in our home barista arsenal must be a knockbox; however, you do not really know how valuable a knockbox is until you don't have it. It is essentially a very simple design, a bin...

/files/u5804/Eva_Solos.jpg" height="500" width="439" /> In the past, I've talked about how much I enjoy "coffee for one" brewed using my Eva Solo 0.6 L, and I've also described my experience trying to squeeze "coffee for two" out of its modest-sized...

What makes a blend work better for a specific machine?  I have often wondered this and I do not have an answer, but there is no question that some blends taste better to me on one machine than another.  I...

Photo Credit: valkyrieh116 /Foter I'm nearly as fascinated by the politics and ecnomonics surrounding coffee as I am by the nuanced flavors and the many ways it can be prepared. The history of coffee is an endless fascination, but we...

One of the lovely things about coffee is that once you think you have tried most method of preperation or think you have at least made all of the variations with the combination of equipment you have. Anyway as going...

  http://foter.com/img/photo/3/ground-espresso-with-raw-sugar_l.jpg" style="display: block; width: 100%" class="foter-photo" /> Turbinado Sugar in Cafe Cubano mhaithaca /Foter About 10 years ago, I lived downstairs from Judy, a Puerto Rican woman with 5 kids the same ages as my kids. Since they all...

Alas –as if I needed yet one more reason to order my coffee from Coffee Kind.  If I did I found one.  There are not many good coffee shops within an hour of my house.  There are a few that...

http://www.coffeebreak2day.com/images/scanomat-top-coffee.jpg" hspace="5" height="299" border="8" align="right" width="325" vspace="5" title="scanomat top coffee machine" alt="scanomat top coffee machine" />Yesterday morning, gadget and gizmo sites around the net were buzzing about this little machine -- the Top coffee brewer from Scanomat. The machine is...

For the regulars here this will be old news - another Melitta CBR-10 Aroma Roast blog from me. As mentioned before, these were hit or miss back in the day - the day being 1982 of course.  Apparently this one...

Here are some of my favorite coffee quotes collected from far and wide.  What are yours? A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~Paul Erdos All the coffee in Columbia won’t make me a morning person.  ...

Thanks to my Melitta CBR-10 fluid bed 1000 watt personal coffee roaster, fresh coffee is available to me at a moment's notice in 40 gram increments.  That's right, this thing is designed to hold 50 - 55g green coffee maximum...

Between going through Klatch's Belle much more quickly than I intended and USPS fumbling a bit, I ended up going without coffee at home for four days.I know, talk about first world problems.I made it through the first three days...

Okay so yesterday I had made a post about how much that I was underwhelmed by Velton's Bonsai Blend, the coffee had taste flat, boring, a total let down. This was especially case because I had heard so many good...

http://www.coffeebreak2day.com/images/espresso-pot-de-creme.jpg" alt="espresso pot de creme" title="espresso pot de creme" vspace="5" width="273" align="right" border="0" height="196" hspace="5" />Smooth, rich, creamy and literally bursting with coffee flavor -- yep, it's another dessert recipe. Pots de creme are the French version of custard. They're...

Today was the first time in a while that I hit the local thrift stores.  As much as I enjoy it my time has been tight lately so my guilty pleasure has gone unattended for too long.  The first stop...

The coffee unsnob I have a friend who prides himself on being an unsnob about coffee and more or less about everything in general.  There is only one small problem - he has a La Pavoni lever machine, lives in...

Last month I took some video showing the process of making coffee with the aeropress using the inverted method but I did not have the time to properly edit the video until today.  Here is a brief run through of...

One of the weird things with coffee is that you can get a pound of coffee and not really have any luck brewing it. I am not so sure if this is because you get a bum batch of coffee...