The Reading Room

Hello all, this is my first blog entry and I thought I would share some math I did a few weeks ago regarding the savings associated with buying coffee online as opposed to your local coffee house/fast food joint. First...

I am torn between to grinders – the Baratza Preciso and the Baratza Vario. Both grinders have many fans and a few detractors. I like the simplicity of the Preciso compared the Vario. I do not think I would have...

  /files/u14732/traditional.jpg" align="middle" height="302" width="190" />   I love cold brew. So much in fact, that I've made finding interesting coffees like Malabar and Rwandan and blending them together to brew a habit. So many coffees that I decided to...

Note: The irony of writing a blog post on how caffeine can be addictive and debating the merits of coffee while feeling the effects of three cups of coffee (and a Red Bull) is not lost on me. It’s said...

The very first grinder I used at home was an impulse buy I made just a few days after buying a French press: a Bodum blade grinder. It was cheap, it looked cool, and I felt like a suave sophisticated...

The French press is, for me and I’m sure for many others, the first foray into making “culinary coffee.” What I mean when I say Culinary Coffee is coffee brewed with careful consideration and in such a way as to...

When it comes to coffee, Pittsburgh is…unique. A blue collar working class town that’s been inundated with nerdy, techy, savvy 20 something’s (like myself) that have lived elsewhere, came to Pittsburgh for work or school (I came for my MBA) ...

What I am drinking now – aka what am I drinking now?  I would love to write a what I am drinking now post but alas I do not know the answer so I cannot do that. You might think...

The vibe in the San Francisco coffee scene when I was living there was very special and unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. People just…cared. They cared about the mugs they used (the fact that they would actually serve coffee...

After spending some time as an unhappy public accountant I thought it was time for a change; I decided to move from Boston to San Francisco. This was a very exciting time for me, and led me to some pretty...

I grew up in Boston; this means that my first taste of coffee was not at home, it wasn’t at a “third wave” coffee shop, it wasn’t even at a Starbucks. No, my first taste of coffee was a “medium...

This morning I did not wake up early enough to grind some of my fresh beans from Elemental Coffee roasters in my Hario Skerton grinder and brew it in my Clever Coffee Dripper (reviews for all these gadgets coming soon.)...

Vintage Timeless Coffee is a café in Edmond Oklahoma, a small town adjacent to Oklahoma City. I like this place, but I will admit that its more because of the vibe I get from it than from the coffee. I...

This is the first of many blog entries I hope to make about my views on coffee, my experiences drinking coffee, and my experiences with coffee resulting from moving around the United States. One thing I’ve learned is that coffee...

Cool tool report The Thermapen from Thermoworks. One of the keys to steaming milk properly, perhaps the most important key is figuring out what temperature to transition from stretching the milk and then most importantly figuring out when to stop...

And sometimes you just have to throw precision out the window… I am usually a huge fan of control when making espresso.  If you change any variable by a little bit it changes the flavor of the coffee.  Increase your...

Yesterday morning I had a little accident while making my first cup of the day. Everything started out normally as I got out my coffee and various bits of gear I intended to use to grind and brew it (scale,...

The Gaggia Classic is a very nice machine.  I own a similar machine call the Gaggia Coffee which looks a lot like the Classic and shares a majority of parts with it's more expensive sibling. One feature found on the Classic...

Tilt the cup keeping it on the counter so it stays nice and still.  (You do not have to do this in the long run, but it helps at the start).    Raise the pitcher up about 6 inches above the...

The work of the espresso machine is complete now and pouring latte art will be the focus of the next few steaming milk posts.  This is harder to explain in a blog than how to create microfoam even though I...

Lever espresso machines, they are cool looking and they make good espresso; but one of the easily overlooked aspect of lever machine is its quiteness. And I experienced this first hand Saturday's night. I was staying up late at night...