The Reading Room

If form should follow function, then my current bottle of maple syrup is a study in good design. It is a slender flask of glass, slender enough to hold captive in one's breast pocket for the occasional discreet swig. Or,...

It’s been said before, but now I think they mean it: Able Brewing’s new website will officially launch this week at some point. For the moment, there’s just this nice-looking placeholder parked at the URL along with a link to...

So it got up to 84 degrees or so yesterday, and I was hot from picking strawberries earlier—too hot, in fact, to stomach the idea of my usual mid-afternoon coffee. That is, until I remembered the ice in the freezer!For...

This is an update to my previous blog posts about my attempt at getting a used Olympia Cremina manual lever espresso machine.-It all started October of last year when I was casually browsing Ebay for any good deals on lever...

So I was out this morning as my wife had some business to attend to, i.e. I was just roaming about while I waited to pick her up and of course I ended up at a coffee shop. So this...

From Google image search for Trifecta MB -- the plot thickens Can someone show me how to brew a bad cup of coffee?I've tried. Used the wrong water, the wrong settings, had an aborted brew when the air leaked out through the...

I recently had occasion to visit my old stomping grounds. Coffee grounds were involved.Columbia recently opened a shiny new building, a futuristic affair whose silvery, futuristic aspect I suppose testifies to the forward-looking scientific studies regularly undertaken behind it.On the...

On the ground floor of NYC's Ace Hotel at 29th in between Broadway & 5th is a small, standing-room only coffee bar. It goes by the name of Stumptown. The knock on Stumptown has long been that it's a great espresso...

I have been a supporter of Bonavita since discovering last year the company was finally introducing the Melitta Aroma to the North American market. Melitta dropped the ball IMHO by not bringing it over long ago. I do own one...

Bonavita has done coffee home-brewers a great service by introducing two (cost-)effective devices: an autodrip, and an electric kettle for hand-drip. Their electric gooseneck kettle is, to my knowledge, the only one on the market. Hario presented an electric Buono...

For some reason a minute ago I started daydreaming about coffee in space. Sadly, we don’t seem to be near the time when it will be possible for middle-class wannabe explorers/adventure seekers like myself to buy a ticket to visit...

I am getting to that point in probably a few days that I will be picking up another bag of coffee either on here or through various local means of getting some nice fresh roasted coffee. However, one of the...

As you probably noticed, this week I have Kalita on the brain. Despite the fact that it will be a few months until I get my hands on the Wave Style Set I won, I’m already checking out recipes and...

I'm still playing with recipes for a culinary coffee cookbook and this one is my latest attempt. It's not perfect, but my taste testers tell me that this coffee pastry was "the bomb". The dessert is a simple one --...

We see enough of these “coffee is healthy for you” articles lately, but why not pile on and post one more? Lord knows we had to suffer through enough bad science reports telling us how bad they thought coffee was...

about two months ago I wrote a little blog about the issue that I was getting with my shots off of the Nuova Simonelli Musica; the shot taste mightly fine but at the end, there was a lot of grit...

I agree with one of our bloggers here that the various brewing guides available online are worth checking out, but I forgot to mention in my comment under his post that I found Intelligentsia’s guide for the Eva Solo Café...

In the spirit of Nick’s “Odds and Ends” post the other day, I thought I’d just share some thoughts about what’s going on with me without fussing excessively about whether or not they hang well together. Here goes.1. Today I’ve...

One of the interesting things about writing a blog here on this site it has made it incredibly obvious to me that coffee has long since gone from beverage to hobby for me. I assume this is the case for...

So this last month has been crazy busy and while I've enjoyed plenty of coffee I haven't had much of a chance to write about it. It's been over a month since my last post.   I finished off the...

The venerable LA Times has done it again -- they've printed the mother of all deceptive coffee health headlines. And it's not the first time. Back in 2008, when the Annals of Internal Medicine published a similar study by Esther...