Even Starbucks employees will quietly admit that the drip coffee available in Starbucks stores is just awful.  I don't know if it's the blend, or the way they brew it, or both, but I find it completely undrinkable.  Worse than office coffee.

Starbucks has made several moves to try and prevent this.  First they started insisting that baristas throw out the coffee every N minutes and make a new pot, so that it wouldn't be stale.  This resulted in the inevitable "We just put on a new batch, your coffee will be ready in five minutes."

Then, because "no one orders regular coffee after 2PM" and because they didn't want to waste it, they stopped serving regular drip coffee after 2PM.  


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Via Metafilter today comes word of a new espresso drink which has taken the city of London by storm.  The "Flat White," which was reportedly developed in New Zealand (or perhaps Australia - but trust me, it's best to stand back and let the two of them duke it out) and quickly became popular in damp dreary London.

The Flat White can best be understood by the American audience as a double short no-foam latte.  It begins with two shots of espresso pulled ristretto - short - in order to maximize flavor while minimizing bitterness.  There are three ways to pull a ristretto shot:

1.    Grind the beans more finely, and pull a normal amount of water through them.  Since the water has less contact with the finer grinds, it will extract less bitterness from them.

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Further proof that coffee is the bringer of all good things is the Coffee Party, a new alternative to the Tea Party.  And without all the hilarious yet juvenile "tea bagging" jokes!

The Coffee Party "advocates cooperation among elected representatives and promotes civil public discourse."  As opposed to the Tea Party, which advocates drawing a Hitler mustache on pictures of Obama, and shouting a lot.  I can dig it!


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Here is a virtual shot of espresso in case you are stuck in a baristaless environment.

Cappuccino or Latte?: Who knows at Starbucks.I am an avid coffee drinker. Espresso to be exact. And I like to mix it up, sometimes a mocha, sometimes a cappuccino and sometimes a 'mochaccino'. I'll even have a cup of joe from time to time when the mood strikes. But I got BEEF with Starbucks.

I have had cappuccinos in Paris, Rome, New York and San Francisco. And as long as I got those in a restaurant or cafe they were pretty much served alike. A shot of Espresso and about equal parts milk and foam. In my mind, the milk shouldn't outweigh the espresso and the foam should fill the bulk of the cup.

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I confess that, after living in Washington for a little over a year, I've not yet really sampled the local coffee culture. I know, it's inexcusable, particularly since I'm exceedingly fond of coffee. I don't really have an excuse. I want to experience the full panoply of Washington's fine coffee emporiums and roasters, I really do. There's just one small problem. You see, long ago, I discovered Hawaiian coffee, and fell deeply in love with it. Not just the Kona brew you hear so much—but coffee from Kaanaipali, in Maui, or Kauai or Molokai. You don't hear much about Hawaiian coffee except for Kona, and honestly, most of the state-side Kona if you check the label is actually something like 10%, with the rest made up of Arabica.

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I am surrounded by coffee kiosks. I customarily pass five or six coffeehouses a day, some with custom small-batch roasts, in an effort to go anywhere at all. Even the local grocery stores carry the beans produced by local roasters. The local climate is pro-coffee, to the extent that you have to hunt for the segregated tea sections in local grocery stores. Ordering coffee here is an art in and of itself, worthy of the mockery of coffee house trendiness in L. A. Story. Americano, cappuccino, mocha, expresso, latte, soy latte, half-caf, macchiato—it's complicated. Don't ask me to explain the decaf espresso crowd; I can't.

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Coffee in terms of the ur-bean, if you will, of the species Coffea arabica, is native to tropical Africa, in the region known today as Ethiopia, and is in the same family Rubiaceae as the gardenia. Your basic coffee bean traveled, in the space of a little under seven hundred years, from tropical Africa to the courts and markets of Europe. Roughly a thousand years ago, c. 1000 CE, coffee was brought from Africa to Arabia. Coffee addiction and the love of the bean spread with the spread of Islam, and thus coffee was spread to North Africa, the eastern(and Islamic) half of the Mediterranean, and India. Arabia, no slouch when it came to international trade, protected their coffee monopoly by boiling or roasting beans before export, thus rendering them infertile, and insuring repeat customers.

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French roasted jitters

Colombian caffeine high

how international

All the coffee nerds are salivating over the latest advance in espresso generating technology, THE SLAYER.  I'm sorry, I can't help putting it in all caps.  The machine is called SLAYER.  Grar!

At a mere $18,000 The Slayer is not the machine for everyone.  In fact, less than 20 of these hand built machines are in use in coffee shops today.  What would lead a coffee shop to pay nine or ten times as much for an espresso machine, compared to typical commercial espresso machines?  Aside from being absolutely beautiful, The Slayer allows for a degree of customization unheard of in today's espresso marketplace.


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