You know what would be a good name for a coffee blog?

Hot Commodity. Right?! On so many levels. Most often served hot, second most traded commodity in dollar terms after oil (and with far less depressing concequences when huge quantities of it are spilled into the deep ocean, mainly highly caffienated blobfish, which, let's face it, they could use some caffeine) and um, also it's ... hot, which I'm not sure I mentioned, and a commodity.

Also, since, in this case, the author often refers to himself as a hot commodity, Hot Commodity as a blog title becomes the heretofor unthinkable quinta entendre. Which is all by way of saying that I wish I'd thought of it earlier.

Alas, the pun will have to remain tetravalent, as I will be departing for the semi-arid hills of Los Angeles' Silverlake district at the end of this month.

I know. Unthinkable, right? Who will man the host of barely operable machinery in the warehouse, not to mention the barely operable puns of this blog?

Fortunately I have trained a new roaster, Jake (Chewbacca to my Han Solo), and he is fully equipped to roast a mean bean and blog sassily about it later. Also, he has a history as an EMT and volunteer fire fighter, two professional skill sets which often come in handy in the wild and dangerous world of coffee roasting.

This then, is the last word I'll be typing for the bittersweet coffee blog. And by the last word I mean this

one

here

right

now.

Within 5/8" of my life

It's easy for me to forget that most people spend less than 80% of their waking hours around high-voltage, pressurized equipment and, as such, have far less opportunity to learn the valuable lessons that can only come from working with high-voltage, pressurized equipment.

In fact, I find I learn these lessons on an almost daily basis. Today, for example, I learned that Type L 5/8" O.D. soft copper tubing is either a) sixty feet long or b) contains materials known to the state of California to be hazardous. Although I'm not sure how total length affects whether or not the tubing is hazardous, there is clearly a correlation. And while I would be happy to buy 60' of tubing even though I only need 10' if that means I wouldn't be source of an army of mutant babies from Emeryville, I'm worried that only sixty continuous feet of tubing will actually remain free of hazards, so as you can see, I'm in a bit of a bind: Either I create an elaborate rollercoaster of copper tubing in our already cramped warehouse, or everyone who drinks my lattes ends up looking like Jeff Goldbloom at the end of "The Fly."

Oddly, 1/2" soft copper tubing doesn't seem to have this issue, nor does 3/8" or 1/4". Also these sizes are available at any hardware store with a plumbing department, whereas neither Home Depot nor Ashby heating and plumbing had 5/8". Although I am happy to report that, for those in need of 5/8" soft copper tubing, it can be found at Ashby Lumber (contains hazardous materials) and Rubenstein Supply (sixty feet long).

That said, everything else is in place for us to open a small retail operation out of the warehouse. I have recently returned old one-eye to it's original housing, and I'm happy to say it looks very sleek and 80s (which is to say tremendously boxy). In honor of this transformation, I am rechristening it Johnny 5 after the eponymous robot protagonist of the Short Circuit movies. Here is a direct comparison:

Right?

Keep drinking coffee.

-Ian

IT'S OFFICIAL!!!

This Thing:

Works:

Yes! Months after my announcement that I would have this thing working in no time, I give you photographic evidence of Old One Eye's inaugural shot. Granted, every shot I've pulled thus far tastes like it was made with water from a public swimming pool - but that's what "dialing in" an espresso is all about.

It may be hard for the average coffee drinker to understand my excitement, but when you take into account my expectations when turning this machine on, which were to be either electrocuted or badly burnt, or to electrocute or badly burn someone else, I think it starts to become clear. In fact, just about the last thing I expected to do this machine to do was to make coffee.

But there it is, making coffee. Even after numerous applications of teflon tape and near-super-human torque on crucial nuts and bolts, it still leaks in places. But hey, if it works perfectly, it's not espresso.

IT'S ALIVE!!!

I thought I'd depart from my normal LucasFilms-laden rhetorical style for the more classic Mary Shelly in honor of the recent revival of Old One Eye, itself a classic of sorts, and shown here with it's little robot eye ablaze and both steam wands ablast.

This picture is taken during the descaling process, which involves dissolving a bunch of descaler inside the boiler and boiling a couple gallons of water for around forty minutes. This process has also served as a bench test for Old One Eye, and I am happy to report that just about every part of this machine that could leak, does, which means I will get to put off actually working for a couple more days and instead turn this thing on and off and look at it seriously and make concerned noises.

In other news, Steve and I cupped earlier in the day at Royal, and it looks like we'll be getting a very nice Nicaraguan in soon - about which I'm doubly excited, having never roasted a "Nic" (a moniker which I think falls short of Yirg and especially Guat in the ugly coffee region nickname contest) before. As we cupped it at Royal (thanks to the wonderful Jerri, sample roaster extraordinaire), it has all the acidity of a central, but the sweetness is more that of nuts and nutella rather than citrus. A compelling cup that we hope to bring your way soon!

10 girls (or boys?) from ipanema

That's right! We just got a palate (that's 10 bags, get it?) of a dry-processed Brazilian coffee that will shortly become the base of our espresso blend, Long Day's Journey (which is either a reference to caffeine as stimulant or caffeine as highly addictive substance, I'm still not sure). The coffee, called Porta Rossa, is from the Cerrado region of Brazil, a high plain much like the african savannah. The coffees from this region (typically of the Mundo Nuovo cultivar) are often dry processed and exhibit mellow acidity and great, big body.

Porta Rossa delivers notes of almond, tropical fruit and a toffee-like sweetness. It pairs beautifully with our recently arrived, washed Ethiopian coffee from Yirga Cheffe for a big-bodied shot espresso with top notes of lime and jasmine and a long, bittersweet finish.

Trials and Tribulations

I have been woefully derelict in my duties here at the BSCB. But spurred by responsibility to my readership, which has continued its furious ascent, barreling into double digits (!!!), I am back, and promise to be better than ever.

Several events at the BSMS (Bittersweet Mother Ship) and our satellite stores have kept me actually working at my job instead of just blogging about it.

Most recently your intrepid narrator was forced to answer that most ancient of coffee roasting riddles: How do you install a k-type thermocouple in a hole you have accidently and irreversibly drilled in the door of your roaster for a much bigger type of thermocouple?

Here, for comparison, is a side-by-side photograph of a k-type (the orange wire), and that other type (the one that looks like C3PO's nipple), for which the hole was drilled.

As I'm sure you can tell, the k-type did not even begin to fill the significant hole we'd had drilled in the door of our beloved Diedrich ir-3. I was at a bit of a loss. Fortunately, Steve (Qui Gon to my Obi Wan) offered this solution: "So just get a bolt the same size as the thermocouple, drill a lengthwise hole in it - see what I'm saying? - then use like maybe a rubberized epoxy to cement the k-type inside the hole and we'll screw it in." Which just about knocked me out of my chair it was so obvious.

Unfortunately, rubberized epoxies appear to have a maximum temperature rating of about 400 f (our roaster regularly reaches temperatures close to 450 f). So my first crack was a silicone gasket maker made for sealing stuff like exhaust systems. This, however, proved to a be a little too gummy and didn't retain the k-type. My next stop was JB Cold Weld, which has lived up to its name, firmly holding the k-type in the middle of the whirling bean mass.

Here's my mock jig holding the bolt and k-type while the jb works its magic.

As you can see, we operate with a maximum of sophistication here at Bittersweet Origins, Coffee Division (BSOCD, or Be Socked!, which I find both hilarious and a good piece of advice).

So now, riddle answered, we can tell the surface temperature of our beans! While air temperature provides a reasonable estimation of bean temperature, surface temperature is both more accurate and, when cross-referenced with air temperature, provides valuable clues as to what is happening inside the bean.

Furthermore, we take away two important lessons. First, think twice, maybe even thrice, before you put big holes in expensive pieces of machinery.

Secondly, once you've put that big hole in the machinery, don't stop until you've patched it up. Or, as a wise, green, two-foot-tall puppet once said "Do or do not. There is no try."

I've been reading a lot about coffee recently, and not just in my own blog posts. In hopes of further perfecting my already exemplary roasting technique I've hounded Steve (Alec Guiness to my Mark Hammel) and others with bona fide Coffee Skillz for any and all documents/videos/performance art pieces that might help me improve.

And let me tell you, blogger to bloggee, there isn't much out there; and most of what is, is in Italian. Fortunately, recent advances in coffee technology have allowed Italian roasters to translate their works into English. Although the method is still in its nascent stages, it has given other humans who don't ride vespas and are less predisposed to coffee roasting a peek into the vast compendium of coffee knowledge compiled by the likes of Illy and International Institute of Coffee Tasters.

Currently, I'm reading Espresso Italiano Roasting, which is a lot like reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in that everyone who's read it says they get most of it, when really, no one gets any of it, not even Thomas Pynchon. The difference is that Thomas Pynchon made Gravity's Rainbow hard to read to torture undergraduates, whereas Espresso Italiano is hard to read because it is a technical manual translated by an unpaid intern armed with only a 5th grade English reading level and an Italian/English dictionary. (Unlike other interns, IICT interns are actually strictly prohibited from "getting the coffee," as this is a symbol of status and prestige. So it is the tenured faculty who make coffee for the interns while the interns generate spider graphs and speak at coffee tasting symposiums.)

While the Espresso Italiano Roasting yields several sentences whose challenge to the rules of English grammar obfuscate any information they might contain in Italian, I found one gem that I'd like to share with you. In the section entitled Science Can Only Support Art, author Luigi Odello concludes:

“Therefore the old limiting concept of roasting process must be left behind , avoiding to frequently resort to cause-effect logic and , above all, it must always be borne in mind that end consumers can only rely on their sensory organs to assess the roaster's job. That is why roasting must be considered on a scientific basis, yet no high standard product can be obtained without art, which is the intellectual part that only the sensitivity of who supervises production can add.”

While the lyricism of Odello’s Italian doesn’t quite find it’s way into the English version, the sentiment remains clear: You can study all you want but perfection is only attained by intuition. Leave it to the Italians to add sentiments to a scientific trade manual that in America are left to movies like Top Gun and Searching for Bobby Fisher.

In any case, Odello touches on one of the most compelling aspects of coffee roasting. Roasting, chemically speaking, is a very complex process (the number of chemical compounds present in the bean double over the course of a 15 minute roast), yet the means by which we control it are simple (air flow and heat). Furthermore our ability to detect with instrumentation what is going on inside the bean at any moment is fairly limited, which means that intuition, guided by years of experience, is what leads to truly exceptional roasting.

I encourage anyone as interested in the philosophical and spiritual aspects of coffee roasting as I am to avoid Espresso Italiano Roasting at all costs and opt instead for the well-researched and surprisingly well-written Coffee: A Dark History by Anthony Wild. Mr. Wild eschews the typical apocrypha associated with coffee’s origins for some real investigative reporting. His conclusions cast coffee in an interesting light: Although he falls short of conclusive evidence, his research points to a certain Sufi scholar inventing the means by which we consume coffee today. Sufis made their devotions at night which would give them a specific interest in stimulants; their interest in alchemy as a physical analogue for their spiritual devotions lead them to experiment with otherwise uninteresting substances, hence roasting an ordinary seed, and their contact with the Chinese treasure fleets would have meant they were familiar with infusion brewing as they would have been served tea.

All attempts to explain the origins of brewed coffee at this point are conjecture, and they are likely to remain so, but I find Wild’s theory particularly compelling. Certainly whoever first roasted coffee was guided by intuition, and I like to believe with Odello that today’s roasters do the same in their continued search for perfection.

Alright - that about wraps up this long and winding and overly sentimental post. As a parting meditation, please enjoy these pictures of webs spun by the highest spider on Earth.