Notes on coffee, the objects it is made with, and what we will not sell you.
A shop shelf of brewers looks like a shelf of unrelated inventions. A press, a cone, a flat-bottom dripper, a vacuum pot, a plastic plunger, a valv...
Read the setupIf your coffee is good on Tuesday and bad on Thursday and you cannot say why, you do not have a skill problem. You have a record-keeping problem, a...
Read the setupA blade grinder does not grind. It chops, repeatedly, at whatever happens to be in the path of the blade at the moment it passes.
Read the setupLeave coffee brewing too long and it does not simply become more of itself. It becomes a different drink, one with flavours in it that were not pre...
Read the setupDrinking one coffee attentively teaches you almost nothing about it. That is an uncomfortable thing to say to somebody who has just spent twenty po...
Read the setupThe fridge feels like the careful choice. It is cold, it is dark, it shuts properly, and every other perishable thing in the house already lives th...
Read the setupYou have heard this one. An Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi notices his goats leaping about after eating the red berries of a particular shrub, tri...
Read the setupThe last inch of a cafetière is usually undrinkable, and most people have quietly accepted this as the price of the method. It is not. The sludge i...
Read the setupFor twenty years the standard advice was never to freeze coffee, and it was given with the confidence of a rule that had been tested. It had not re...
Read the setupTwo people can agree they want strong coffee and want opposite drinks. One means a dark, smoky roast. The other means something that will keep them...
Read the setupOrigin gets the attention on a bag of coffee, and processing gets a single word in smaller type. For predicting what the coffee will actually taste...
Read the setupTea drinkers are taught that different leaves want different temperatures, and they adjust without thinking about it. Coffee drinkers are mostly ta...
Read the setup
