Category Archives: Green Coffee

Tick, tick, tick….. boom.

The internet is quite talkative at the moment.  The coffee sliver of the internet anyway.  Lots of talk about seasonality, which is a good thing.
This does beg the question – how long is coffee good for?  Green coffee I mean – we’re still arguing about roasted coffee’s shelf life and a great deal more time [...]

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Recommended Coffee Reading List – Part 1

Back in 2006 I published a recommended reading list. Since that time my collection of books has (worryingly) increased so I thought I should probably update it. I could easily write a list of coffee books that one should avoid (having learned the hard way) but I suspect that would get me into [...]

Also posted in Espresso, Latte Art, Opinion, coffee brewing | Tagged , , , , , , | 15 Comments

More on density

I had a brief moment to dig into a couple of books and was pleased to come across the following passage in  Coffee: Recent Developments  that was very kindly sent to me by Jim Schulman.

Also posted in Food Chemistry, Roasting | Tagged , , , , , | 12 Comments

A grand unified theory of espresso

Not too long ago I posted on Home Barista about trying to find a good way to measure the density of coffee beans. 1
As always the paricipants there were way smarter than me and offered several interesting options. I dropped into the thread that this was part of my idea of a grand unified theory [...]

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Thoughts on the last Esmeralda auction

According to the owner of the stoneworks auction website, I was one of up to 3000 users watching or participating in the latest auction. It went on for 9 hours and you had to feel very, very sorry for the Japanese who would have started bidding at 10pm and finished around 7am. (though [...]

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Introduction to the chemistry of the wet process (part 1)

This article is a simplified version of what was researched and written for the attempted coffeed study group. Sadly that project didn’t take off – however I am grateful to people like Andy Schecter and Jim Schulman for publishing the papers they wrote regardless. The article doesn’t focus much on cup quality and [...]

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Story Coffees

Sometimes the smallest things set your brain off thinking down a particular track.  For me it was the last post on the Sweet Marias blog, which got me thinking about the rise of what I call Story Coffees over the last few years.
From the outset I will make it clear that I love to know [...]

Also posted in Coffee, Opinion | 7 Comments

A varietal family tree

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, but hadn’t gotten anywhere with. Tonight I was flicking through the Illy book looking for something else and then starting reading the varietals page and thought I’d try something simple to see how it looked. It is pretty badly labeled at this [...]

Also posted in News, Opinion | 11 Comments

Quebradon

Today was a good day.  Mercanta had a Meet the Grower event for some farmers from the Quebradon Cooperative.  I was really looking forward to this because I am a huge fan of their coffee, and this year’s crop really is great.  It was so good in fact that during Anette’s practise for the World [...]

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Kopi Luwak in the LA Times

I picked up this link via BoingBoing – according to a Canadian food scientist named Massimo Marcone 42% of the Kopi Luwak available for sale is “either adulterated or complete fakes, unfortunately”. I always thought the percentage was higher than that, but I suppose I am cynical.
Full article here.
I can’t help post about this [...]

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