Welcome, Twitter Users
It is likely that you arrived at this welcome page by clicking the link on my Twitter profile. This post is my primitive method for tracking traffic from Twitter.
Read MoreLate Night, With Wondo Harfusa
These days, I seem to be on a musical nostalgia tour. A couple of weeks ago, it was The Dead. Then last night, my wife and I found ourselves in the crowd for They MIght Be Giants at Le Poisson Rouge, on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. The crowd of people in button-downed shirts and khaki was enthusiastic. But it did not have the same energy we recalled from the late 1990s, when the band could fill the Bowery Ballroom, and nerdy fans sat in circles in the line outside singing angst-ridden lyrics they knew by heart. That was long before the band transformed itself a Grammy-winning act for children known for TV and movie theme songs. Anyway, the last thing I did before leaving the apartment was to pull another shot of this coffee, from the Yerga Cheffe region of Ethiopia. It kept me bouncing.
Read MoreA Couple of Shots of Soma by Barismo
It was a beautiful Memorial Day in New York, and I was getting down to the dregs of the bowl where I throw the leftover beans from my coffee experiments. It was starting to taste a little too much like the bitter Starbucks mistake from quite a while back. I took a bike ride down to my favorite indie coffee shop, Café Grumpy, using the newish Ninth Avenue lane, encountering just one illegally parked delivery truck that forced me to divert awkwardly into the street. On the way back, up the older Sixth Avenue lane, it was a nightmare of hazards -- cabs veering into the lane to get fares, jaywalkers, wrong-way cyclists and bladers, and, incredibly, a row of half a dozen police squad cars parked neatly in the lane in Herald Square. The N.Y.P.D. does what it pleases.
Read MoreShots of Alphabet City, the Espresso
It was a busy week of catching up at work after vacation, then a busier weekend that included a children's birthday party by the Hudson River, with volunteer activities to benefit the Children for Children Foundation. Then last night it was off to Madison Square Garden for The Dead. It was a great show, musically. There were certainly some aging hippies in the crowd, but most of the audience had a middle-aged suburban feel to it. A lot of people who might have been dancing in the hallways and aisles 20 years ago seemed content to sit in their seats and suck on plastic bottles of Budweiser.
Read MoreTaste of Agua Preta From Carmo de Minas
Origin: Produced by Antonio Pereira de Castro and Glaucio Pinto of Fazenda Tijuco Preto in the Carmo de Minas region of Brazil.
Roasted: April 6 or8 by Intelligentsia.
Purchased: April 13 at Ninth Street Espresso, Chelsea Market, 75 Ninth Avenue, between 15th and 16th Streets.
Description: "A silky yet buoyant mouthfeel combines with notes of brown sugar and caramel to create an exquisitely delectable cup. A tamed acidity allows for notes of fudge to blossom right before the buttery finish."
In the cup: I was at first taken aback by what appeared to be a very old roasting date, which I just found in very tiny type on the price tag. But Ken Nye of Ninth Street Espresso has corrected me in the comments, noting that I was probably misreading the tag and that no coffees he sells are older than 12 days. I'm sorry I doubted. The coffee certainly tasted fresh.
This Yellow Catuai was grown at 1200 meters and harvested in August. Here is an excerpt from the tasting notes from Kyle Glanville, director of espresso at the roaster (full PDF is here):
Agua Preta is our first DT Brazilian coffee for filter, and this first lot comes from Fazenda Tijuco Preto, itself a two-time finalist in the Cup of Excellence competitions. Tijuco Preto is blessed with natural springs and a high-altitude plateau that makes harvesting cherries an efficient and easy task. This pulped natural coffee offers striking balance and drinkability with soft acidity, a perfect cup for a lazy morning with the paper.
Well, where to begin. I've been drinking this as espresso for much of the week. This morning I tried it as a regular coffee. Setting aside my ambivalence about the term "mouth feel,' it was definitely silky in both cases. I don't know about buoyant. The acidity is low, though the espressos were slightly more acidic. The hints of chocolate, caramel and fudge were there, more or less, especially in the espresso version, but the finish -- I guess it is buttery -- it is most noticeable in the filter version for some reason. Is "buttery" really the right word? Oh, I suppose. It's a tasty cup of joe.
Another Fine Coffee From Finca Santuario
I'm on vacation from the job that pays the bills this week, but vacationing is hard work, especially since our daughter is off from school and my wife has to work. I need many shots of espresso to keep up my stamina. On Monday, I hustled my daughter off to a playdate, then wandered off on a chilly but sunny day to the Ninth Street Espresso outpost in Chelsea Market. I was on a specific mission: All of NInth Street's coffees are roasted by Intelligentsia, which has a roasting lab but no shops in New York. I had been pleased with several Intelligentsia "guest" coffees purchased at Cafe Grumpy, including this Colombian. I'll have more on the results of the expedition later. How did this bean fare in my ongoing coffee quest?
Read MoreThird-Party iPhone Apps Update 3
I am surprised by how well this list of iPhone apps I actually use has held up over the past few months. Most of the apps I've added in recent months have been games, none of them particularly amazing, although my daughter swears by one, Jelly Car. I have to admit, it is fun.
Read MoreThis Is Chapadao de Ferro (Microlot 494)
This has not been a good month for my coffee-blogging. We had some distracting news at the office, then a couple of weeks ago, I was laid low by a burning lump of fire in my throat that turned out to be strep. My daughter and eight other kids in her class, plus the teacher and some parents, probably came down with it too. It took a while to shake that, and the cure was in some ways worse than the illness, but I finally seem to be on the mend.
Read MoreThe Next 100 Years Could Be Better Than This
I just finished reading "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century," by George Friedman, and I hope he is wrong about nearly everything. His thesis is that we humans don't have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.
Read MoreA Pound of Organic Espindola From Ecuador
I happened to find myself in a Whole Foods store a week ago and noticed the wide coffee selection. Not being able to help myself, I picked up some single-source beans from Ecuador. For much of the week, I have been drinking it, mostly as espresso, alternating with the pricier Kenyan beans from an indie shop that I wrote about last week as part ofmy ongoing coffee quest. This has kept me alert through a few hours of an extracurricular project, listening to the audiobook version of "Shantaram," by David Gregory McDonald, a potboiler set in India.
Read MoreFrom the Thunguri Auction Lot in Kenya
Ah, the signs of spring -- Turbotax, Daylight Saving Time and warmer weather. What better time to jump-start a moribund blog? I've been kicking around some ideas for posts. For example, I am really grooving on the new Kindle for iPhone application. It is amazing to be reading a book on one device then have the phone call the same text up to the page where I left off. And the updated New York Times iPhone app is snappier than the original, which had grown slower and frustrating with new phone firmware updates. Now I can get depressing economic news right in my hand in a matter of seconds.
Read MoreShots of Heliconias From Finca Santuario
So by the time I went back for more of the sweet-tooth yellow icatu, it was sold out, alas. I am tempted to order some directly in bulk from the roaster, Ritual of San Francisco. I may yet, though that would be admitting my quest was at an end, and, of course, given the ephemeral and perishable nature of coffee beans, not to mention existence itself, that is not likely. I could have bought more of the oddly tea-flavored selection from Guatemala, or even the standard Heartbreaker espresso I started all this with, but I'm not ready to repeat myself yet. Onward to the new, this time a direct-trade bean from Colombia.
Read MoreA Week of Sweet Tooth Yellow Icatu
In my seemingly never-ending quest for the perfect home-made espresso, I was stopped short last weekend by a bean that came incredibly close. I just didn't have time to write about it, so I've been drinking it all week, alternating with this oddly tea-like but delicious coffee from Barismo that seems better suited to what the non-Americans call a cup of American coffee. Which can be a lovely beverage, no matter what the snobs say. Anyway, I bought these espresso beans at the same time, and have been enjoying that Brazilian flavor that took Frank Sinatra to no. 6 on the charts in 1946.Name: Fazenda Esperança Sweet Tooth Espresso Yellow Icatu
Read MoreAnalyzing an Experiment in Blogging
Since October I've been experimenting here with some personal blogging. Why, you might ask, when I already blog at my job? Isn't that a busman's holiday? Perhaps. But I had plunked down money for this domain, and I had some ideas and obsessions to explore that didn't fit in with my work. And I also wanted to conduct a few experiments. When a blog is housed within a major news site, the metrics get hard to sort out. With some great content and breaking news, and a huge built-in audience, it is a simple matter to draw millions of views. (Palafo.com has drawn under 5,000 views in its entire existence, with who knows how many hundreds of those clicks attributable to family and friends.)
Read MoreA Tea-Flavored Cup From Nimac Kapeh
I've come to appreciate sellers and roasters who blog about their single-source culinary coffees, giving some background on the beans, how they found them, who grew them. So it was that I learned that "Nimac Kapeh" is (reputedly) a Mayan phrase that means "the place of coffee."
Read MoreFrom the Aptly Named Wondo Worka
Yes, I'm coffee-blogging again. After ambiguously adequate experiences with single-source beans from Starbucks and Joe the Art of Coffee, I high-tailed it back to my regular source of beans this week.
Read MoreMen Polishing Their Silver
Several years ago, I was on a suburban commuter train in warmer weather, and I overheard a man who claimed to be a psychiatrist, a big man festooned with silver rings and bracelets, sweating in a suit, talking with an incongruous companion, a tattooed young woman in a skirt. He told her he sometimes worked in a clinic where there were currently 20 men claiming to be Jesus. O.K., I thought, sure, right. Nice round number. I've heard that joke. The man and the woman were just getting acquainted. Perhaps it was a blind date of some sort. He told her how he would never greet patients on the street until they first greeted him, so as not to violate doctor-patient confidentiality.
Read MoreAn Abrupt Farewell to Pacific Echo
Restaurants come and go, especially in New York, and I usually don't get attached to them or mourn them, but this sudden departure hurts a bit. For several years, Pacific Echo was the reliable little place around the corner for a Saturday night dinner. It was the first place my daughter learned to sit down and behave in a restaurant. This was where she learned to love California roll, edamame and green tea ice cream.
Read MoreA Couple of Shots of F. W. Tres Rio Bella Vista
In my defense, I live in a neighborhood that has more square feet under the control of Starbucks than it has space devoted to food markets, bank branches or even Duane Reade drugstores. There is just one independent coffee shop, several blocks away, and it serves bad coffee. Plus, it was cold last night, 20 degrees, and the Starbucks was right there, still open, as we walked back from dinner, having just learned that our favorite sushi joint had gone out of business.
Read MorePodcast Zeitgeist, Jan. 26
This week's installment is the Podcast Zeitgeist of second chances, and probably the last such post for a good long while. I'll continue to listen to a few favorites, but a hiatus is in order. This started as an effort to make some notes about what worked for me as a listener. But it became an exhausting and time-consuming exercise, particularly since I sampled many more hours than I ever wrote about. It was cutting into my Twittering time. At some point I may summarize what I have learned, or not.[See all lists.]
Read More