no coffee; pepsi.

no coffee; pepsi.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Congratulations, Boston: You've joined the percentage of the world's population without reasonable access to clean drinking water.

It's not the exclusive group you might think »

Posting by cameraphone from Logan International Airport, Boston.

coffee stains

Ivan Vakarelski at the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences in Singapore was inspired by the rings left behind by spilled coffee to create a new way to make ultrathin coatings for LCD and plasma flat-screens.

In LCDs, transparent conductive coatings are used to form an electrode on the surface of the screen, while in plasma TVs they provide a shield that prevents electromagnetic fields from straying.

Traditionally to make such coatings it’s necessary to sputter a fine layer of highly conductive and transparent indium tin oxide onto the surface. This takes place in cost-intensive clean rooms and vacuum chambers.

Vakearelsk noted that when coffee is spilled, the evaporating liquid drives coffee particles to the edges of the spill -- which ultimately produces the circular stain. The coffee granules are being "assembled" by the varying evaporation and convection rates in the fluid.

Vakarelski and his colleagues figured that if they could mimic the process in a controlled fashion, they could create a pattern of granules of other materials to form a nanoscale conductive coating.

Instead of coffee they used a suspension of gold particles »

Shamelessly plagiarized and paraphrased from Anil Ananthaswamy’s Future TV screens seen in coffee stains in the 1 March issue of NewScientist.

ichor

Making the coffee for my folks on weekend mornings was one of my first grown up jobs -- and one that I fought my sister for until we relented into rotation.

From under the covers, still sleepy from the week, my dad would lay out the prescription -- the ratio of scoops in the flat bottomed basket to the whole pot of water that I’d pour into the Mr. Coffee coffee maker before flipping the switch to drip and breathing in deep as the steam rose from the plastic contraption.

When it was brewed and done I’d deliver the coffee to them in bed, black, taking care to walk slow so as not to slosh, feeling important and useful and accomplished.

When I was in high school a new crew moved in, against the tears and wishes of me and my brothers. My stepmother gone, my sister off to college, my father’s girlfriend and her two girls brought their percolator with them. It stewed up a bitter brew that sat and warmed for too many hours until it grew dark and viscous. I poured my first cup from that percolator, the first that I intended to drink myself, and did, when I was a sophomore in high school and alone in the house. I laced it heavily with cream and sugar. And then poured the second.

We took to each other immediately, coffee and me. I’d flaunt a mug and a bottomless carafe late at night at Denny’s, arguing philosophy with my boyfriend, the way the cool kids flaunted cigarettes.

My habit was so steep in college, and my pockets so poor, that I trained as a barista just to stay caffeinated. (The coffee was free.)

I drink it now with cream after I’ve brewed it through a cone shaped filter and favor a varietal from Chicago’s Intelligentsia, although this morning I’m drinking a cup of Cone Zone, which my Dad and his new and lasting and first girlfriend I’ve ever loved so much, C, delivered when they passed through town a few months ago. Cone Zone is named after the construction zone that currently surrounds the coffee shop that C owns and runs in Grand Junction.

I met C for the first time when my father lay dying in a hospital bed in Grand Junction. He’d talked of her before, but I dismissed her as just the latest of too many to count. When she walked into the ICU, a true cowgirl with long and curly pure white hair, just back and still bruised from her mother’s funeral, and said to my father deep in his coma “oh honey what have you done to yourself?” I knew she was more than that, and cried even harder, knowing he had even more to lose.

That she loves coffee, that she pours a beautiful shot, that she brought us two pounds as a matter of course -- is only one of the reasons that I know we’re kin for sure.

p.s. another way I know: C posts as desertmoon on flickr »

conversation starters

We've been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment.

Terry Davenport, Sr. VP for Marketing at Starbucks commenting on the introduction of the broadsheet Good into Starbucks' locations in this morning's New York Times.

It's implied in the New York Times piece, but not explicitly stated, that the Good broadsheet will be distributed free of charge. "The Good sheet features one advertiser an issue, which covers the cost of the sheet."

I don't have an issue with the distribution of Good in this context -- it looks like a fine publication -- but the piece immediately brought two considerations to mind:

Coffeehouses as we know them in the U.S. are descended from European coffeehouses that took root in the 1600s & 1700s. Historically governments have feared coffeehouses because of the political foment they generate -- whole revolutions have been born in coffeehouses and in the minds of the folks drinking the brew.

This from the New York Review of Books, courtesy of Henry Copley's piece on Blogging from 1750 to 2302 (emphasis my own):

After its creation in Constantinople in 1560, the coffeehouse proliferated in all European cities from the mid-seventeenth century. It first appeared in London in 1660. By 1663, London had 82 coffee houses, by 1734, 551. Because of their free talk and virtuosi, they became known as "tattling universities." They also served as centers for political cabals, for they provided pamphlets and newspapers as well as drink. The first London daily began in 1702 -- long after the first daily newspaper in Germany (Leipzig, 1660) but long before the first in France (Paris, 1777). Print, talk and coffee combined to create a powerful new force everywhere in Europe: public opinion, and public opinion took a radical turn in all the great cities.

Authentic coffeehouses continue to stir up this spirit. They're the last refuge of poets and philosophers, renegades and revolutionaries. The Last Exit in Seattle comes to mind; the Trident in Boulder; Cafe Strada in Berkeley (okay: maybe I'm remembering the Strada's white mocha lattes before white mocha lattes were cool. still. pretty good.).

How far does a coffeehouse have to be neutered past its original inheritance to require the injection of "conversation-starters" into the equation?

Starbucks neglected to share an important part of this story: the fact that some ten years ago now, they made a decision to stop the distribution of free local publications in their retail locations. For me at the time that meant I could no longer pick up my copy of the Stranger or The Seattle Weekly at Starbucks. In Chicago it means you won't find a Chicago Reader.

Might there be a connection between the need to inject "conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment" and the decision, long ago, to distribute only those publications that promised a little coin for the merchant?

Maybe the decision to distribute a free publication now, as the coffee giant struggles to find its coffee-swigging soul, should extend a little bit farther than Good.

p.s. Bonus political coffeehouse content at the midden »

and it was good.

and it was good.
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Intelligentsia Coffee
Chicago, IL

Posting by cameraphone
the Loop

the perfect pour

Stopped by the Trident the day before last after a late breakfast with an old friend at Lucile's just down the road.

I love what I do now, but I've never loved working so much as when I worked at the Trident when I was a student, supporting my two double-latte habit a day with subsidized coffee drinks, and doling out one of the few legal substances that made its way into Boulder's sewage run off.

Started up by three Buddhists from Berkeley before good coffee was easy to come by in Boulder, the Trident used to be almost the *only* place where you could get real coffee in town. And although good coffee is now much easier to come by under the Flatirons I'd still recommend that you go out of your way for a cup of the Trident's coffee at the far West end of the Pearl Street Mall the next time you're there -- a recommendation based in part on sentiment but mostly on knowing how much coffee matters in that place.

To become a barista at the Trident it was expected that you would first bus tables -- for a year. This was your apprenticeship.

Some kind of conference took place behind closed doors before the invitation was issued to train at the piston-driven Rancilio (no pre-programmed push button nonsense at the Trident -- this was a real machine that required timing, temperament, and a musical sense of tempo to operate) and then M.S. (who's still with the Trident and whom it was good to see again yesterday when I stopped by to pay my respects) whose true business title I don't think I ever knew (and don't know now) but who I think of as "the Elder" (not that he's old. just that he knows. so much.) -- M.S. would pull you aside and let you know that it was time.

And then your training would begin.

There were conversations about the correct color and texture of the coffee's crema as it poured like honey through the grip; about the right grind and how the burrs would sometimes have to be adjusted when the weather changed because humidity in the air impacted the pour. There were conversations about tamping, frothing and ratios of espresso to milk.

In the summertime there were careful machinations to create an iced coffee that was strong enough to hold up as the ice melted down, and intensely labor-intensive iced espresso drinks in which we lovingly layered a strata of chilled espresso over a base of cold milk.

I loved the art required to work there, and the speed needed to serve the line that snaked out the door. And I loved that the management we worked for respected that art and asked us to own it.

I also remember with respect and reverence the best bitch slap I ever received on the job. I was late by about ten minutes for my shift -- I had been late before and had as good an excuse now as I had then, but M.S. had had enough of it.

He pointed out that I was late, I started in with my excuses, and he interrupted me, saying: "No. Don't be late again."

I wasn't.

When I was going through my divorce and unsure of my place in the world, I came *this close* to calling him up to see if I might spend a few weeks at the Trident, working the machine, making coffee for the folks, flowing from one order, one act of creation, one delivered request to the next.

I sensed then that maybe it could right my world, make sense out of things again -- the way making gifts by hand does, the way giving can fill you up whole.

karma come and getcha

Moving is one of those things, like showing up, that you do for friends. I’ve run out of fingers to count the times I’ve moved my own life from one point to another, and I’m nearly through the toes, which means I’ve learned from experience that moving is always better with a crowd.



Which is why when friends ask, I’m there. (Although I hesitate a little to broadcast this fact to the blogosphere. ;)

Moving karma always comes back around, and sometimes it comes back in curious ways. One of the curious objects that I love in my life is a coffeepot that came to me in a move.



It’s old school, from Ethiopia[1], with a rounded bottom so it can’t stand on its own – I set it in a little dish designed for mixing soy sauce with wasabi for sushi, and it sits, balanced just so, on the top of my Bompa’s bookshelves.



It was given to me by a dear friend whom I helped move once upon a time, who dug it out of a box that we were just about to seal up and said: “Here – you like these kinds of things – would you like to have it?” M is from Ethiopia, and she explained to me that she used it to make coffee – first they’d roast the beans, over the fire, and then they’d grind and boil them, by setting the pot in the coals.

“But won’t you need it?” I asked her, and she laughed. She’d been in the U.S. for several years at this point and she shook her head. “Not at all,” she said, “we use Mr. Coffee!”

So of course I said yes, please.
And thank you.


[1] Lest we forget, coffee was discovered in Ethiopia by, legend tells it, a goat herder named Kaldi – which makes a coffeepot from Ethiopia just about as old school as you can get.