Starting here with coffee — Specialty Coffee.
Many folks are not ready for specialty coffee.
I wasn’t.
I haven’t even been drinking coffee very long — maybe four years, before that not often at all. I certainly hadn’t been an everyday coffee drinker.
Nor had I ever even thought of roasting green coffee beans.
The coffee roaster where I used to live burned the beans. They were always very black and very oily. I bought these burnt oily beans to serve guests, if they cared for coffee. I’d grind them in a whirly blade grinder. I had a small espresso machine and a small bodum press. For myself, I’d drink Foldgers or some Arbuckle Bros.’ Ariosa or Yuban at home, served from the bodum; otherwise, I’d occassionally have a cup of coffee at work. Work coffee wasn’t good either.
I moved to Northern California, the Delta Valley, just northeast of San Francisco and just south of Sacramento.
Lurking in San Francisco I was exposed to Ritual Coffee Roasters, and, later, Blue Bottle Coffee Roasters. These roasters and their coffee wasn’t like a Starbucks or a Peet’s or the coffee you could get at any number of restaurants, fast food ghettos, or the local 7/11 or Quik Trip. It was good.
I fell quickly and hard.
First came the $15 bags of 12 oz coffee beans from Ritual. I lived just far enough away, and wanting not to have beans shipped, I’d get some when visiting. Often my brother-in-law would bring bags of Ritual from the Bay into the Valley. Once he brought 6 bags of different Ritual coffees, brewed all of them at close to the same time, and a coffee tasting was the result. He kept bringing coffee out to the Valley. I kept buying coffee in the Bay area. I started spending too much money on coffee. I’d run out of coffee, and complain to anyone about the Peet’s and the Starbucks and the sad state of affairs since my sense of coffee uppitiness hadn’t been fulfilled as my palate preferred a lighter roasted bean and there were none to be found. When I was really hard up I’d buy old dried up Kona beans from the super market nearby. I’d also hit up TARGET for some Archer Farms beans. I knew nothing about coffee then, so not much would change for about a year or three.
Fast forward to last Mother’s Day/Father’s Day — gift of a FreshRoast SR500 arrived for Father’s Day on Mother’s Day. Funny how our household works sometimes ( read I’m not the only one who likes coffee in this house ). The FreshRoast SR500 roaster came with a 5 pound sampler of 5 different green coffee beans.
I set off the house’s fire alarm on my first roast.
There’s been no turning back.
To cut this short or continue it later, whatever the case may be.
Here’s where I’m at right now:
Here are my two major suppliers of green coffee beans:
I use a HOTTOP roaster. But I don’t think I’d recommend the roaster. More on that later.
I use a CHEMEX coffeemaker for pour over coffee.
My grinder is a Baratza Maestro Plus Burr Mill for everyday use and a Zassenhaus Turkish Mill as a travel grinder. They’re both great!!
There’s lots to cover. Which would you rather read about? Coffee. Diet. Exercise. Parenting. Let me know. These are some of the places I’m going. O, and I promise to do better with pictures and links and writing — I’m hoping time will help.