Coffee, Tea, Drinks

DIY French Press for the Inventive Coffee Lover

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What if you’re stuck at a hotel around Minneapolis, and the only thing around you are Caribou Coffee joints (and you hate Caribou Coffee), and there’s no way you could trudge through the driving snow to some salt-of-the-earth independent cafe for thermal mug of heavenly darkness? All you have is the hotel’s nasty Mr. Drips Coffeemaker from 1978. The grounds look vintage too.

Well, Ole, you could try to this French Press concept from Josh Campbell. All you need it a coffee filter (I hear nylons will work), a wire clothes hanger (if your hotel has only plastic hangers, you could try ripping the wire liner out of your suitcase), and a glass or mug.

Of course, you still have to use the vintage coffee grounds from your cheap hotel, but if the magic of this DIY project hits you, maybe you will forget about the grounds part (until you take your first sip).

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Why Does My Coffee Taste Like Dirt?

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I believe I tasted espresso for the first time shortly after college. I bought it at Barnie’s Coffee and Tea in Hamilton Place Mall, and I remember two things. First, I didn’t know what a real espresso was before then. I was surprised at my drink’s smallness and lack of milk-like substances. Second, it tasted as if someone had drowned a cigarette in my cup.

I loved it.

You may find a similar earthy flavor in your regular joe, if you buy one of several major brands of ground coffee, not because you oversteeped it or got espresso mixed into your light roast breakfast blend, but because it actually has dirt in it. If not the stuff of earth, then perhaps some coffee byproducts like husks, stems, or leaves.

Researchers at State University of Londrina in Brazil have developed a test for filler material in coffee grounds. “With our test, it is now possible to know with 95 percent accuracy if coffee is pure or has been tampered with, either with corn, barley, wheat, soybeans, rice, beans, acai seed, brown sugar or starch syrup,” states Dr. Suzana Lucy Nixdorf. She and her team are concerned that Brazilian coffee shortages could inspire impure coffee grounds. She doesn’t say whether someone with an allergy to one of these fillers would react to the substances in their cup, but if Maxwell House ever looks into stretching their coffee, I hope they investigate that angle thoroughly.

I hope we aren’t also at risk for finding sheep dung in our coffee, now that sensible laws, such as the U.K.’s Adulteration Of Coffee Act 1718, have been repealed. We shouldn’t assume old folk remedies are wise because they are old and folk, so no dung coffee or tea for me, thank you. (via Dave Lull)

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

Bookselling, Fiction

Death’s Doors, Snippet 1

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(As best I can figure out, we’re close to releasing my next novel, Death’s Doors. To whet your appetite, here’s a snippet. lw)

PROLOGUE

We have no use for barns anymore, but are ashamed to tear them down. So the lofted sheds stand here and there across the land on derelict farmsteads, redundant, their backs swayed like old horses’.

The woman tossed her cigarette away. It arced like comet spit in the dark. She went into the ruined barn through a dutch door, pulling open first the upper panel, then the lower. The granulated hinges screamed and the bottom scraped an arc in the earth. She was afraid the noise would wake the baby she cradled in her left arm, but it did not. Such a good baby.

The law said she could be rid of a baby up to the age of eight weeks. She would never have let this one go except for something like this – something terribly, cosmically important.

Her flashlight showed her a low-ceilinged side-shed with animal stalls along its inside wall, its dividers and wooden posts scaly with brown flakes of ancient, petrified manure.

The old woman she’d come to see sat so still that she overshot her with the flashlight beam and had to back it up. Once fixed by the beam, the old woman smiled – a smile of radiant beauty that brought to mind a Renaissance Madonna gone wrinkled and white-haired.

“You – you’re the one I was to meet?” the younger woman asked. Continue reading Death’s Doors, Snippet 1 →

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Goofing

Mrs. Olson, abortonist

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Scandinavians are so culturally identified with coffee that one of America’s foremost brands actually made a Scandinavian (of unspecified nationality) their spokeswoman for more than twenty years, a period of time popularly known as “our long national caffeine-induced nightmare.”

From 1965 to 1986, Virginia Christine, an actress of Swedish extraction, played “Mrs. Olson” in one of the longest-lived commercial campaigns in history. Throughout those years this diabolical old harridan, obviously unhappily married herself, insinuated herself into other people’s domestic problems, like this.

According to her Wikipedia page, Ms. Christine spent her declining years as a Planned Parenthood volunteer, which explains a lot, it seems to me. Clearly she was slipping contraceptive drugs into these people’s coffee. Which obviously accounts for the dropping birth rates that characterized the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Coffee. A clear and present danger to the republic.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Brewing Coffee for Watercolor-style Painting

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Angel Sarkela-Saur and Andrew Saur have been painting with coffee for years. This video introduces them and their artwork. They mention sending their work to the U.S. Embassy to Malawi in the video. Now they are sending three pieces “Drained,” Dabble,” and “Voyage to Valhalla” to our ambassador to Columbia for a three year stay.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Is the Coffee World Getting Better?

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With all the coffee choices we have now, are coffee farmers making more money or expanding their markets like they could not 20 years ago? It doesn’t appear so. Oscar Abello writes about the pitfalls of Fair Trade certification and the clash between what professes to do and reality.

If Fair Trade certified coffee is intended to be sold at a fair price to give workers a fair wage, then why are farms larger than 10 acres allowed to be certified, when they can afford to pay their workers better than small farms.

When Aida Batlle she took over her family’s 38-acre farm in El Salvador in 2002, it was too large for fair-trade certification, even though Batlle claims to pay her workers three times what everyone else is paying, plus transportation and food. After winning El Salvador’s inaugural Cup of Excellence competition in 2003, Aida became something of a celebrity in the “Third Wave” movement of coffee, even getting her own profile in the New Yorker.

One of Batlle’s longest-running buyers is Counter Culture Coffee, founded in 1995 in Durham, N.C. Ten years ago, Counter Culture was still mostly a smaller regional roasting company, trying to get a market foothold by handing out samples in grocery stores. Customers would ask why one coffee from Nicaragua was certified fair-trade and this other one from El Salvador (the coffee from Batlle’s farm) wasn’t. In reality, Batlle’s workers were among the highest paid of all of Counter Culture’s suppliers.

“The idea that this was somehow unfair because there’s no certification on it, no seal, was just maddening,” says Counter Culture Kim Elena Ionescu.

Maybe certification is merely another way to pay bureaucrats for the privilege to say what they want us to say.

In other news, Dunkin Donuts now offers a coffee-flavored doughnut, which makes me ask why they didn’t have this before. Particularly since DD is known for their coffee, I assumed they already had a coffee-flavored doughnut, just as I would assume they zip up their pants. When you notice you point it out like a mistake, not a new idea.

Fiction, Reviews

Coffee delenda est

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Coffee week, huh? That’s what I get for being gracious, in a moment of weakness.

Getting into the spirit of the thing, I want to recommend to you Mark Helprin’s masterful novel, Memoir From Antproof Case. It’s a moving story about a man who goes into violent rages whenever he smells coffee, or sees anyone drinking it. Needless to say, he’s a sympathetic character.

I wanted to re-post my review, but it seems to be on the old blog, where I can’t search.

Also, on another note, I want to thank Loren Eaton for giving me a mention in his latest review. I have trouble commenting over there, so I’ll say it here.

Now get some sleep. Helpful hint: It helps if you lay off the caffeine.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

Craft Coffee’s DNA of Your Taste Buds

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It’s coffee week here on Brandywine Books. Come back everyday for wonderful posts and links to coffee-related information bound to bless your taste buds and have you leaping like Arabian goats.

Are you looking for new roasts to try? Startup company Craft Coffee already has a large database in pursuit of their goal to become the Pandora of coffee flavors. Fill out their survey, try their service, and they will apply their algorithms to your tastes to help you find a cup of coffee you love to death.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction

10 Fictional Coffee Scenes

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Benjamin Obler has collected ten scenes or lines which include coffee, like this one from Muriel Spark’s The Comforters.

“Tell me about the voices,” he said. “I heard nothing myself. From what direction did they come?”

“Over there, beside the fireplace,” she answered.

“Would you like some tea? I think there is tea.”

“Oh, coffee. Could I have some coffee? I don’t think I’m likely to sleep.”

Isn’t it terribly English of the Baron to offer tea to Caroline, who’s just fled a religious centre (not a nunnery, not a retreat), has separated from her husband, and is now suffering delusions – hearing the clacks of typewriter keys and a voice narrating her very thoughts! Take comfort in tea. It is in character of the Baron to think so: he’s a man of affected intellectualism, calling the sections of his bookshop “Histor-ay, Biograph-ay, Theolog-ay,” and addressing everyone as “my dear”. But only coffee is up for the job. This is coffee as antidote to madness. What else to clear her head in this fix? They’ve already had Curaçao – that didn’t help. Coffee as realignment. Coffee to reconnect with your own synapses, to reset the senses and solidify reality in the forefront.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reviews

Of Norwegians and coffee

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Coffee has been a subject of some uneasiness on this blog from the time I climbed on. There used to be a mission statement around here somewhere that said (I quote from memory), “Book reviews, creative culture, and coffee.” It’s no secret to any fair-minded reader that Phil has discriminated against me constantly because I don’t consume the vile stuff.

My isolation is increased by the importance of coffee in Norwegian-American culture. If I had a nickel for every time somebody has said to me, “What kind of Norwegian are you? You don’t drink coffee!” I’d be able to afford… a cup of coffee, I guess, because they cost a lot of nickels these days. But how did coffee get to be so important to Norwegians? I now know the answer, thanks to a book I’m reading.

I was recently given, as a birthday present, an interesting work by Kathleen Stokker, Remedies and Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Land. It’s mostly about the superstitious – but sometimes scientifically valid – remedies Norwegians have used through history, and the sometimes celebrated, sometimes persecuted, but always feared people who practiced them.

One of the subjects covered is the use of brennevin (distilled spirits), which held an important place in folk medicine. That touches on the subject of the general use of alcoholic beverages in Norwegian history. The Norwegians, like all Europeans, were drinkers from the earliest times. But they mostly drank beer, and often quite weak beer. Later brennevin appeared, but its use was generally restricted to medicine and celebrations. But in 1817 a law was passed giving every Norwegian farmer the right to distill as much liquor as he liked whenever he wanted.

The result was disastrous. Celebrations became drunken brawls, ending in injury and death. Accidents increased. Productivity decreased. More and more individuals became hopeless slaves to drink.

By the mid-19th Century, people were forming temperance and abstention organizations, and the distillery law was repealed. One of the substitutes suggested to people who wanted to kick the brennevin habit was coffee: Continue reading Of Norwegians and coffee →