Dateline: Minneapolis
My new novel, Death’s Doors, is now available for download for Amazon Kindle.
In the near future, suicide is a constitutional right. Tom Galloway is an ordinary single father, just trying to keep his rebellious and depressed daughter from going to the Happy Endings Clinic.
The last thing he needs is a ninth-century Viking time traveler dropping into his life.
But Tom is about to embark on the adventure of his life. One that will change the world.
…you can see Phil Wade in the background.
Have a good weekend.
Due to the immediate, overwhelming response to the photo in our last post, our executives have decided to post another one. Here we see the gorgeous Myrna Loy serving Navy sailors in an canteen during WWII. This wasn’t a one time stint for her. She stopped acting to support the war effort and worked closely with The Red Cross. Learn more about her in this review of her biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl In Hollywood.
1. A Colorado coffee shop, located in an housing development for the homeless, is attempting to help the people around them as well as change their community’s perspective on the capabilities of homeless people.
“People don’t know who’s behind the counter when they stop here,” Kelly Kelley said. “It could be any one of us in that low-income or homeless category. We want to make a positive experience for people.”
2. 10 reason why fair-trade coffee doesn’t do what it claims, and plenty of pushback in the comments. “Fairtrade is not a one time, cure-all, it provides a framework. It’s a tool and if applied well, producers move up the value chain, negotiate better terms, and strengthen their communities.”
I remember a coffee roaster saying he saw little value in fair trade certification, because he knew a farm received certification on only half of its crop because they couldn’t afford the price. No difference in the coffee they grew. They just could not afford to pay for the fair trade label for the second half of what they produced.
3. Costa Coffee, United Kingdom’s largest coffee chain, has replaced its club card for an app.
4. Starbucks has gone to Colombia, and the Colombian national chain Juan Valdez is expanding in response. “In downtown Miami, a new Juan Valdez cafe feels like a slice of Colombia: traditional floor tiling, warm wood details, woven baskets, fresh arepas, and pictures of Colombia and its coffee. A poster of a smiling coffee farmer hangs near the entrance, greeting customers with the company’s key new message: ‘Carlos is one of the 500,000 coffee growers who owns this coffee shop.'” Leaning on their history has proven profitable so far.
5. A young Lauren Bacall with coffee. (I believe this photo would be rated PG-13 because it depicts smoking. Steel yourself.) Continue reading Coffee Week Selections
“It’s voguish to say poems are about the making of poems, but the good ones normally engage something out there in the big bad world beyond the classroom,” write Patrick Kurp.
In the last post, we linked to Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks’ piece on third wave coffee producers. Food Republic asks her about her experience researching that article, whether her drinking tastes have changed, and how she believes Starbucks will respond to this bit of competition.
As I write in the story, Starbucks doesn’t like anybody infringing on its turf. They want it both ways — they’ll do as little as possible to gain street cred in the third wave coffee community, but they still want to appeal to the masses, which is the much bigger market. On one hand Starbucks is increasingly pushing its single origin “Reserve” line (brewed on Clover single cup precision brewers), yet its investments and acquisitions of late feel like a coffee company that’s leaning more towards fast food (fizzy drinks, drive-thrus). At the end of the day, if they felt like third wave was a gnat worth swatting, they could just purchase Stumptown or Blue Bottle, both of which have investors that will want to monetize their investment at some point. It’ll be interesting to see which of these players might end up part of the big green giant.
A third wave of coffee connoisseurs is washing over America. Artisan coffee producers, such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Counter Culture and Blue Bottle, have pored over their beans, roasts, and brews to steep the most awesomest coffee drink you will ever taste. Fast Company’s Danielle Sacks describes the reaction some coffee evangelists received somewhere in New York.
Staffers begin wandering over to taste coffees with names like Brazil Samambaia and Three Africans. A few are coffee snobs, and for them it is a moment of vindication. A thirtysomething in a chambray shirt expresses delight at the prospect that his company might ditch the pods in the office kitchen in favor of Stumptown, which he brews at home. For others, the experience is more like an awakening, when they taste the refined brew for the first time. “I’m a coffee guy,” declares a silver-haired exec in khakis. “I drink Dunkin’, Starbucks, Tim Hortons–not the deli stuff,” he says, echoing the sentiments of many of America’s 100 million coffee drinkers. The woman from Joyride hands him something he never orders: a cup of black coffee. “It’s pretty smooth,” he says, surprised by how good a naked cup of coffee can taste when it’s made with artisanal care. “This is really good,” he confesses, taking another swig, “even without milk.”
I believe I almost had a great cup of coffee like this once, but I didn’t want to spend the money on it. This article says these wonderful coffee lovers want us to spend $7/drink. It may be awesome, but they aren’t going to knock out K-cups at that price. (They probably wouldn’t approve of my home brewing anyway.)
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).
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
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.
