Coffee Snobbery

Some hobbies or passions require significant investments, and food is no exception. Many know of the $125 bottle of hot sauce I purchased and tried (the tale was chronicled in a previous version of this blog, though has since been purged), and my beer appreciation has led me to drop $130 on a bottle of beer (a subsequent blog post to come once I work up the courage to try it), but some don't require as much of an investment. Coffee is certainly a drink which can have its snobs, but I find it unique in that there's so many small things that can be done with your grounds to make incremental improvements and an increasingly better cup of joe.

I wasn't a big coffee drinker in college, mostly because we weren't allowed to have a maker until junior year, and I didn't really want to stink up a 12'x14' shared dorm room with coffee smell all day. Once I move to Del Rio, however, I thought I should sack up and take my coffee addiction to the next level (Diet Mountain Dew is a helluva drug). I started with an automatic drip coffee maker, the model of which was recommended by my BFF Alton Brown in his book as a maker which can get the water to a sufficient boil and brew for about five minutes - long enough to extract the good coffee flavors without extracting the very bitter stuff.

This may have been my first time around the block, but I wasn't naive enough to go for the pre-ground stuff. Coffee beans are a spice, and the longer you can wait until grinding, the better the product. Del Rio is not a city that has much of anything, coffee shops included, so I had to get my beans care of Starbucks vacuum-sealed packs from the grocery store and online if I didn't want the two types of roast that were available city-wide. Everyone shits on Starbucks for their crappy coffee, but I they start with a decent bean, roast them, and package them in a way that preserves freshness, so I didn't think it was the swill to which everyone equated it.

There's two ways to grind beans: blade grinders, which are cheap and small and use fast-spinning blades to chop the beans into grounds. There's also burr grinders, which use two rotating stones to grind the beans. I ground my own beans using a spice grinder and ground right before I made the coffee each morning.

The product was decent, and it got me through the last year and a half, but I've recently begun wanting more from a cup of coffee, so I started going down the list of potential coffee pitfalls and optimizing whatever I could:

The Water
The majority of coffee is water, so it should taste good. I use tap water that's been filtered through my Brita pitcher to ensure purity. The water needs to be hot to extract the coffee flavors, so I heat it to the boiling point with my electric kettle.

The Beans
Now that I live in a bigger city, I have more options in purchasing beans. You can get them from the giant bins at the specialty markets, but it's impossible to tell how long those beans have been sitting there (given the size of the barrels, I would wager 'quite a while'). Instead, I visit a local coffee shop that roasts their beans in-house. You don't necessarily have the same consistency in roasting quality as an industrial operation, but I've never had any problems. It's also nice to know that the beans that I'm buying were roasted within two or three days of purchasing, sometimes on the same day. I take them home and immediately seal them in an airtight container to preserve freshness.

The Grind
The problem with blade grinders is that they produce an inconsistent grind - some pieces are big and some small, resulting in overextraction of some of the grounds and underextraction of others. Burr grinders are more costly and use more counterspace, but I found a midrange grinder that gets the job done well. Professional burr grinders can go for hundreds of dollars, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Brew
Once the beans are ground and the water's hot, I put them together in my French press. The beauty of this device as opposed to other brewing methods is the controllability with regards to brew time. I place the grounds and water in the press (along with a pinch of salt to get rid of some of the bitterness, also recommended by AB), wait four minutes, and push.

How do you take your coffee? If it's anything other than black, you just lost a little of my respect.

The resulting product is definitely superior to the coffee my Brew Central was putting out. This cup has a cleaner appearance, less bitterness, and none of the occasional bits of grounds that sometimes managed to sneak through the drip. It even seems to wreak less havoc on my stomach, oddly enough. The pinnacle of coffee? Perhaps - I can't think of any other way to improve it.

It's typical that the simplest foods are often the ones that can be the most complex to make, and it's interesting to consider how many different elements - when chosen incorrectly - can cause a coffee catastrophe. I'm not saying this is how you should drink your coffee - drink your mud however you choose - but taking even one or two steps to improve something that is a daily ritual for many people can make a world of difference.

Review: Delicious Extension for Chrome

Delicious, the tastily-named social bookmarking website, recently released an extension for Google Chrome. As a convert to the Chrome browser for the past two months now (everything else in my life is Google, so why not?), this was the biggest sticking point when I moved from Firefox - in that browser, the extension opens in a sidebar where you can see your bookmarks sorted by tags or use the search bar to search for a specific tag or bookmark.

The Chrome extension, on the other hand, takes all of your Delicious bookmarks and dumps them in Chrome's bookmark menu, in a folder marked "Delicious - DO NOT DELETE" - an unsophisticated way of warning users that deleting that folder would erase all of the bookmarks on Delicious' site. There's no way of searching for anything, which makes people large amounts of bookmarks - those who are using Delicious in the first place - are left to wade through hundreds of unorganized bookmarks.

The other appealing aspect of Delicious, the ability to sync and access your bookmarks anywhere, has been negated by Chrome's bookmark syncing feature, so no loss there. The extension says "beta" all over the place, and the developers mention that there's a lot more functionality left to put into it. I should hope so, because until you can search and organize, the bookmarks are a hot mess. I still plan to add bookmarks to Delicious - that functionality in Chrome is as full featured as Firefox - but I'm dual-saving it to my Chrome extensions, too.

Digital Intellectual Property

Legally, I have never violated any Intellectual Property laws and have never pirated any sort of material ever, but I would like to share a frustrating experience that happened to me a few weeks ago.

I like watching Tosh.0. The show is currently in its second season, and I missed a few episodes from the first season. The first season is no longer being aired on TV, so my last resort was to turn to paying for the episodes on the internet. I had two main choices - iTunes Store, and Amazon VOD. I was forced to buy from Apple because the last episode of the first season - which I wanted - was not available on Amazon. I paid for and downloaded the episodes, which I can now watch in iTunes...

...except I don't want to watch them in iTunes. I want to watch them on my HTPC running XBMC. In a perfect world, it should be a simple matter of pointing XBMC to the files and adding them to my library, except that Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management software prevents the files from being played on any software but Quicktime and iTunes. What then followed was an eight-hour adventure to figure out a way to obtain control over these video files. It eventually broke down to me running screen capture software while the video was playing, and having the stereo output of my sound card running back through my microphone input to get the audio. It nearly worked, except the screen capture software was really meant for presentation-type stuff and not smooth video, so it started getting choppy. I ultimately gave up.

There is no reason why this should be this difficult, aside from the greed of content providers and their inability to allow content to flow freely. I am never going to watch these episodes for which I've paid, and I'm not going to download any other videos from the iTMS until I figure out a way to make these videos available for me to use in any way I want. It's the same principal that has prevented me from jumping into the ebook market - why would I want to pay $15 for a license to read a specific book on a specific platform with no guarantee of keeping the book if I buy new hardware or even if the book will still be there when I wake up. Once I purchase something, I'm going to use it any way I deem fit, and if that's not agreeable to the content providers, then they aren't getting my money.

Laugh

I've been watching the amazing six-part documentary about Monty Python, and in the final episode, John Cleese said something along the lines of this:

"As you get older you laugh less because you've heard the jokes before."

It's a sad statement, but it's something that has occurred to me in my life. As a child, my father was had amazing taste in comedy, and I grew up watching things like SCTV, The Kids in the Hall, Night Court, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. I think I was exposed to a good deal of excellent comedy early on, and refined it throughout my teenage years, appreciating the old stuff while expanding my horizons considerably with the advent of the internet (as it is now I have dozens of classic and current comedy sitcoms and films watched and archived on my computer, with even more waiting in the wings). This sense of humor certainly helped me through my middle and high school years, but as I began college I noticed that I didn't laugh as much as I used to in response to jokes told in everyday conversation or on a digital screen somewhere. It was more of a smile, or - at most - a singular "ha" ("huh" or "hmm" is a more onomatopoetic translation), even in instances where everyone else is in guffaws.

I do find, however, that I'm more likely to laugh at the things that shouldn't be funny, or the more intricate jokes. Something that comes to mind happened a few months ago, when we had an older instructor who told these old, hokey jokes - the groaners - and the entire class would not laugh, not even in a patronizing way. In those instances, I found the fact that everyone thought these jokes suck to be extremely funny. It's similar to what Norm MacDonald is doing for his act nowadays, immortalized in his roast of Bob Saget.

I still find things funny, but not in a way to make me burst out laughing (and certainly not at anything while watching Family Guy or Dane Cook or Robin Williams). It's sort of depressing to consider that the appreciation of something rewards you by giving you diminishingly less reasons to appreciate it, but that's life, I guess.