the dapper hedgehog

(image copyright cafe grumpy.)

a cute little dapper hedgehog.

So it's probably your coffee, but there are a few other equipment/technique issues that might be the problem. The Aeropress is highly regarded although the girl hedgehog and I didn't like it; the Chemex should work well too though.   Let's start with coffee: During WWII coffee was rationed in the US and so we ended up with shocking weak, shelf stable coffee like Folgers. Europe couldn't get coffee at all during the war so they never got used to drinking bad coffee.  Ironically, the very availability of coffee in the US during the war caused people to become accustomed to terrible brew. (This is something the boy hedgehog read somewhere, could be false but he likes the story.) Fast forward to the early 1990s and along comes Starbucks with its fancy Italian-inspired coffee drinks like "espresso" and "lattes." Starbucks wants Americans to realize that coffee can taste like something so they roast their beans to death. Open a bag of Starbucks French Roast and you'll be hit in the face with the smell of COFFEE emanating from pitch black, oily beans. This is a result of Starbucks roasting the beans for a very long time. It brings out the intense, dark, coffee flavor but at the expense of all the other flavors in the coffee. This was/is the "second wave" of coffee in the US and still the dominant mode in Seattle where for the girl hedgehog and the boy hedgehog, it is shockingly hard to find a good cup of coffee in the 2010s. Then in the early 2000s people in Portland (Stumptown) and San Francisco (Blue Bottle) and Chicago (Intelligentsia) started treating coffee not like a commodity but more like wine or whiskey. They started paying attention to the fact that a Guatemalan coffee didn't taste like an Ethiopian coffee if you roasted it a little less and brewed it carefully. The hedgehogs have a coffee in our den right now that smells like a fruit basket and another that smells like a bag of Snickers bars. This is "third wave" of coffee and it's where you want to be. Unfortunately, roasters don't label their coffees with the applicable "wave" so it can be hard to find the right coffee unless you already know what to buy. Starbucks, Pete's, Tully's, and most others still over-roast their beans because they've trained people that coffee should taste overpowering and bitter. One good way to tell a third wave coffee is if it identifies the specific farm or finca where the coffee was grown. That is, like single-malt scotch, you want a "single origin" coffee not a blend. You should have enough specificity on the label that you could, in theory, charter a flight to Guatemala and meet the people who picked every bean in your coffee. Roasters who go to the trouble of buying and selling coffee in single origin lots are unlikely to roast it until it's indistinguishable from Starbucks' coffee. Check out www.mistobox.com if you want to spend a little money on a coffee subscription for a while to see what you like. You almost certainly won't be able to buy good coffee at a grocery store. Next up is the grinder. You need a burr grinder not a blade grinder. The old Braun blade grinder standby cuts the beans into vastly uneven shapes and sizes. A burr grinder (kind of an automatic mortar and pestle) makes much more even coffee. The bare minimum is the Krups for about $60 which we use, but it's not really acceptable for the hedgehogs anymore.  The Barratza Encore for $130 is what we should have. Lots of coffee people will tell you that the grinder is the single most important piece of equipment you can invest in. Water: I'm sure you're using good water but that's a big issue for a lot of people who just use tap water. Finally, there's the issue of technique. The Aeropress is fairly straightforward but it makes a sort of coffee concentrate that we didn't like. The Chemex or other pour over options require a bit more work to get right.  In all cases though, you should make sure that you let the water cool down from boiling. At 212 degrees F the water just burns the coffee. You want the water to be 202-208 degrees or so. You can buy a kettle from Bonavita that allows you to regulate the temperature so that it is exactly right. Or you can use a regular kettle and just kind of guess. Once you have your water, you want to pour a little bit (just enough to wet all the grounds) and stop. Then you let the coffee "bloom" which means you'll see bubbles form and pop as the coffee degasses a bit. After that you want to pout the water in slowly and evenly making sure that all the grounds are "extracting" evenly. It helps to have a kettle with a spout that allows you to direct the water which the Bonavita does (http://www.amazon.com/Bonavita-Variable-Temperature-Electric-Gooseneck/dp/B005YR0F40) Mistobox has a good set of videos, including one on the Chemex that show you how: http://www.mistobox.com/category-s/2042.htm If you want an option that's a little more forgiving, get yourself the Clever Coffee Dripper. You allow the coffee to "steep" like tea for a few minutes then pour it out the bottom into your cup. We used this for years and it's great—you don't have to sit there.  http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Shrub-C-70888-Clever-Dripper/dp/B0047W70GY We used to use the Clever until we had the second hedgehog. Then even that was too much for the boy hedgehog in the morning so we invested in the Technivorm Moccamaster (http://www.technivorm.com). Hand made in the Netherlands, it is one of only two automated coffee makers I could conceive of owning. It heats the water to the perfect temperature, has a shower-like water spout for even extracting and a filter basket that allows you to access the grinds if you want to stir them and to regulate the flow of water out of the filter into the carafe. It's $300 though. Bonavita makes a less expensive coffee maker that appears to be nearly as good though. (I would argue for the metal carafe instead of the glass though because coffee in a glass pot on a warming plate will taste like an ashtray in 10 minutes.) Any follow up questions?

304 Carroll St NW (at N Cedar St) Washington, DC 20012 (202) 417-6266 lamanocoffee.com M-F 6 am - 7 pm S 7 am - 7 pm   S 7 am - 6 pm

review on its way...

coffee quality:         8135 Maryland Ave Saint Louis, MO 63105 Neighborhood: Clayton (314) 725-0719 halfandhalfstl.com Hours: T-F 7 am - 2 pm S-S 8 am - 2 pm Weekly cupping: Monday mornings at 8 am. Call to confirm.

we are behind, but need to be friends with these people.

3D Coffee Art Reaches New, Dizzying Heights [Brian Ashcraft/Kotaku] (via Boingboing via Geekologie)

3459 Ringsby Ct. Denver, CO 80216 M-F 7-5 S 8am-1pm S CLOSED

1017 7th St NW, inside HUGO M-F 7-2 S 8-2 S CLOSED 1017 7th st. NW Inside HUGO

Since they are mobile you need to check their website to find them.

Denver, CO

New Orleans, LA 70115 M-S 7-5 S 8-5