This is the last selection in my most recent shipment from Craft Coffee. I feel like I have been drinking a lot of African coffee lately (and there are still more African coffees to come in the pipeline!), but I am also learning that there is so much variety in the coffees from this continent […]
Author: Margaret
A general guide to single-origin coffees
One of the more fun but frustrating parts of getting into single-origin specialty coffee is trying to figure out where to start. Let’s say that you have resolved to start buying specialty coffee, and you pop into your local specialty coffee shop. You are overwhelmed by the array of bags on the shelf. What do you […]
Review: Summer Moon Organic Sweet Hearth (Austin, Texas)
My dear friend Julee brought me this bag from a recent trip to Austin, knowing I would be intrigued by the workings of this roaster. Summer Moon Wood-Fired Coffee Roasters is a company that does everything old-school. They built their brick hearth by hand, one brick at a time. They use no electricity or modern technology […]
Review: Lift Coffee Ethiopia Kochere (Riverside, California)
Here is another selection from Craft Coffee. This coffee reminded me a lot of the Three Ships Konga Ethiopia Yirgacheffe that I reviewed back in March. Both are natural-processed Ethiopian heirloom varietals, and the beans are quite lightly roasted and smaller than typically seen. Whole beans: Bright, juicy berry aroma. It smells like a mix of tart […]
Mini review: Intelligentsia Decaf Librarian’s Blend (Chicago, Illinois)
This bag of Intelligentsia was a gift for my friend Julee, but she generously offered to let me have some of the beans in order to do a review. I purposely just took a little bit (after all, I wanted her to enjoy the coffee!), so I was not able to do a full review with […]
Review: Rival Brothers Rwanda Dukunde Rawa (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Recently, I started a subscription to Craft Coffee, a company based out of Brooklyn, NY. Craft Coffee describes themselves as the Pandora of coffee, where you can tell them what you’re currently drinking and they’ll send you coffees that they think you’ll love based on your preferences. After answering their short questionnaire, it determined that […]
How to host a coffee cupping at home
What is a coffee cupping? It’s like a wine tasting, but with coffee. Roasters will have cuppings regularly with their staff to analyze their product for consistency, defects, etc. Cafes will sometimes hold cuppings open to the public for people interested in learning more about coffee and about the differences possible between roasts, countries of […]
Follow-up Review: Intelligentsia Black Cat Classic Espresso (Chicago, Illinois)
I hope you all enjoyed reading my friend David Cooper’s excellent guest post on Intelligentsia’s Black Cat Classic Espresso back in April. This espresso blend is a celebrity as far as espresso blends go, and for some reason I didn’t buy a bag of this for myself on that trip (oh yeah, now I remember why – I […]
Review: Cultivar Colombia La Esperanza (Dallas, Texas)
During my last trip to Los Angeles, I had a little time to kill before returning my rental car, so I decided to try out Cognoscenti Coffee on my way to LAX. They had coffee from multiple roasters offered that day, none of which I had tried yet (Commonwealth and Four Barrel among them), and I opted to […]
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Freezing coffee beans
There are plenty of coffee snobs that will gasp and avert their eyes from this post. I won’t argue that fresh coffee is best (I don’t think anyone thinks frozen coffee is BETTER than fresh), but I wanted to see for myself if freezing whole coffee beans is a terrible idea, or if it is a […]