Today I drank entirely too much espresso because I was having fun watching the shots. I also learned how to get Molly’s camera to take video and how to get that from camera->YouTube.
Just dug into the new batch of Peaberry from Boca. After the lessons learned with the August batch, I wasted much less coffee getting a nice shot. The trick seems to be keep the grind just a little too fine, then back off the tamp a little. I think I may want to lower the temperature on the PID just a couple degrees, though, and see how that changes it.
So tonight, finding myself home alone without a good grocery supply in the house and knowing that Hard Times has a special on Chili Mac this week, I decided to walk down to Clarendon to grab a bite and watch people for a while. It turned out to be a much better evening than I expected.
I went to Hard Times for the vegetarian chili mac 3-way with tomatoes and jalapeños. It was stellar, as expected. Then I decided to roam the neighborhood a bit and grab a coffee. On my way to Boccato gelato, I passed Iota. Outside Iota, there was a woman standing around in a Halloween costume playing the fiddle. Naturally, I had to stop and listen, then ask why she was there.
I’m nearing the bottom of my bag of Boca Java’s espresso blend. This one has been really fantastic. Once I found the grind, every shot has been sweet. This is a really easy blend to work with. It’s also got the advantage of coming to my door in 8 oz. bags instead of 1 lb. It’ll definitely land in the regular rotation.
This is available locally from Murky Coffee. Besides being relatively easy to work with, it’s what they use in house. This gives me a decent way to benchmark my equipment and technique against the best I can find around here. The batch I got was roasted 9/2. The first shot of the morning was one for the sink, but the second was really, really sweet.
What’s a little mystifying to me is that I liked my shot slightly better than the same shot at Murky yesterday. I have no explanation for this. It’s the same coffee. Their machine is much better. Their grinder is better. Anyone in that shop has much more trained, more consistent technique than I do. But somehow this morning’s shot was more to my taste than yesterday’s. Go figure. (To be clear, just in case this turns up in search results or something… theirs was excellent. Mine today just suited my palate a bit better and I’m not sure why.)
I really, really wanted to like this one. I picked it up at Rappahannock coffee on Columbia Pike. They roast in house, and it was very fresh. It was also way over-roasted for my taste. Near the end of the bag, I learned that dialing down the temperature on the machine might help salvage it, but I didn’t have enough left at that point to really experiment. I did not manage to get anything that didn’t taste burnt. Furthermore, it was so oily that it was hard to work with in the grinder.
I will probably go back to Rappahannock, but not on the strength of this batch. It would be very nice to find a good locally roasted espresso blend.
Just opened a bag that was roasted about two weeks ago. (That makes it exactly the same age as the peaberry I just finished.) This is a slightly lighter roast. It required me to go two clicks finer on the grinder to hit the sweet spot. It’s really flowery and maybe just a little acidic for my taste, at least as a shot. I’m reserving judgement on this one for now, but really enjoying it in an americano.
Just before I reached the end of my bag, I started getting consistently good shots from this one. This was more a matter of learning curve than anything related to the beans. Compared to the CC toscano blend everyone serves, this one is a bit more woody and ever so slightly more bitter. I definitely like it enough that I’ll include it on my next Boca order.
I’m probably going to be throwing espresso notes online here, since it seems as good a place as any to keep track of them. For the benefit of the innocents who might stumble across insane espresso posts and wonder, here’s the story of how the setup came about along with notes about the equipment.
So I finally snapped. I’ve been considering improving my coffee making setup approximately since we got the house. About a month ago, our coffee maker suddenly stopped making the water hot enough to brew a decent pot. I had always planned that the next coffee machine I got was going to be a good one, but hadn’t done my research to determine that. So I bought a press pot from target to keep me caffeinated and got to researching.
