Coffee
Posts here are devoted to the simple joy of coffee—whether it’s a nitro oat latte in Fargo or a tasting flight during a road trip. I share notes on cafés visited, beans tried and the small moments that make each cup memorable.
Finished cleaning and rearranging the garage. Time for afternoon espresso.
First ever batch of cold press is brewing. Just pulled the stopper and letting the cold press filter. Coffee bar is open. 😊
Drinking amazing espresso roasted yesterday at Jim’s in Linden Hills.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Cold Press Coffee
I had a great coffee moment today that I just have to share. It’s worthy of sharing because there is information here that is new to me, and it highlights why small, local coffee shops are great.
I have two “coffee moments” each day. The first one is at home with my DeLonghi Espresso machine that I’m still loving. Two shots easily obtained with the press of a button. Just great. The second one is in the afternoon with a quick walk to One on One and get some afternoon espresso.
It’s summer now, or at least summer enough, and I’ve now switched to iced drinks in the afternoon. My typical drink is iced espresso. It used to be a triple shot over ice, but I’ve brought it down to a double shot over ice to reduce the shakes later in the evening (too much caffeine!).
I like my iced espresso, but it’s not very much liquid and just disappears too fast for me. So, I presented my problem to our favorite barista.
me: So, I want an iced drink – but there just isn’t much liquid in iced espresso. What do I do?
barista: Well, you could add water to the espresso.
me: That sounds horrible.
barista: Or how about iced coffee?
me: Brew sucks.
barista: Hmm… how about a cold press?
me: Huh? What in the world is a cold press?
barista: It’s great. We take a pound of beans and cold brew it with 80 ounces of water for 12 hours…
The conversation about cold press continued for quite a while. I got one, and it was perfect! The cold press is never heated, and slow brewed for 12 hours and then pressed through a cloth filter. It’s incredibly smooth and wonderful. I’ve got a new favorite drink!
Your not going to find something like this at most coffee shops. And your also not going to find such a helpful person with their headset on punching your order through their assembly line. What a great discovery. Try a cold press the next time you can. If you like serious coffee on the colder side, you’ll love it.
Really missing espresso. Really. Badly. Brew is just no substitute.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
We had brunch at Salut today, and got to try this giant croissant that they had just put on their menu today. Note coffee cup, knife and Mazie for scale. It was crazy. Shocking actually.
Triple Caffeine
The
title of this post is a reference to what one of my friends calls my
regular coffee order. Iced Triple Espresso. It doesn’t get me hot in the
summer, in fact it’s refreshing. It has enough caffeine in it to shock a
horse. In fact, since the espresso is cold you can take a drink and hold
it in your mouth, swishing it around. This will give you a caffeine buzz
extra fast as it absorbs through the tongue (for best results, hold
underneath your tongue as well). Not that espresso is all about
caffeine. It does taste good after all. And I recently decided that I
wanted to be able to have the espresso experience at home. So I ordered
a DeLonghi Magnifica
fully-automatic espresso machine.
Fully-automatic is essentially like having a coffee shop in your home. This thing requires nothing of you other than hitting a couple of buttons. Occasionally you need to dump the grinds out, add some more beans and top of the water reservoir. But typical usage just involves turning it on, and a couple minutes later hitting the single shot button.
So far I’m really happy with it. Everything works exactly as advertised. I relied heavily on the user reviews on Amazon and this machine got nothing but good comments. We’ll see how it stands the test of time.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying effortless cups of espresso with perfect crema every time.
Change Game Setback
A friend and I got coffee today and the total came to $4.58.
I gave the person at the register a $10 bill and three pennies.
Expecting that I would then get a $5 bill, a quarter and two dimes.
Instead of the quarter and two dimes she gave me nine nickels! This sets me back in a huge way with the change game.
And you thought doing math on road signs was geeky? Ha!