This Week in Coffee; 8th of Feb '23
Equipment
Although there has been a long, and one-way, love affair between coffee and wine for at least a hundred years - I don’t think this another sommelier stick-em-up*.
As to my understanding, aerating coffee before you drink will make subtle notes more perceptible and reduce some of the bitterness and harshness.
This 8-cup Chemex has small indents ("paddles") on the inside which may steadily aerate the coffee as it’s swirled within. I understand that this is similar to decanter but, personally, I am no expert on the grape.
You wait three months for a pun-based name, then two come along at once.
Certainly the original Encore is a popular all-rounder, mid price, home grinder and the promise of the ESP is to allow casual home users greater control of their dialling in process.
The most important change which Baratza have made is an internal gearing system which reduces down the relationship between the setting wheel and the internal distances, only once the espresso range has been reached on that dial.
This should allow for closer adjustments when grinding on the finest settings while keeping big jumps for filter and pour over.
Industry
All I know is that he was on the original Jenny From The Blocks, and that’s all I need to know.
I’ve mentioned this before but I’m increasingly confident that this celebrity bean-list is because, generally, the margins on speciality coffee beans is very high and marketing is the key challenge for most roasters.
This means that if roasters can crack the marketing problem, there are reasonable rewards on offer (driven by margins).
I love these guys - in particular they're spearheading a renewal of Robusta coffee which is great news.
Hiring
Miscellaneous
Many people here will have been assigned multiple tickets that they can't use and I think it's tremendous to donate them to front line coffee workers.
If you don't use them before the deadline, you're basically giving Starbucks money.
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*Other options included (each getting progressively worse); Rose rip off, Malbec misappropriation, grape grab, Savvy B(urglary), House Raid, thevinary.