10 replies to this topic

[Fat Guy]

One of the many joys of New York City's Byzantine and time-consuming alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations is that, simply through complying with the law, I've had the time to absorb the entire Kenneth Davids Home Coffee Roasting book and move on to other sources. I thought I'd mention a few Web sites that I've found particularly helpful in getting my coffee knowledge up to speed. But first, I need to explain to the uninitiated -- once and for all -- the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regime.

They need to clean the streets in New York City, and they do it with these massive street-scrubbing machines that drive along the curb, spray water, and suck up debris. They also leave behind about half of the dirt and garbage, but that's another story.

If there are cars parked at the curb there's no way for these machines to clean the street. So every street in New York City has at least some times on some days of the week when no parking is allowed. There is no public street anywhere I know of in New York City where you can park for an entire week in the same place without violating the street cleaning regulations.

The specific rules are different in different neighborhoods. Where I live, on the Upper East Side, on the residential blocks we have two sets of two three-hour periods when cars need to be moved in order to allow for street cleaning. I should say theoretical street cleaning, because it's not like they always show up -- but you'll get a ticket anyway, even if nobody is actually trying to clean the street. On my block and on the blocks immediately near mine, you can't park on the south side of the street from 8:00am until 11:00am on Tuesday and Friday, and you can't part on the north side of the street from 8:00am until 11:00am on Monday and Thursday. If you walk down a couple of blocks the regulations are the same but the blackout period is 11:00am until 2:00pm (obviously, the street sweepers can't do the whole city in three hours, so there are different rules in different neighborhoods).

So in a typical week, if I want to park my car on the street, I have to move it on the weekend sometime to get a space good for Monday, then on Monday afternoon to get a Tuesday spot, then sometime Tuesday or Wednesday to get a Thursday spot, and finally on Thursday afternoon to get a Friday spot. So that's four moves per week, assuming I'm using the car for nothing else.

If you live in the city and you have a car and you park it on the street, you of course plan your whole life around this parking stuff. So for example we often pick Tuesday night as the night we'll drive to a restaurant somewhere out of town for dinner. That's because it's very easy to park on Tuesday nights. Why? Because if you were reading carefully, you'd have observed that in my neighborhood there are no street cleaning regulations in effect for Wednesday, so both sides of the street are good. And usually we can get a space good for Thursday when we park on Tuesday night. Thursday is the day we usually drive up to Yonkers to do grocery shopping, so that coordinates another move with a task so it isn't really like moving the car. In a normal week, we can make the car moving process relatively painless and fit it into our schedule.

But things get messed up when, for example, you have to take your dog to the vet early in the morning. Because if you get back to my block at around 8:00am, forget about it: Every legal spot is full and most of the people who were on the other side of the street are sitting double-parked in their cars. Add to that various delivery trucks and other service vehicles and in a million years (okay, three hours) you can't get a parking space. So what you need to do is find something to do with yourself until about 10:15. Then at 10:15 you pull into an illegal spot on the empty side of the street and you stay with your car in case a street sweeping machine or a police officer comes along. And at 11:00 the space becomes magically legal and you can leave your car there for a couple of days until you re-synchronize yourself with the process.

This is just a very general overview. There are many more specific things to worry about, such as holidays, parades, film shoots, meter regulations, where the building line is, parking rules for three-way intersections, etc.

Now about those helpful Web sites. I've already mentioned that my home roasting equipment and beans came from Hollywood, CA, based The Coffee Project. The folks there have been instrumental in educating me and answering my questions. I wouldn't even be doing this experiment without the prodding and support of James Vaughn of The Coffee Project. The focus of the company's inventory is on the stuff that relates to home roasting -- beans, equipment, books, videos, and a free newsletter called Ground Control -- but things like grinders and press pots are also stocked. Another home-coffee-roasting equipment-and-supplies site that appears to be well run is Sweet Maria's, in Emeryville, CA. I've enjoyed reading the information on that site and at some point I'll likely order some of their beans. These two vendors appear to be in their own category when it comes to home coffee roasting. Various pieces of equipment are available elsewhere -- searches on Google for any particular product yield numerous potential sources -- but I haven't found a comprehensive, knowledgeable source other than these two.

In terms of comprehensive coffee-information sites, the best I've found by far is CoffeeGeek.com. So thorough is the information there, it's hard for me to take myself seriously as a writer on the subject of coffee. I think I'm about a year away from even being able to have a conversation with the site's contributors and with regulars who hang out on the CoffeeGeek.com message boards. We actually thought about having a coffee message board here on eGullet, but CoffeeGeek.com runs good software and seems to be the best place for this -- so if your interest in coffee rises above the basic level you should visit there. Tell them we sent you; it's always good to make friends, and perhaps at some point I'll approach that site's administrators about a link exchange. Right up there with CoffeeGeek.com are the CoffeeKid.com and CoffeeResearch.org sites.

There are extensive excerpts from the Kenneth Davids book -- the one to which I have so often referred -- at LucidCafe.com. There's also a nice coffee section on the National Geographic site. There are quite a few other coffee sites, of course, but I think the above is a good list of resources to get started with. They'll hook you into all the others if you choose to pursue it further. You all are also free to suggest your favorites.

At this time I don't have all that much to report regarding the actual research I'm doing, because I'm mostly accumulating samples in preparation for the big comparative tasting in November. But I must confess it's getting more and more difficult for me not to jump to conclusions about the merits of home coffee roasting. I'm already losing my objectivity.

Over the past few days I've continued to tweak my roasting, grinding, and brewing techniques, and I'm really liking the coffee I'm brewing. I look forward to challenging my emerging opinion (which is based on drinking one cup of coffee at sitting) with a comparative test. I've also been branching out into some other types of beans and should have some preliminary opinions on those soon.

For the side-by-side tasting I plan to conduct in a couple of weeks, I've settled on 2-ounce batches of Colombian beans roasted just a few seconds past the onset of the second crack (the sizzling noise I described in the first installment). This is tending to run around 4:15 to 4:30 minutes and yields a medium-dark roast. My personal preference for such a roast -- which you'll often hear referred to as Full City -- happens to coincide with this being a pretty good roast for evaluation purposes. If I had it to do over again, I might have chosen to go a bit lighter still (the darker the roast, the more the characteristics of the roast start to obscure those of the bean -- some say this is why many of the chain coffee places roast so dark). So, I'm roasting a small batch of these beans every day and sealing it in a small Zip-Loc bag labeled with the date of roasting. When I have 14+ days of samples I'll be able to see how the flavor of coffee is affected by the time since roasting. I'll also bring some store-bought coffees into play at that time.

If there are any folks out there who design empirical studies for a living, feel free to suggest modest improvements to my proposed experiment. I don't plan to do this blind -- I will know what I'm tasting. And I'm not a battle-hardened professional coffee taster so I don't want to design an experiment that requires brewing and tasting 280 different coffee samples. Also I'm open to suggestions regarding the best sources for store-bought (i.e. pre-roasted) coffee either in New York City or by mail. I'm only going to get a few of those samples and I will try to make them the best possible representatives of their kind. It wouldn't hurt if the source in question specializes in medium-dark roasted Colombian beans. I'm not sure how useful it would be to compare my medium-dark home-roasted Colombian beans to, say, a very dark roast from Ethiopian beans.

I see it's late. In-depth coffee research will do that to you. Not that I slept much before . . .

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[Wilfrid]

So many things about New York seem designed to make us compulsive-obsessive. Which is distressing for those of us who were compulsive-obsessive to start off with.

I await the next installment with bated breath.

[Dave the Cook]

bated breath

Too much espresso?

[Wilfrid]

Too much espresso?

C-c-c-contradiction in terms. Must dash.

[Spoonful]

This might help you for your Big Sniff, the Big Slurp and the Big Spit Experience

[ahr]

FG, considering the amount of French Press coffee you're consuming, take a peek about halfway down this thread for some information on the health implications of drinking unfiltered coffee. (Search for "cafestol," without the comma or quotes.)

BTW, in formulating a link, is there a way to specify a particular post or page position?

[Fat Guy]

I'd love to know who funded that study. It has the stamp of a paper-filter manufacturer all over it. Hmm. Coffee is bad for you. Destroys your liver and raises your LDLs. But if you use a paper filter, it's totally harmless! Yeah, right. When they perform that same study double-blind on a thousand people drinking normal quantities of coffee, I might take another look.

Each post has a unique identifying number and it's possible to code it into a link, but as I'm not sure whether the next version of the software will support that particular code I'm not going to explain how to do it. We're trying to make it such that, when we upgrade this time around, our internal links will still function.

[ahr]

Hey, are there enough trees in Holland to make paper filters?

I've done no further independent poking about, but the references and related reading at the bottom of the article from Science News include the following (emphasis mine):
van Rooij, J., et al. 1995. A placebo-controlled parallel study of the effect of two types of coffee oil on serum lipids and transaminases: Identification of chemical substances involved in the cholesterol-raising effect of coffee. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 61(June):1277.
Does it really seem unreasonable that filters might, um, filter?

[Fat Guy]

It seems entirely reasonable, and if you're accustomed to ferreting out urban legends and junk science that sort of apparent intuitiveness is the very first thing you look for. Maybe those studies have revealed truth and maybe they haven't. But a few obscure tests are hardly enough to justify the slightest bit of behavior modification by a rational person. What we do know is that every few years somebody comes along with a study that once and for all allegedly proves coffee is unhealthy, and soon afterwards those studies are always shown to be bogus. Remember how coffee used to cause heart disease, and now it doesn't? Remember how decaf was better for you than regular, and now the studies are showing the opposite? I can't take this latest set of claims seriously at all at this time.

[ahr]

I’m certainly no fan of the precautionary principle when applied to official policy -- and I’ve cheerfully eaten red meat for the thirty years that it’s been considered by the health busybodies to be tantamount to smoking asbestos cigarettes -- but I find studies like the ones cited in Science News useful input to making informed individual, personal decisions. (Nice twist, though, about the more logical the hypothesis the less likely its truth.)

In summary, counselor, I found your reaction disproportionate. Perhaps you overreacted to my assault on your apparent brewing method of choice, or perhaps you’ve just been consuming way too much coffee. Like about a liter per day?

Edit: Added them parens.

[Fat Guy]

Apparent obviousness and fulfilment of preexisting beliefs simply put one on the alert that people may be less likely to ask the kinds of questions that need to be asked before they swallow a load of crap.

I've been drinking on average maybe 6 ounces of brewed coffee a day. I rarely finish a mug.