MGLloyd

So is it a Capresso MT 500 you are replacing? I ask since that is what I have, and I did a lot of research at the time (two years ago) when I bought it. It is still going strong, but like any coffeemaker, I wonder about the life expectancy. When I think back through the years, it seemed as if I would get five years max from a coffeemaker before it expired. Prior to buying my Capresso, I was a Braun fan. If my Capresso checked out tomorrow, I don't know what I would buy. It is not easy finding a coffeemaker that does not have a warming plate, which I now avoid.

I lived on Vashon for several years, and there is no Albertson's on the Island. There is Beck's and Thriftway. Thriftway is the larger of the two stores, but insofar as I recall, they don't have a Kosher meat or fish department; and I suspect there is not a large enough population on the Island keeping Kosher to support one.

I work in healthcare administration for a very large medical clinic. Suffice it to say that people bring in all sorts of animals, stating they are therapy or service animals. My favorite so far was the Vietnamese pot bellied pig that was a service animal and shit profusely all over the waiting area and exam room.

So, a recipe for the cinnamon pastry cream? Which by the way has me salivating?

In my experience, the majority of the restaurants and wine bars that I have been to pour a four to six ounce glass of wine. The only exception is if I am getting a wine tasting flight, in which case a two to three ounce pour seems typical.

I can also speak highly of some of the excellent ice wines coming from the Okanogan, on both sides of the border, but primarily from Canada.

I wish that 25 for $ 25 would expand its' geographical horizons a bit and that more restaurants in the North End or Eastside would participate.

Noting that Barking Frog in Woodinville, twenty minutes away from us, is on the list, my wife and I will be trying that. Of course, we have eaten at the Frog many times, but it will be interesting to see what the $ 25 menu is.

Lowell-Hunt cafe in Woodinville allows you to bring your own wine for no corkage fee. They do ask that if you have something interesting, to share a glass with them! This restaurant is a new find for us. My wife and I were driving to Columbia to pick up her wine club order, and we intended to eat dinner at Purple Cafe afterward. We passed Lowell-Hunt on the way down, and decided on the spur of the moment to give it a try. Boy, are we glad we did. Excellent food at very cheap prices (the seared scallop appetizer for $ 8 and the seared duck breast for $ 16 were my choices), a pretty good wine list at an astonishingly low markup and a limited but good dessert menu made it worth the trip. It used to be that for that area of Woodinville, our favorites were Herbfarm, Barking Frog, Purple and Golden Goat, in that order. Lowell-Hunt will move to position three on that list.

The Great White North Baking Company

Not to be a pedantic twit, but I offer a correction only so that readers won't be misled. You are actually referring to glacial acetic acid. Culinary white vinegar is approximately a 5 % solution of acetic acid. If you went to the chemical supply house and asked for acidic acid, they would look at you strangely. Asking for acetic acid, however, will ensure prompt service!

The companion to B-Brite is C-Brite: a chlorine based no-rinse cleaner and sanitizer. So if you wanted to clean and sanitize in one step, I would use C-brite. I, myself, having had a five gallon carboy go bad from an infection, use liquid dishwashing soap and hot water to clean, and then do a sterilizing soak in iodophor solution followed by a hot water rinse or I rinse by running everything through the dishwasher on a rinse only cycle with heated drying. PS: Oddly enough, on the carboy that went bad, I caught one of my dogs in the garage licking the carboy neck right where the airlock was. This was less than a day after I pitched the yeast and there may have been some residual wort on the carboy neck. I removed the airlock and swabbed the carboy neck in and out with absolute alcohol as a sterilizing agent. I always wondered if the batch going bad had anything to do with the dog, having the airlock off for ten minutes while I sanitized the neck, or if it was just happenstance and I had a bad batch of yeast? I can tell you, when I saw the dog licking the carboy, I was tempted to trim the dog to fit in a petri dish and culture it for 48 hours.

MGLloyd (Michael Lloyd) is a he, and bears a startling resemblance to 'Lionel Hutz' of the Simpsons, except for having five fingers on each hand, no hair on the top and a grayish-pinkish skin tone rather than goldenrod. I would be concerned over using a high concentration bleach solution to sterilize a food contact surface without a subsequent rinse or wipedown. Although the liquid solution may dry, I suspect there might still be chlorine present on the surface for some time until it degrades. If I could still smell chlorine, I would think that it is still present on the surface and could contaminate any food in contact. In addition, in high enough concentrations and with sufficient contact time, bleach solutions can attack some metals. And I am a homebrewer for a couple of decades. B-Brite is a cleaner only. It is not a sanitizer. I have used an iodophor sanitizer for my homebrewing equipment for many years. It rinses clean and is relatively non-toxic. If you continue to use only B-Brite and not another sanitizing agent, you are running a distinct risk of contaminating an entire batch of homebrew.

I knew that graduate degree in chemistry would come in handy some day. Aqueous solutions of chlorine do degrade over time. Exposure to air (oxygen) and sunlight (UV radiation) break down the active chlorine in a sodium hypochlorite solution. Since it is the active chlorine that provides the disinfectant action, a degraded solution is useless to disinfect. Keeping a bleach solution in a cool climate, a closed container, stored away from sunlight and adding a bit of alkaline can maintain a disinfectant solution for up to six months. Here is a webpage that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about chlorine. I also read some interesting pages talking about how soaking a female condom in bleach ( ) for re-use will degrade the condom membrane. At first I thought, 'why would anyone be reusing a female condom?'. But attempts to find a safe way to re-use female condoms is of great importance is developing countries that are using them to help control the spread of HIV. I learn something every day. PS: Edited to add that Mr. Bunge above and I were typing our responses simultaneously. I agree with his comments.

I have bought the Vivace green blend and roasted it at home. It was pretty good, but my favorite espresso blends to home roast are Malabar Gold and Liquid Amber. I make some of my own blends with a heavy emphasis on central and North Africans that turn out pretty good. Think equal parts Kenyan, Harrar and Yirg. PS: I forgot to mention another source of green beans locally. Hines Public Market on Eastlake roasts their own, and the roaster, John Sanders, can sometimes be persuaded to sell you some of his green beans. Tell him Coffeegeek sent you.

Ooh, ooh, I know this! As a homeroaster for over two years, I can tell you that there are few places locally to buy green beans. Good Coffee is one (but expensive), Vivace is another. If you go to one of the local Costcos with a roaster inside, they will usually sell you green beans from their stock. Perhaps your best bet (since I don't know where in Seattle you live) is for you to find the nearest coffeehouse/espresso shop that roasts their own, like Zokas, and ask them if you can buy some of their green beans. Typically, you should be able to get the green beans for half the price or less of the roasted beans. But my usual advice is to point people to Sweet Marias (www.sweetmarias.com), coffeegeek (www.coffeegeek.com) or the green coffee co-op (www.greencoffee.coop). I can give you five local coffee brokers right now that will sell you green coffee by the container load, two that will sell you green coffee by the 132 lb sack, and none that will sell you green coffee in small retail quantities. Your best bet is to check out some of the sources on the Net, like the ones quoted above.

As luck would have it, I do happen to have a MSc in analytical chemistry, earned back in the early 80's. My lab days are long behind me, however, and I have no idea how they would produce a fascimile of Kopi Luwak. One could hazard a guess, though of soaking them in a warm slurry inoculated with a culture of some sort of gut flora. That could be a way of replicating the GI tract of a civet cat.

I still think my idea of feeding the coffee cherries to my domestic house cat and then wait at the litter box with a scoop is worth a try.

Framboise.

In regard to oven roasting, the best results are achieved using a gas oven and a perforated sheet pan, as recommended by Kenneth Davis. I have heard of people doing this in an electric oven and a regular sheet pan and getting fine results, however.

Hmm. My wife and I were in Honolulu last month for one week on business/vacation. We went to Mavro because of the rave reviews rather than going to Le Mer. This turned out to be a mistake. We were both pretty underwhelmed, particularly for a $ 185 meal for two. We have had much better French food in Seattle at $ 75 for two. The service left something to be desired, too. When I had the temerity to order a wine different than the pre-selected pairings, the waiter carefully explained to me how the entire staff did the wine tastings to select the optimum wine for each dish. I carefully explained back how I was aware of that, but having personal experience with the wine paired with the fish, I would prefer another, and that I knew my palate better than the staff. We thought the food was pretty uninspired and bland. Of note, we were told by a couple of Honolulu residents later on that Mavro tends to attract the Japanese tourist and business trade and that the food is not particularly venturesome. We were, however, very pleased with Keo's downtown, Hoku's at the Kahala Mandarin and with Roy Yamaguchi's. I think we will skip Mavro the next time we are in town.

Yes.

I have one word for you: heatgun/dogbowl. Using this technique, I can roast and cool one pound of coffee in 20 minutes. See here for details.

All home roasters smoke; it is merely a matter of degree. The two main factors controlling the amount of smoke are the amount of beans being roasted and how dark the roast is. The darker the roast or the more beans being roasted, the more smoke. For a countertop-sized roaster like the I-Roast or the FreshRoast, they don't smoke all that much, generally. But particularly with an I-Roast, you might want to roast under s stovetop hood fan or the like. More information than you ever thought possible on home coffee roasting can be found here: coffeegeek In particular, go to the forums section and look at the home roasting forum

The Purple cafe, between the Golden Goat and the BBQ house is pretty darn good and has an excellent wine list and great food at reasonable prices. Try the lobster mac and cheese. The last couple of times we went to the Golden Goat, we were disappointed with the food. We stopped by there last weekend to give them another try. They open at 5:30 pm, and at 5:40, the restaurant was dark and appeared closed, although I could see someone in the kitchen. We went in and I asked if they were serving dinner, and the cook said he could make no promises since the server had not shown up yet. We were clearly imposing on him, so we took our business down the street to Barking Frog.