Your Guide for Craft Coffee
For long time readers of the Compass, you might have guessed that we enjoy participating in every step of the coffee process, including roasting. After I began getting into iOS app development, I started searching for a project to cut my teeth on. That project is RoastWatch.
RoastWatch, a portmanteau of “Roasting” and “Wristwatch”, is a simple, yet powerful iOS tool to help you track and log your coffee roast profiles. It was designed…
In one week international man of intrigue Todd Carmichael will compete in the US Brewer’s Cup, a competition that crowns the nation’s best brewer of black filter coffee. It’s fairly standard for competitors to develop their own customized technique for the competition, but a new video leaked by Carmichael himself reveals the owner of La Colombe has gone so far as to invent his own brew method.
On Twitter Carmichael referred to the apparatus as the “Manual Siphon 2.0” and spoke of the benefits of “slurry temp profiling”. The video has no sound, but it appears to use multiple chambers to control the temperature of the fully immersed coffee grounds. A plunger causes the mixture to run through a filter and into the bottom chamber of the apparatus, which doubles as a server. Carmichael’s patent-pending use of the Bonavita Variable Temperature Kettle makes a showing as well. From all appearances this approach is involved, tedious, and arcane. In a word, we love it.
Hopefully we’ll get an opportunity to sample what we can only dub “the Carmichael Brewer” at SCAA this week. In the mean time we’ll be looking for a glass blower to fashion us one.
For American and Canadian coffee drinkers, Mexico is the closest place producing specialty coffee (Hawaii not withstanding). This is not so for Small Batch Coffee Company in Brighton, England- but that hasn’t stopped them from building a direct trade relationship with Finca Muxbal in Chiapas that’s now 3 years strong. According to Small Batch,
The farm is outrageously beautiful, situated high above the city of Tapachula in Chiapas and straddled by the Mexico-Guatemala border. More importantly the farm is run in the most professional and socially responsible manner I have seen anywhere at origin.
Small Batch recently produced a video with FatSand Films about their long-term partnership, and it has us wanting to pull out our passports and visit our neighbor to the south. After that, a holiday in Brighton may be in order. Watch the video below then scoop up some coffee here. Recommended brewing soundtrack? The Who’s Brighton-based rock opera, Quadrophenia.
I was recently chatting with a friend about some of the variables that go into brewing coffee. I started explaining the process of how I begin by weighing my coffee, then boiling filtered water using an electric kettle, and then I check the temperature with my thermometer. “Whoa,” he interjected. “That’s a little much.” After explaining the importance of temperature on coffee extraction, he still was a little skeptical, but was interested to know how this might actually affect the end product: a delicious cup of craft coffee.
It’s conversations like this that give us satisfaction to recommend the coffee products we use every day and is one of the main reasons we started the Coffee Compass. But enough talk of these idyllic, blogger-producing conversations, you wanna know about this shiny new, affordable thermometer: the ThermoPop. …
Chicago holds an important place in the history of American coffee. America’s Second City was the first place Starbucks expanded outside of the Pacific Northwest, and few companies have shaped third-wave coffee like Chicago natives Intelligentsia. While these companies have production in scale with the Chicago skyline, a new wave of artisanal roasters have been …
