Your Guide for Craft Coffee
Last year we published an Aeropress guide with a rather presumptuous title: “The Only Aeropress Recipe You’ll Ever Need.” We stand by the recipe, but we’ll be the first to admit the Aeropress is an extremely versatile brewing device that can be used in a variety of ways. You can even use your Aeropress to make iced coffee.
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I heard a professor say once that if you only read one scholar, you’ll be a mimic. If you read two scholars, you’ll be confused. But if you read widely enough, you can make your own conclusions. Coffee roasters haven’t had that luxury. There’s really only two current books on coffee roasting: Scott Rao’s The Coffee Raoster’s Companion and Rob Hoos’s Modulating the Flavor Profile of Coffee. If you roast coffee for a living (or even a hobby), these books are required reading.
But a new book from veteran Estonian roaster Raimond Feil aims to add to the conversation. After 12 years of coffee experience, Feil has published his first book, Coffee Roasting Made Simple…
Almost every major coffee roaster has published a pour-over tutorial, and they’re basically all the same. Medium grind, 1:16 ratio, bloom, stir, slow pour, three to four minutes. You get the picture.
In the face of such hum drum monotonousness, perhaps it’s little wonder this brew guide from Adult Swim-affiliated Youtuber Rebecca Brand is creating such a stir in the coffee world….
One of the most painful parts of leaving the land of 110 voltage and moving to Europe was saying goodbye to all of my electronic coffee gear. The most beloved item was a well-worn Bonavita Variable Temperature Kettle, a prize from a barista competition with both sentimental and practical value. The kettle was used daily for four years, and was still going strong when I passed it on to a friend. Although there are kettles I prefer for their superior handle or spout, the convenience of automating water temperature wins every time, especially when it comes to that first, sleepy-eyed cup in the morning….
Sometimes, checking up on an old workplace feels a little bit like running into an ex. In my case, Quills Coffee is the ex you’ll always have a special place in your heart for and would consider hooking up with again if your spouse died in a fiery plane crash. Perhaps it’s fitting that this Valentines Day Quills has a variety of oddly specific Valentine messages, which somehow feel universally relatable in our modern times….
I’ve longed bemoaned the fact most tourists visiting Istanbul don’t make it to Balat, the old Jewish quarter. In addition to its colorful row houses and historic synagogues, Balat is home to one of my favorite coffee shops, Coffee Department. The roaster/retailer has set themselves apart as one of the strongest brands in a very crowded marketplace, due in no small part to founder Metin Benbasat’s tireless dedication to quality. Benbasat is a longtime resident of Nişantaşı, so it makes sense he would open his second café closer to home….
I spent the better part of my twenties in Louisville, Kentucky, a city that, by all accounts, punches above its weight class. From fast casual barbecue to white tablecloth Mayan food, the culinary scene is surprisingly diverse, spurred on by low cost of living and a young, culturally-aware population. Many of the most exciting restaurants and cafés are independent, DIY passion projects– a little rough around the edges but driven by a salt-of-the-earth, Midwestern work ethic, with a generous portion of Southern hospitality. (As a river city straddling the Mason-Dixon line, Louisville is geographically, and culturally, confused.)
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Ales Pospisil has been to a lot of coffee shops. The cofounder of the website European Coffee Trip has compiled the most extensive regional catalogue of specialty coffee shops we’ve seen anywhere. But the Czech-native’s latest project is even more ambitious. Pospisil recently produced Aeropress Movie, a medium-length documentary about the cult brewing device. We viewed a screening of the film and were impressed by its engaging story, uncovering surprisingly bits of information about one of our favorite brewing devices. We caught up with Pospisil to ask him what it was like to meet legendary inventor Alan Adler, and, of course, how does he brew an Aeropress….
This week I was perusing Instagram and came upon a surprising coffee recommendation from author and consultant Scott Rao. According to Rao, when making coffee with manual-fill batch brewers, such as our favorite, the Bonavita 1901, filling the tank with cold water can help slow the brew cycles, increasing extraction (i.e. more delicious coffee flavor).
This tip is surprising because water temperature is one of the key variables that affects coffee extraction. Overwhelmingly, most manual-fill batch brewers struggle to get the water hot enough. (And don’t get us started with baristas brewing your $5 pour-over with too cool water.) In fact, we’ve long heard coffee experts recommend the opposite: preheat your brew water to help the machine get it to temperature.
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The most exciting neighborhood for coffee in Istanbul right now is a full 12 kilometers from the city’s center, and technically it’s not really a neighborhood. Maslak is something of an urban curiosity— a suburban financial district on the Northern edge of Istanbul’s European side. But this island of skyscrapers is also home to a booming number of specialty coffee shops— driven by the plethora of white collar office workers that populate the glass high-rises during working hours. The newest of of those shops is the latest café from roaster/retailer Petra Coffee, in the lobby of the Mudo Concept Tower….
