Your Guide for Craft Coffee
We have a fairly simple policy for finding tasty coffee in Arizona: go where Bryan Schiele goes. The mustachioed software engineer has a caffeine tolerance that could drink most baristas under the table, and a palate as refined as a master sommelier’s. As anyone who follows his fantastic blog already knows, the guy drinks a lot of coffee. So when Bryan invited us to visit Crepe Bar with him, we didn’t have to think twice. …
It’s tough trying to sell coffee when the temperature outside is the same as a well steamed cappuccino, but Cartel Coffee Lab in Tempe, AZ has a threefold recipe for success: source incredible coffees, roast to highlight the natural flavor characteristics, and brew with skill and precision. Throw in a friendly staff, a DIY aesthetic, and an old strip mall down the street from a massive university and it’s little wonder that the Cartel Coffee syndicate has expanded to…
A CHEMEX BREW GUIDE from Cartel Coffee Lab on Vimeo.
German-born chemist Peter Schlumbohm had a simple goal: invent the best coffee maker ever. After several years of testing and prototypes, the Chemex was patented in 1939. Over the ensuing decades the Chemex became an icon of design and pop culture. The Chemex is James Bond’s brew method of choice in From Russia With Love and is also featured in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who says it “epitomizes the kitchen–as–laboratory concept—a hallmark of the interwar New Kitchen.” (They stole the words right out of our mouth.) In more recent years it has experienced a revival amongst the craft coffee movement, valued for its ergonomic elegance and the clean, balanced cup it produces.
Out of a plethora of instructional videos on the interwebs, Cartel Coffee Lab in Tempe, Arizona has one of our favorites. This shop is always one of my first destinations whenever I fly back to the Grand Canyon State to visit my family (full review here) and this is the only coffee video I have seen with a No Country For Old Men allusion. So strap on your boots, grab a kettle, and start brewing!
