Your Guide for Craft Coffee
Philadelphia: the city of cheesesteaks, the Liberty Bell, and brotherly love. It’s also a fantastic place to drink some locally-roasted coffee. We recently café crawled our way around America’s first capital and were pleased with the quality and diversity of the local coffee roasting scene. So if you find yourself in Philly, don’t sleep on trying these five local roasters. …
Philadelphia-based coffee company La Colombe is making national headlines with their new draft latte. They’ve offered the frothy, chilled beverage at their cafés since last year, but a recent innovation has allowed La Colombe to can the drink as a shelf-stable product. In a new video La Colombe cofounder Todd Carmichael offers a glimpse into their proprietary process. Long time readers of The Compass will spot James Tooill, consulting with Carmichael about some green coffee. Watch the video below and see if you can resist purchasing a four-pack of the draft latte online.
The holiday season is upon us, and you need relevant gift ideas. Whether you’re looking to find something special for the caffeine-addict in your life or a hint to drop around your rich relatives- we’ve got the coffee gift guide to meet all of your consumerist needs.
Coffee professionals have long lamented the absence of an authoritative, single-volume introduction to coffee. Coffee luminary James Hoffmann’s The World Atlas of Coffee aims to change that. Hoffmann is a former world barista champion and the founder of one of England’s most esteemed coffee companies, and he claims writing the book was his most challenging endeavor yet. After reading it, we understand why. The World Atlas offers concise, clear explanation about coffee varieties, farming practices, brew methods, and history. Perhaps most impressively it has a profile of every major coffee producing country, from America to Zambia. This book belongs in every coffee drinker’s library….
I’m in my living room with a black plastic suitcase- the kind musicians use to transport expensive equipment and mobsters use to hold weapons and drugs. Inside is what Todd Carmichael has dubbed “The Assassin Kit”, which contains a first production run of his renowned brewer, The Dragon. It also includes an …
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.
Todd Carmichael is an international man of mystery. The man has transversed Antarctica on foot, written for Esquire, and is the star of his own reality show on the Travel Channel. He also knows how to brew an incredible cup of coffee.
Carmichael, who owns La Colombe Coffee Roasters, turned more than a few heads when …
