Barista Jams, Esmeralda Geisha and Bloody Mary's

I thought this blogging thing was going to be easy to keep up with, but I guess I'm busier than I thought. This month has been an exciting progression for the Coal Creek Roastery. We're awaiting the arrival of a new roaster, a Deidrich HR-1 (ours is black), which will allow us to roast samples to the same exacting standards that we roast for production. It will also allow us to experiment with different profiles and roasts without risking the loss of product. All in all, it is going to be excellent and I'm looking forward to it.

We've begun to get together at the roastery for weekly Coal Creek Jams, pouring latte art, drinking beer, talking about the upcoming competition season and having a grand time. I think it's great to provide some of our newer baristi with an appreciation for how hard we work and how much fun that can be. Everyone is having a great time and it's happening most Thursday nights. If you're coming through Laramie, stop by!

Excuse the lengthy preamble, the core of this blog concerns a very special cup of coffee that I've been privileged enough to consume. Hacienda La Esmeralda is a coffee farm located in the province of Chiriqui, in Southwestern Panama. They have recently revived the Geisha cultivar and have made it quite popular. Michaele Weissman chose the title of her book God In A Cup based on a description of this coffee. Each year, the farm holds an auction for the top lots of its coveted Geisha crop. This year, the top lot sold for $117.50 per pound (keep in mind it hasn't been roasted yet and there should be at least a three times margin above the green price). I did not get to taste this. I did however get to taste a lot purchased and roasted by Intelligentsia, titans of the third wave of Specialty Coffee. John was gracious enough to agree to spending $100 of the company's money on two 1/2 lb. bags of the Geisha that Intelligentsia roasts only once per week. I figured it was worth a Saturday at work to taste this stuff. I brought Emma to take some photographs and I fired up our halogen beam heater to see how the coffee fared on with a siphon extraction. The beans were beautiful, Geisha is a long, thin, canoe shaped bean, which I imagine is very difficult to roast. The roast I received was fairly consistent, with only a few discernible tips on the verge of scorching. I carefully measured 26 grams of coffee, ground slightly finer than drip, about at the number six setting of our Mahlkonig EK-43. I used 15 ounces of water and a mingle time of 55 seconds, resulting in a total extraction time of just over two minutes. Emma and I split the siphon and chatted about how it presented itself. I have tasted plenty of coffees, few have been so delicate and complex. I felt that the best aromas and flavors were present when the coffee was very hot. Intelligentsia describes the flavors as Orange Marmalade and Toasted Marshmallows. I immediately picked up on the caramel, maple syrup and brown sugar sweetness, also present was a very mild pinon nut sweetness. The coffee presented an intense fragrance, floral and tea-like. A touch of lavender and bergamot, a delicate body like a clean, Sencha green tea. The acidity was very much like oranges and kumquats. As the coffee cooled I picked up a cucumber mouthfeel and the acidity turned more toward stewed tomatoes and celery, the body retained its delicacy and acquired a bit of a black tea, pleasantly bitter characteristic. A truly elegant cup, I look forward to cupping it Monday and preparing it on our Clover, to round out my experience of the bean. I'll keep you posted on these developments.

I'm currently drinking a homemade Bloody Mary. If I learned one thing when living in Wisconsin, it was how to appreciate and prepare a proper Bloody Mary. Emma and I used to spend a fair amount of time at Genna's in Madison after the weekly farmers market. They made some serious Bloody Mary's, which came with unlimited access to their extensive garnish bar, including everything from the traditional olives and celery to pickled asparagus, cheese and dilly beans. It took some practice but since moving away from the readily available, I have figured out a reliable and quite delicious recipe.
The basic rules are:
Do not use anything from a can, tomato juice from a can tastes tinny, and in the same vein, lemon juice that is not fresh will add a tinny flavor to what should be one of the best cocktails on earth.
Also, you need cheese. Bloody Mary's are completed by a very sharp Cheddar, I'm consuming a Cabot Private Stock from my lovely home state of Vermont. It gives balance to the spiciness of the drink and if you add some Wood's Cider Jelly, essentially a reduction of unpasteurized apple cider, it sweetens and adds complexity to the entire experience.
Two words as important as "bloody" and "mary" are Garlic and Horseradish. There is nothing worse than a Bloody Mary with no spice. That being said, it's easy to overdo the garlic or add so much horseradish that you end up with shrimp cocktail sauce. I find one small clove of garlic and 1/2 tsp. of horseradish per serving is adequate.
Infuse! I use Ketel One vodka, infused for at least a week with dried celeriac root. This thickens up the vodka and again steers you away from the metallic flavors that can come from the citrus, the tomato, or the vodka.
Salt the rim. No excuses, even better is to grind some pepper into your rim salt and rim with salt and black pepper.
Finally, BEER CHASER. There is nothing that can do as much for a Bloody Mary as a beer chaser. The drink was designed to bridge morning and afternoon, breakfast and lunch, and you must, must, must, accompany a Bloody Mary with a beer chaser. A mild amber ale will do, I'm using Fat Tire today, a pilsner also works quite well, many weekend mornings I'll crack a PBR to do this job.

Thanks for humoring me and reading this, more to come soon!

Labor Day, Fixed Roasters and Homemade Triple Sec.

It's Labor Day Weekend, motorcycles and RV's abound. The Cowboys won their first football game of the season, Laramie is full to the brim with people in town for the game, as well as for the Snowy Range Music Festival. Emma and I went to see Johnny Lang last night, and we're off to see Susan Tedeschi in a few moments. It's been fun so far, I'll write more about it later.

THE ROASTER IS FIXED!

Last time I checked in, I planned to begin roasting on Tuesday, this did not happen because of a gas permit that wasn't in the right people's hands. So Wednesday I showed up to roast as soon as the city inspector verified the integrity of the plumbing. This was about 10:30 am. Needless to say, we were behind and I had plenty of coffee to roast, I was planning on about 400 pounds, which would allow me to pack it all up before the UPS man got there. So I roasted, and roasted, and roasted beautiful, fragrant coffee. Our neighbors complained about the smell (I still don't get it). But we're ordering a pair of no-loss vent caps for the roof, so they should smell no more. I was almost done for the day when I had my most terrifying roasting experience to date. The drum stopped moving. The roaster got really quiet and I stared in shock at the stationary coffee for a few seconds before I realized that it was going to start on fire pretty quick if I did not empty the drum. I opened the chute and turned on the cooling bin, as the coffee fell out of the drum, the drum began turning slowly, but soon creaked to a stop. John showed up around four thirty and we figured that it must be the roaster drum motor, which has been turning the drum faithfully for eleven years and who knows how many pounds of coffee. We immediately called Grainger and ordered a replacement part overnight. Of course, the only place that had one was in Central Time and had closed for the night. So Friday, we got the roaster motor and we spent all day figuring out how to mount it (it was a different size, requiring us to get out the sawzall and modify the roaster mount plate). We got it in, turned it on and it spun, slowly, so we called it a night and figured that it was just a slightly different gear ratio and our coffee would be fine.

Enter Saturday, I show up and start warming up the roaster, I notice about six minutes into the warm up that the drum is slowing again. WTF?! I shut it down and start freaking out about how to get another motor here on labor day weekend and all that. John shows up and waves his hand over the shaft and it works, must have just needed to warm up the motor and the grease, or the drum may have shifted during the move and had to recenter itself. Anyway- we roasted, we did not run out of espresso, and we will roast again tomorrow!

On to my weekend at home.

Emma and I subscribe to Imbibe Magazine and in the most recent issue was a recipe for homemade triple sec. I lent the magazine to John (because it also features 100 of the best beers), but I remembered the jist of the recipe and decided to give it a shot. I went to Safeway and got some oranges, Ketel One and Everclear. I sliced oranges and dehydrated them in the oven for about a half hour, stacked them in a pitcher and in went the everclear, also a hint of ginger, black pepper and sweet dried basil for nuance. I made some simple syrup, two 1/2 cups of water, 1 1/2 cups of orange juice and 3 cups of sugar, simmered to a thick syrup. The vodka I mixed with mandarin oranges and when everything was orange, I strained and combined the elements. I look forward to doing a taste test next to some other high quality liquors, I'll keep you updated.

So the photos are of the first cocktails with my homemade triple sec, I look forward to experimenting more with this and other infused liquors. The first cocktail was for Emma, a Margharita with Reposado Tequila, Triple Sec and Lime Juice, with an Everclear Orange Garnish. My Drink is a Ketel One with Triple Sec, shaken with frozen blueberries and garnished with orange peel. It's delicious! Cheers-

Moving the Roastery

Just finished day two of moving the roastery operations. It's really starting to come together in the new space, lots of room to design an efficient flow and room to really grow into ourselves. It's amazing how small the roaster looks in an empty space with high ceilings! I've been looking forward to this move for quite a while now and it's all a little dreamlike that it's really happening now. I scrubbed and set up shelving, organized product and got the place ready for tomorrow. Tomorrow we have the plumber coming for the natural gas line to the roaster, the air guy coming to set up the roaster ventalation, the phone and internet coming and an electrician. I know it's ambitious, but we're planning to roast again on Tuesday morning. I think it will happen. It will be really nice to have a dedicated office space and a consolidated wholesale stockroom. For those of you who don't know, we used to haul all of the wholesale products (save coffee) out of the coffeehouse basement, next door to the roastery. This made picking a large order quite a task and with our new wholesale hallway, we'll just toss it in the boxes as we move down the line. I'm very much looking forward to Java Moon's first order from our new space.

We still don't have flooring in the office and showroom spaces, but that's coming soon, maybe this week, more likely next. Also we're getting a new cyclone chaff collector, so we won't have to spend a halfhour or more cleaning out the old one we've got every morning. We will have a dedicated bagging table, tripling the area that was previously dedicated to this, (you're welcome Carla), and we'll have more green coffee storage space. Our goal is to double our stocked inventory, so that we would pay freight on fifty or so bags of coffee at a time, rather than 22-26.

Perhaps best of all in the green coffee end of things will be this: we will no longer have to carry coffee bags on our backs across Grand Avenue, Laramie Wyoming and into our roastery. We have a garage door and can either use the drivers lift-gate/pallet jack, or borrow a handy fork-lift from the friendly electric supply warehouse next door. Yee haw.

Also, speaking of green coffee, I'm wildly excited about some coffee that should be arriving tomorrow or perhaps early tuesday. New to Coal Creek will be an Organic Bali Blue Moon coffee. When we cupped it, I tasted homebrewed root beer, ginger and vanilla, sweet and full bodied, almost creamy enough to call it a root beer float. It was rich and earthy and man was it awesome. The Bali is processed using an interesting method previously unkown to me, called wet-hulling. This is when the cherries are de-hulled and fermented for about 24-36 hrs. Then they're dried in their parchment to about 40% before being sold, wet-hulled (de-hulled) and dried down to 12-15% moisture, which is where we receive them. I'm really excited about putting this through a production roast, especially with the current situation in Ethiopia, I've been craving some coffee with a wild character. Also coming is an Organic, Rainforest Alliance coffee from El Salvador. Las Lajas is a tasty treat and I look forward to adding it as an origin and playing around with it in some blends.

Today I'm drinking a Little Sumpin' Sumpin' Ale from Lagunitas, it's sweet and hoppy cantaloupe melon and orange peel flavors give it a juicy finish. Not my favorite of theirs, but it tastes good after working through a weekend!