Coffee

Yeah it wasn’t good at all! Certainly not worth the $5.50 I paid. I use a drip filter at home and it tasted like that except if I hadn’t used enough grounds

Blue Bottle isn't good. Great example of the power of good branding.

There's a Blue Bottle at the end of South Park in SF and it's a big hob-nob place for tech knobs.... everyone looks like the theranos lady

Atmosphere in the one I was in was like a funeral parlor with hipster lurkers

xp I know the place. Used to be Jeremy's, who moved out I believe because they got priced out of the area. The place was empty forever, and I rooted for it to stay that way to punish the greedy building owner. But then Nestle Blue Bottle moved in.

Just out of curiosity how did the person ruin the Fellows kettle? I've been thinking of getting one, too. They have them at Sur La Table now.

― beard papa, Friday, 29 October 2021 23:42 (yesterday) link

Don’t worry, what happened here is not something you are likely to do. She put it on the stove in a moment of what I assume was extreme morning exhaustion.

tbf that sounds like something i would do

It seemed extremely well built. My one complaint was the on/off button was a little wonky and required a certain touch.

I'm pretty happy with my Bonavita pourover temp-controlled kettle; definitely a bit cheaper than the Fellows. They don't look too bad, either.

agreed blue bottle is the worst of the big third wave companies

Thirded. I feel like Stumptown and Counter Culture have gone down somewhat too, although still prefer Stumptown to CC or BB. I've been mostly ordering Tandem lately. I sometimes mix decaf beans into my regular beans now to cut the jitters, although the flavor takes somewhat of a hit. Partners and Grumpy are both solid, although for some reason the Grumpy beans at Whole Foods are often not as recently roasted. Tried some Irving Farm beans recently, not particularly impressed but fine.

gf accidentally bought decaf coffee, which we've been drinking all week without realizing. horrible

ouch

that is a legit horror story

lol

i like counter culture the best of the stumptown intelligentsia blue bottle cc bunch i think tho i havent had it in a while

I have a support request in about that Fellow (Stagg EKG) kettle and the finicky power button! It’s great once you actually get the damn thing turned on

(I would not normally spend that much on a kettle but it was discounted by quite a bit)

Is there a benefit of using a kettle when you can just boil water in a small pot? Wtf am I missing here

i live in the UK so i already have an electric kettle obviously.. getting another one feels a bit redundant/decadent. i feel like as long as you let 30 seconds / 1 minute pass after the boil it’s pretty much the right temperature for a pour-over. a goose-neck would be nice tho

calstars i think some of these kettles have temp controls on them for the real finicky types

We have a pretty standard Capresso burr grinder. Never had a problem with it, really, except the last batch of beans we used suddenly started to get all static-clingy over everything. (Or the powdery residue did, at least.) Apparently this *can* be a problem with burr grinders, enough so that Cook's Illustrated tried (and failed!) to find a solution.

https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/8357-minimizing-static-in-burr-grinders%E2%80%8B

And yet, we'd never had the problem before, and in fact, after we went through that bag of beans and opened another, the problem went away. The roast itself was one of our regular rotation, but we had noticed it tasted a bit darker than usual, which made us wonder: could it, the particular bean or roast, have been what was generating all the static electricity? And if so, why?

there’s your podcast right there

have noticed this a couple times but never cared enough to remember what kind of beans. if it roast was a factor i would expect a dark roast to be less staticky because they are more "oily." maybe the beans were a little older and had lower moisture content. anyway you have to repeat this experiment under the same temp/humidity conditions with the cup exactly as clean/dirty each time. please report back.

calstars i think some of these kettles have temp controls on them for the real finicky types

its also much faster

is it? on your weeny little 120V current?

i had always understood that to be the stumbling block to mass acceptance of the countertop kettle

yeah its faster, americans dont have them i think just cause they dont use kettles very much

it's faster, but not as fast as euro kettles due to what I am told is the "mains voltage"

its against gods law for europe to have a single better household appliance than america and must be rectified i demand mains voltage

most houses have 220V outlets for the washing machine.. i bet something could be rigged up

xp burning the european flag to heat my coffee water

I didn't get it either before I dated/married a non-American but now I will never go back to the stovetop kettle. And the Fellow did heat very fast somehow.

I really did like the temp control as well as the temp hold feature on the Fellow, but I just can't splurge like that again. The cheapo one I've been using is basically fine for now.

the fellow kettle pulls hell of amps to keep up afaict

tbh feel like electric kettles have become pretty common in america

as many as one in fifteen of my coworkers may have them in their domicile

Ive switched to a stovetop kettle because the electric ones just got eaten by the hard water locally

reminding me that i need to get an electric kettle for my office...for TEA

......i use the water arm of my coffee machine....

It's a Friday afternoon and I'm fading, coffee would be great right now. I work on a college campus, it's finals week, shouldn't be hard to source, no?

Turns out, yes. None of the cafes in the buildings I can access are open, the local coffee shop randomly closed at 3 this afternoon, even the Starbucks is closed.

Thoughts and prayers

An otherwise excellent cof house in my town closes at 1pm, WTF? Others close at 2pm. Only one is open until 5. Otherwise, the Starbucks inside the Target is your choice.

Not in the same annoyance league as most cafes in Japan, which OPEN at noon or some afternoon hour.

japanese business hours are strange

i got a good espresso grinder (eureka mignon) for xmas. this is going to be a life-changing upgrade.

get ready baby

nice

nice

London's first coffee-house, as reported by an eyewitness in 1654:

"A cuphye-house or a Turkish- as it were ale-house is erected near the Old Exchange. ...It is somewhat hot and unpleasant but a good after relish and caused breaking of wind in abundance"

— Dr Anton Howes (@antonhowes) July 2, 2022