Missing the regular coffee posts? Don’t forget thebeanstalker.com – where you’ll also see this video posted. Amongst other coffee related gems.
The video claims, rightly or not, that the Enlightenment was fuelled by caffeine. Don’t believe it? Check out this further video.
Speaking of Canadian Mitch (and Canadian Steph), one of the fun things about getting to know them this year has been watching them come to terms with Australian coffee culture. Steph even works at one of my favourite cafes.
I hadn’t realised why the learning curve was so steep for them, until I saw this video:
I know, most of you are already reading my cafe reviews on thebeanstalker.com, right. But I have to point out that if you’re looking for an incredibly cool cafe to hang out at, or to study at, in the Toowong region – then you should most definitely head along to the Corner Store Cafe on Sylvan road.
Here’s my review of the Corner Store on thebeanstalker.com.
That’s a photo of my double shot flat white from yesterday. Because we spent the morning there. The food is also excellent. Try the Beef Dip – a popular Canadian dish, and the Bacon Cheeseburger – a popular everywhere dish.
Over on thebeanstalker.com I’ve posted a bunch of vintage coffee ads and a link to a gallery of 300 that I pulled from all over the internet.
To get you in the mood, here’s a video advertisement for coffee – the drink of winners.
The other day I tracked down ten health benefits of caffeine for a post I wrote on thebeanstalker.com – 10 majestic pieces of scientific proof that drinking coffee is good for your health. Caffeine is good for you. And that article proves it.
So, here’s a shirt to go with it, a nice play on the Rick James sketches from the Chappelle Show.
You can get it here.
Five cafes. 11 shots. One chemex. Three friends (and me). One morning. Crazy times.
Here’s a slideshow.
I’ll be reviewing the tour and a couple of the cafes individually over at thebeanstalker.com tomorrow. In the meantime – you should order some beans off me.
Here’s a photo my friend, coffee companion, and photographer extraordinaire Steven Tran took of me at Veneziano Caffe in West End.
Clever. Very clever. I can see these coffee chairs springing up in cafes around the world.
“It seems a coffee mug on a saucer silhouette when you look in front of the chair, Handle on the backrest is useful when moving the chair to a different location, and also when hanging a handbag or bag. Coffee Chair satisfies you both aspects, functional and decorative design, and certainly differentiates with other chairs, therefore can be used in cafes, restaurants, design companies and etc.”
I figured it was time to put all my blogging talk into action. This one even has ads. I’ve picked a niche (coffee) and I’m out there to see just how much free stuff running a coffee blog can score me (I heard Izaac’s Pixar blog scored him free DVDs).
Plus it’s fun having a purpose when you go to cafes. And it makes all that time spent reading about coffee seem worthwhile.
Here it is. It’s called thebeanstalker.com. Add it to your feed reader. Tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends. There has been a little bit of original content over there already – but expect to see some of my coffee posts from here posted there, and good stuff from there occasionally posted here.
Dave Miers is raising money so that kids can drink clean water in India. You should help him meet his target of $2,000. He’s got $600 left. For one day only – if you donate money to his fundraising cause and tell me (I’ll check) I’ll send you 250gm of freshly roasted coffee for every donation of $30 or more. I’ll even buy and roast some Indian Coffee for the occasion.
Here’s the direct link to the donation page. Here’s the link to a post on his blog.
I think it’s a good cause, and I’m happy to support it. I do like the poetry of supporting clean water in India by offering to dirty yours.
This is just crazy. Who needs this much over-roasted coffee anyway?
This is what it looks like for real.
This has been all over the interwebs. But I think I saw it first on ChurchCrunch. It’s originally from the National Post.
Hey. Guess what. I sell roasted coffee. No doubt some of you know that. What you don’t know is two things.
I now have a snappy looking rubber stamp so my coffee bags are branded.
And also, you can now pay for the coffee as you order via Paypal. You don’t even have to have a Paypal account. Just a Credit Card. You can order from this page here. And I’m thinking I might even put the form in the sidebar on the front page.
Cool hey. I suggest you order away. You won’t regret it. Millions of people have already enjoyed coffee from St. Eutychus Coffee. And that’s the only exaggerated sentence in this post.
Amongst the really awesome presents I received this year were two most bits of coffee paraphernalia – a syphon with its own little butane burner thing, and an aeropress. Both are great. Both use filters. A solution for the constant necessity of buying filter papers for the aeropress comes in the form of these chemically etched filter disks from Coava…
They used the same method to make a filter cone (which they’ve called a “Kone”).
Kones are used in filter coffee makers like the Chemex. Which will be my next coffee frontier.
Also on the Internet, here’s a comprehensive repository of different methods of preparing your morning cup of coffee.
Check it out.
I missed my end of year wrap up yesterday because I was reading a book. Sorry. But here are some facts, figures and highlights from the year that was.
Stats
In 2009, 31,705 Absolute Unique Visitors made 48,733 Visits, making 82,916 Pageviews
In 2010, 31,869 Absolute Unique Visitors made 52,965 Visits, making 83,668 Pageviews.
At the time of writing I have 78 Facebook fans (become a fan – I’m now sharing links to stuff I don’t blog, or that is in my queue, to Facebook fans ahead of time), and 22 Google Connections.
So small increases across the board – but more importantly. No decreases. Hooray.
In 2009 I posted 1,106 posts here on St. Eutychus. In 2010 I managed 1,434. A 29% increase. And some people said being a college student would slow down my blogging. As it was – I used college as an opportunity to create more content.
My favourite college related series and posts from the year.
1. Some language resources (some for Mac, some for typing on a Mac)
2. Reflections on the “Disciplines of a Godly theological student”
3. My guide to First Year Greek
4. The things I love about College
5. The things I’d change about College
6. My Wisdom Literature Essay (part two, three, four, five, six) – my favourite essay of the year.
7. Pre-exam prep: New Testament 101, New Testament 102, Old Testament 101, Old Testament 102, Church History 101, Hebrew 102
8. Greece and Turkey Report(s).
9. Liveblogging Ben Witherington.
10. Liveblogging Gary Millar (one, two, three, four, five)
My favourite useful posts from this year
1. How to write a Media Release to promote your church event
2. How to talk to Atheists about Christianity
3. Awareness Raising is Overrated, (and the prequel – The Facebook Booby Trap, and the sequel about Movember, and a follow up about Social Media)
4. How to not raise bitter ministry children
5. Social Media Strategies for Churches (and a follow up on Venn Theology)
6. How not to be very good at Facebook
7. My election posts – Julia Gillard’s atheism, my Christian values election scorecard, why I won’t vote for Family First, wrap up.
8. Coffee and ministry.
9. Five cheap ways to exegete your suburb.
10. My Five Steps to Better Coffee series
Many of these are the type of thing I hope to post at Venn Theology this year (2011).
My favourite coffee posts this year
1. Seven Deadly Coffee Sins
2. From Cherry to the Cup – a look at processing and roasting coffee: part one, two, three, four, five
3. Brisbane cafe reviews: Dandelion and Driftwood, Cup, BlackStar
4. The sin of Instant Coffee.
5. Coffee and Ministry
6. A coffee gift guide.
7. Science says “don’t freeze your coffee”
8. How to make Greek Coffee.
9. A beautiful guide to coffee drinks
10. My “Five Steps to Better Coffee” Series
My favourite frivolity
But it wasn’t all serious. Here are some of my favourite posts/series from this year.
1. Ten steps to planting a mega church (with a follow-up “how to name your megachurch“)
2. 23 Bacon products that will take your breath away.
3. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook.
4. The Devil Wants you Fat (series – that I probably should finish now I have a scanner).
5. Backwards Masking Unmasked (The Jacob Aranza Series)
6. Mad Skillz Week
7. Liveblogging Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA (part 2, part 3, part 4, Robyn’s report).
8. The Make Me A Mexican Challenge
9. About “Hot Wives”
10. About Church Slogans (a bad example).
11. A Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (part one b, part two, part three)
12. The definitive and authoritative guide to the six basic plot lines
13. A look at “Objective Ministries” crazy Christian conspiracy to take over the moon
14. Reverse engineering the perfect chip
15. The Art of Improvised weaponry
16. K-Strass the Yo-Yo guy
Most popular posts in 2010
Here are the most popular posts (mostly because google loves them) by visits this year. A couple of these were written last year and continue to attract a steady stream of traffic.
1. How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast (2009), the 2010 follow up was equally popular
2. Five things that would make atheists seem nicer: this accounted for about a quarter of 2009’s traffic. By itself. Not so much in 2010, but still enough to rank second.
3. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook: This one had a bit of a spike in traffic around publication, but continues to get about 10 hits a day.
4. Ten steps to planting a megachurch: This was one of my favourites, so I’m glad it did well.
5. Chuck Norris Jeans: The little engine that could. Google loves this post.
6. How to get the Facebook Like Button working on WordPress: Certainly my geekiest post of the year.
7. Bible Stories for Boys: Ehud the Left Handed
8. Eight things I’ve learned from arguing with atheists online (and why I’ve mostly given up).
9. Let’s not fly Jetstar: a 2009 post about a Jetstar nightmare.
10. Facebook Login Fail: a little post about a funny story about people googling “facebook login” and landing in the wrong place.
Most popular posts from 2010
A slightly different list – because it does away with a couple of “long tail” posts from last year.
1. Mark Driscoll Ruined Facebook
2. Ten steps to planting a megachurch
3. Chuck Norris Jeans
4. How to get the Facebook Like Button working on WordPress
5. Bible Stories for Boys: Ehud the Left Handed
6. Eight things I’ve learned from arguing with atheists online (and why I’ve mostly given up).
7. Facebook Login Fail: a little post about a funny story about people googling “facebook login” and landing in the wrong place.
8. Some Greek and Hebrew Resources
9. How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast How to Make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast: The 2010 follow up was equally popular
10. Typographic Moustaches
Thanks for reading.
Modernist Cuisine is the foodies’ bible.
Also, I can’t get over how many serious coffee snobs are scared of doing espresso at home. It is possible to get cafe quality coffee at home – you just need a cafe quality machine.
The Cold Portafiller
“The classic example with espresso is if your portafilter is cold, it’s impossible to pull a good shot. It’s going to be sour no matter what… And the portafilters are clean and sitting down in the drip tray, they’re not locked into the machine. You might as well turn around and walk back out. It’s impossible for them to make a good cup of coffee at the point because the portafilter’s cold. They’re going to put the grinds into a cold or even lukewarm portafilter before locking it in and pulling the shot, and the temperature of that portafilter is going to cause the temperature of the water to plummet. And low temperature water going into your grounds is going to make a very acidic brew. So one of the things you want to see is the protafilter even when not in use locked into the machine because that keeps it hot.”
Weighing the Dose
“… we would do experiments where just being off by half a gram, how many espresso grinds you put in, would make an enormous difference in how good the coffee tastes, with everything else being as same as possible. And so it really reinforces the point that if you want constancy, especially when you’re learning a knack for it, you’ve got to weigh. We’re just not that accurate as human beings to judge things by eyeball. We certainly can’t feel in our hands 17 and a half grams versus 18 grams of coffee. That’s just too small of a difference for us to perceive. It makes an enormous difference in the final cup of espresso.”
Salting bitter coffee reduces the bitterness
“… actually sugar doesn’t actually mask bitterness at all, but salt does. The idea with adding a tiny bit of salt to mask the bitterness of the coffee, and the trick when doing this is to get it so you don’t really detect the saltiness. A salty cup of coffee is not tasty, but just enough so it diminishes the bitterness of the coffee. The easiest way to do it is to just add small amounts of saline solution, actually. That’s a very dilute solution of salt, you don’t have to worry about it dissolving at all, and it’s harder to over do it. You can do that in your cup of coffee, you can do it with tonic water.”