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• The only way to drink coffee... Blog: Friday, Oct 10

  2008-10-11 5:41AM / 標準BLOG / 會員可以看
  3個評論

  
  I guess while I am working on new music, designs, and struggling with how to lay out the spontaneous creative processes, I should try to share some of the other stuff I am doing or into. One thing is, I've always liked good coffee. When I drink coffee, I only drink it because of the taste, not because it has caffeine. I guess this is not so common because most people I know drink coffee for the caffeine. That is a little weird to me. Caffeine may sometimes help slightly but I only have one or two small cups a day. The caffeine high is not that big of a deal to me and if you drink a lot of coffee you may turn into a nervous freak for most of the day. I also think it is strange to drink a huge ass cup of crappy coffee just for some short caffeine high that may end up just making you sweat a lot and crash heavy in the afternoon.
  
  The point is that when I figured out one day about 5 years ago that I could roast my own coffee beans, the whole idea of coffee changed. I found out that coffee could actually taste good and be good all the time. In the past I mostly had to find a place that had the best pre-roasted beans. I would only buy a small amount because pre-roasted beans wont stay fresh for too long and I never knew how long they were already sitting in the café. I use to loathe buying a cup of coffee at most cafés because it always tasted like something between muddy water and bitter acid, but now I can drink coffee made from the freshest beans possible and they usually never get older than about a week. I just roast any kind of beans myself whenever I want. The only problem is now I've distanced myself from cafés even further. Now I can't stand buying a cup of coffee from anywhere. After I started drinking the coffee roasted at home, 99% of the coffee I drank from outside became total crap with no question. Now there is no going back.
  
  Here is the small roaster that I use at home. It's called an i-roast2. It works pretty good and can be programmed to do different kinds of roasts. The bags around it are the green raw coffee beans. I am always trying many different kinds of beans, so the flavor of the coffee is always changing. I can also make my own blends of different beans but that can take a little trial and error roasting.
  
  
  There it is close up on the left. On the right is a close up of the inside of the roasting chamber. If you can see the thick metal wires going across the top of the center... one time that metal piece on the top of the main part in the center broke off which made the roaster useless. That was a bad day. The people at the company that made the roaster were no help so I had to rig it myself. I used some really thick wire and wrapped it around the parts to hold them together. It still works so whatever, as long as I can roast I'm good. The chamber gets pretty damn hot though so I can see how over time it will start falling to pieces.
  
  
  Here's a closer look at the raw green coffee beans.
  
  
  When I roast I have to do it in the garage because it can create a lot smoke. I don't want to set off the fire alarm all the time. The smell of the smoke from roasting coffee beans is actually not bad either. After roasting the beans and waiting at least 24 hours the next step is making the coffee. That can be just about as important to me as the roasting. I have a few different ways that I brew coffee but that is a whole other story so I'll have to put up more stuff on this later.