Merry Christmas?

I'm here at my parents house, located in Vancouver, WA, sending all of you reading this the warmest holiday wishes. It's been interesting this year because more than ever it feels less like Christmas. I think that much of those feelings, or lack there of, have been due to my transition, coffee business, and the intense lack of snow in Minneapolis. The cities minus snow equates to saddness this time of year... But what can you do?

I spent last week moving into my new house. The place was built in 1906 and is a masterpiece within itself. The first night I spent there, I slept on my two extremely old mattresses and my stuff sat in piles on the floor. Moving out of the dorms, I hadn't really thought too much about the fact that I had no furniture. That was remedied the next day at Ikea... The place is well located between my two job. Kopplins is just a 10 minute drive east and the roastery is a good 25 minutes northest from there. I really wouldn't want to be much closer to the roastery though... I mean, it's out there. A couple nights after I moved in we had to have a night to break the place in... actually, we broke the place in 3 nights in a row... but Friday was the intense night... It's good to be young.

Monday I started at Paradise. Roasting is a lot of fun. I'm not going to say everything I did was all that great, but the idea of doing something coffee intensive... all day... without having to explain to customers why we don't serve 20 oz. or raspberry syrup is kinda a nice relief. I think it will be a nice balance between serving coffee and seeing the expression on my customers face and walking away from that to breath in something different.

Many people have been wondering and asking about the Clovers. So far incredibly good! Almost every regular customer has commented on how much better the coffee is tasting. I have some notes from one of our new coffees I will post a little later. But, I have been playing more and I am finding some awesome things as I go. Honestly though, for the first week I was really fucking up the coffee. I was shrugging off the stirring thing and assuming the Clover was so good I couldn't possibly screw it up. Well, I was wrong. My coffee was tasting lame... and by lame I mean it lacked the clarity I could find in the cupping cup or french press. So, with some reading of coffeed I realized I was over-extracting the stuff. Thanks to Alistairs posting I found some remedies. Right now I have settled on his technique, which is to basically just push the coffee towards the stream of water and to gently saturate it. So far, that has helped massively.

Well, Clovers are in and running well, I am in my new house, I'm roasting at Paradise, and there's a competition coming up. Such craziness... There's much more going on, but for now I will leave it at that. Keep in mind, I am back in Portland, which means there is massive amounts of beer to be consumed, many coffee people to harass, and many friends to see! Peace out for now!