Coffee Mayhem

I had big plans for hot sauce. I dribble the stuff on everything I eat, so I have four different kinds in my fridge. A nice idea, I thought, would be to try the whole series of sauces in coffee, then have a post comparing them all, with an intricate rating system to help you, dear reader, choose the perfect hot sauce for your morning beverage.

Here is how those plans got derailed.

Assplosion was a lovely gift from my family. It’s not a great hot sauce; it’s spicy enough, but hadn’t really lived up to its name. Still, I had to try it first, to start this series with a “bang.”

The only coffee I had ready was chocolate-hazelnut flavoured. And you know how chocolate with chili in it is all the rage these days? I thought I’d enhance the chocolate with some Fry’s cocoa and go for that idea in drink form.

I’ve been watching Dexter a lot lately, which makes red drips remind me of blood. That was probably the first sign this wouldn’t turn out well.

When it was all mixed up, the smell was … alarming. It literally hurt my nose a bit, with the combination of bitter cocoa and noxious spice. Ah, but I had to try tasting it anyway. For you, dear reader. All for you.

All I could taste was the Assplosion. I only put a few drops in, but it overwhelmed the coffee, hazelnut, and chocolate such that all they did was add some bitterness and enhance the illusion that I was drinking poison. Or ass.

I want to give other hot sauces a chance. Maybe it’d be better with regular coffee and no chocolate. Maybe there is a sauce out there that can contribute to the pleasant coffee / spice balance I experienced with curry coffee. But I can’t bring myself to try any more; not any time soon.

Plus, I’m starting to feel a rumbling down below.

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St. Paul Wicked? Grind Roasted Harley Davidson Coffee

Summary
Are you a Harley-Davidson owner? Then you need this to go with your Harley. St. Paul Harley-Davidson? Wicked? Grind Roasted Coffee. 100% Arabica beans have been blended in this exclusive coffee. Medium roasted blend that has passion and attitude, just like yours for your Harley.

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Oh just look how cute these are:

Little gingerbread houses perched on a mug! The smell alone would probably enhance the flavour of coffee in that mug, but I don’t think anyone would be too disappointed if the house got soggy and fell in. Gingerbread lattes have been my drink of choice for keeping warm through the snowstorms around here.

Here is how to make your own precariously perched gingerbread houses, and thanks @nataliese for tweeting about this.

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Fresh Brews is the (semi-) weekly round up everything going on in the coffee blogosphere. I never know what I’m going to find as I’m reading through out the week and I share some of my favorite stories with you. Enjoy!

The Coffee Adventures: Brewed Over Ice: Does Iced Coffee Taste The Same As Hot?
I don’t know where you are, but it’s pretty hot here in Florida and I’ve heard that parts of the country are even hotter. Luckily, we have Jamie who is helping us out with some experiments in iced coffee.

Coffee Nate: Healthy Coffee Scam!
Nate is back with a fun video about the so-called healthy coffees. I think Nate and I feel exactly the same about them!

Cheap Flights: A Viennese Coffee Crawl
Cheap Flights isn’t exactly the first site that I think of when I think coffee, however apparently they know a thing or two about coffee in Vienna. I would love to take a vacation there and spend some quality time getting to know the Melange, Fiaker and a few of the other drinks.

Caffination: CaffiNation 494: Heater
Make sure you check out the latest podcast over at Caffination. For the coffee geeks, there’s a few stories about coffee (including one from some site called Daily Shot Of Coffee), however my favorite article this week was on the technology side. Listen to the story “A bright idea to bring light into poor family homes.”

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Photo by kennymatic.

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In Venezuela, talk about Specialty Coffee is to talk like a Chinese. In a country where there are so many ways to drink coffee from a study not of the menu but as a product of the mind of the drinker, there is awareness of the term Barista, Coffee Roaster or origin coffee. Here, is known as the coffee boy, the guy who prepares the coffee. Period. We love coffee, we are high consumers of it, many of our meetings begin and end over a cup of coffee. But usually it is prepared by a person who has been trained to manage the coffee machine not coffee itself.

Five years ago began my concern for the coffee, I felt there was something else there in that beverage that we learn to drink since we were children and decided to start reading, studying and trying to understand, always via Internet – what was all this world that keep me wondering as a fan of UFO´s always searching for a contact of the third kind.

In our country, with few exceptions, is generally believed that the ultimate in coffee is Starbucks, anyone who travels abroad aims to go and buy a frappuccino and take a photo with the logo of the famous mermaid. And so far will be the world’s best coffee. Without question!

In the United States and most European countries, coffee is taken for granted, but the truth is not everyone knows the meaning of Specialty Coffee. They do not know they are lucky enough to go to any of those wonderful places that sell coffee and get a coffee origin of Sumatra, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia, organic or not organic, decaf and regular, or even an exquisite and surprising Geisha whose taste in mouth confuses you to think if you are drinking tea or coffee or both at the same time, without wanting to offend the palate of coffee tasting experts.

Each country feels coffee in its own way, depending on their culture, for example in the USA, they like to drink it with milk, cream, accompanied with syrups, muffins and cakes of different flavors, while in Europe they drink more black, cut and almost no sugar, strong and with a gulp. Even China, dedicated mostly to the consumption of tea and not coffee, due to its recent opening to the entry of franchises and the entry of Starbucks at least in Beijing (a city I visited in August 2009) shows a growing interest in its young population who makes meetings of friends around a steaming cup of coffee as a symbol of progression and development into the future. Not to mention of course Latin American countries like Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, top producers and exporters of green coffee who have learned to create an entire industry based on excellence and quality. But unfortunately in our country for government regulations we can not import any of this origin coffee, so sad. In our country, consumers meet, talk, fight when making the order, change the menu asking you to remove or add other ingredients, calling coffee a “conlechito” clear, light brown, dark brown, Guayoyo, bottle, that you can not order in anyplace but here. But almost no one, very few, ask for a espresso or a double espresso, less! When this happens those around turns around and says: What? How can you drink this coffee? It’s not that not happens, it just is not common. They do not know the incredible experience that occurs in the taste buds when you take a properly prepared espresso, that feeling where you can feel the caffeine and other acids present in coffee, to try to determine if it has fruit flavors, whether sweet or if it has some species. They do not know the feeling in the roof of the mouth long after you’ve drunk your cup that leaves you wanting to come back and drink another. It’s another thing!

But I’m surprised how many people outside my country every day show a big interest not only to know who is that person who will prepare their coffee and how he/she does it but also care about the origin of the coffee they are drinking.

They do not know how lucky they are to do so. So, next time you drink an espresso either from a country not even know where it is geographically or what its language is, taste slowly and admire the coffee grown thousands of miles away from your home, produced under high quality standards and roasted by people who care doing the exact term that allows the beans only provide the best of itself, take enough time to savor it as you would treat an old friend who has traveled a long way just to sit at your side. And after that, be happy, thanks God.

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Maria Esther Lopez is a lawyer born and raised in Venezuela, passionate coffee lover, studying for Barista and everything about the coffee world at every place where she can travel, SCAA member.

Photo by zedworks.

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This blog has been sluggish lately. Updating once a month is better than nothing, but it could use a pick-me-up for more frequent posts. I have discovered something that’ll give the blog just the jolt it needs: a lack of caffeine.

See, I’ve been doing a full time job lately, and that takes up time. Specifically, it takes up mornings, which is when I tend to drink coffee. I can’t exactly be pouring gravy into the office coffee machine, so work really puts a limit on my experimentation. I can’t pick up slack during my evenings either, because the caffeine would keep me up all night and make those gravy-free mornings even more miserable.

But wait, what about caffeine-free coffee?

I’ve never drank coffee for the caffeine. Other than keeping me from sleeping, I don’t feel any effects of the stuff; my body seems immune to perkiness enhancement. I might as well remove the caffeine and add the possibility of late-night experimentation.

It limits which kinds of coffee I can have, but have you seen this blog? It’s more about what goes into the coffee than the coffee itself. I think I’ll find enough variety.

Hey, what about you? Do you drink coffee for the caffeine, the flavour, or both?

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Let’s take a look at a few coffee creations that will melt your face and make you feel like a real man (even if you are a woman).

First, blogfriend Brian Raymond pointed me to this Satanic coffee from Geekologie:

I can only assume the barista sweetened it with the blood of infants and added the milk of murderous cows for colour, yet still referred to it as black coffee.

Next, in this old post of mine about butter in coffee, a commenter named Nathan linked to this article about HOW TO MAKE YOUR COFFEE BULLETPROOF. Spoiler alert: you put butter in it.

I’ve done this a few times before. Butter Chicken Coffee Minus Chicken was not too shabby, but Cafe Benedict caused involuntary convulsions. This David Asprey fellow recommends unsalted butter, which would probably be bearably delicious.

He also goes a bit further, claiming that this coffee provides “level energy” for 6 hours, “programs the body” to burn fat, and will “make you feel Bulletproof” (yes, with a capital B). These claims seem to come from the “I made this shit up because it sounds cool” school of nutrition rather than, you know, science, but hey, whatever it takes to justify chugging butter. I wouldn’t recommend testing the Bulletproof claim, however. Placebos don’t work so good against bullets.

I’m working on some, um, interesting coffee creations. I will be back to write about them when I have time. By the way, buying stuff from the PWTIC store or leaving a tip, on that sidebar to the right there, would really inspire me to hurry my butt up. Hiiint.

See also: Optimum Biopower Xtreme Coffee.

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After having a delicious dinner at a little mom-and-pop Vietnamese restaurant, a friend of mine ordered some Vietnamese coffee. I took a single sip and I was sold on the concept: strong, fine-ground coffee brewed in an individual French drip filter, right into a mug with condensed milk at the bottom. I vowed to make it at home first chance I got.

Of course, I don’t have a French drip filter, nor the type of coffee they used. I made do by grinding my grocery store brand coffee extra fine, using a lot of it in a French press (hey, it’s still French), then slowly stirring it into a mug with condensed milk.

The main thing here is the sweetened condensed milk. It’s different than dumping a crapload of cream and sugar in the coffee; more caramelly, and thicker in texture. Even with regular coffee, it’s a new way to cream and sweeten it in a tasty new way.

I like to put a lot of condensed milk so it’s sweet as candy in a base of bitter coffee, but (obviously) I like bold flavours. It may not be true Vietnamese coffee, but I highly recommend giving the stuff a try.

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