Tanzania Peaberry beans right out of the roaster. As I get older things like Tulips and coffee beans are so exciting.

Searching for adjectives to help describe coffee, I found a blog post with a nice starting palette for the budding palate on the Londonium Espresso Blog. Aside from the rather common "nutty", "chocolaty" and "winey" the following I found compelling: Quote:Animal-like - This odour descriptor is somewhat reminiscent of the smell of animals. It is not a fragrant aroma like musk but has the characteristic odour of wet fur, sweat, leather, hides, or urine. It is not necessarily considered as a negative attribute but is generally used to describe strong notes ... Rubber-like - This odour descriptor is characteristic of the smell of hot tyres, rubber bands and rubber stoppers. It is not considered a negative attribute but has a characteristic strong note highly recognisable in some coffees. I'll have to throw in some European spellings of words like "odour" and "tyres" to add some posh to my posts. I must say I'm jealous of the overall design of the blog! More here.

Now it just needs to roast and grind the beans!

OK, so my first order of beans from Sweet Maria's is getting pretty slim. See the reviews for some thoughts on each of the beans (that is if we actually get around to reviewing them, Fat_Hen?). So what do you do when you just have a few beans of each variety left? You make a blend! OK, so in true Chicago style, I threw together "The Suicide". You know, like when you go to the soda fountain and fill your cup with a little coke, sprite, root beer, lemonade, oh no don't put any of that strawberry soda in there or you'll ruin it! a little bit of everything basically. The results? Fat_Hen shrugs his shoulders, "A little whiney". OK, so I guess there is more of an art to this.

Brewing Jeff's fancy, home-roasted coffees and being eager to expore new ways to enjoy the hearty bean (colonics excepted), I was amazed and horrified on so many levels by Javabot(gizmag) Quote:[Javabot] delivers a coffee with your favorite blend of seven beans, plus how they are roasted, ground and the temperature at which the coffee is brewed, all inside 30 seconds. All in all, I think this is representitive of the way coffee has become commodified. Basically this machine is a minature version of something Hills Bros would use in their factory to maintain some kind of coffee status quo. The whiz-bang here comes from the idea of putting "exotic" and "gourmet" beans into a tiny factory that Jack-Starbuck? can walk into, bark commands to a button pusher, and make his worst guess for roasting and blending in the least amount of time. We even joke about the nature of our coffee-wiki here because a good cup of coffee is not just about quasi-scientific study and documenting it in the least accessible way on-line. Good coffee is about sharing the whole ritual with some friends, making assanine assumptions on what will affect flavor and digging wikipedia-deep into the rich history of coffee and pretending to be a know-it-all about vacuum-pots, ibriks and the sacred french-press. What it all comes down to is visiting someones house or restaurant and letting them share their coffee heritage with you, be it hand roasted in a pan, ground in a pestle, and brewed in a copper ibrik or bubbling from an electric castiron percolator in your drunkard uncle's trailer galley, its the love of coffee. I just want to scream "Take your mechanical grippers off my coffee, you damned shiny Javabot!"