fat_hens house

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)



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!"