At the Pike Place Market store I can sit around and jive talk about coffee for hours, but many others don't necessarily want to know more about it—instead, they're drawn to the experience of drinking it, socializing with friends, talking about the previous night, peeling off layers of a cranberry walnut muffin, until we reach that coffee buzz which makes surviving the upcoming day all that much more plausible. No wonder so many successful coffee shops around the country create living rooms for their customers with dark wooden floors, light colored walls, communal tables, and the endless aroma of freshly ground beans. We're drawn to comfort in the aroma of brewing, the barista's choice of music, and the milk-infused...
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Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is an NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, continuing today with the roasting of beans. When I want coffee made with love, I immediately think of Small World Coffee in Princeton, New Jersey—the location of my first-ever barista position. We had our own roasting plant five miles down the road in a huge warehouse. You'd walk in for a staff meeting after slaving away at the espresso machine all day and the intense aroma would conjure up images of swimming in coffee beans alongside toasting marshmallows for s'mores, stirring a...
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Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is a NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, starting with bean origins today. Clockwise from top left: Coffee cherries, washed green coffee, roasted coffee beans. A few weeks ago, I was at the local bar for trivia night when the ultimate question was asked: "Where is the majority of the world's coffee beans grown?" Simple, I thought. I work in coffee and look at names of Latin American and African countries every day. While hesitant, I chose Colombia from my brainstormed list—the popularity of Juan Valdez has got to count...
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