Posted by Robyn Lee, April 24, 2008 at 11:45 AM
From April 13 to 19, I traveled around Chile with two other American food journalists on a culinary media trip. Here's another snapshot from that week. —Robyn Lee
"They don't serve any alcohol?" asked Jenn incredulously.
"No," insisted Carolina, our Chilean host. "They just serve coffee."
Jenn, Wes and I—the clueless Americans in Chile—were befuddled by the Chilean institution that is café con piernas, or "coffee with legs." Think Hooters, but with a focus on long legs and dainty cups of coffee instead of boobs and chicken wings. Sex appeal sans booze? Interesting. As these cafes have been around since the 1960s, the formula of coffee and legs must work pretty well.
Although visiting one of these cafes wasn't part of our original itinerary—methinks it doesn't qualify as one of the foremost attractions that the Chilean government wants to promote to outsiders—we made it a point to visit Cafe Caribe, just one of many of these types of cafes near Plaza de Armas, the main square in downtown Santiago.
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Posted by Raphael, April 23, 2008 at 11:40 AM
Wired's latest issue features "12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower." Number two on the list is about the right way to consume coffee:
For optimal brain gain, regular tea breaks, as favored in the UK, are more effective than a 20-ounce French roast... Throughout the day, your noodle fills up with adenosine, a chemical thought to cause mental fatigue. Caffeine blocks the brain's adenosine receptors, countering the chemical's dulling effects. To maximize alertness and minimize jitters, keep those receptors covered with frequent small doses — like a mug of low-caf tea or half a cup of joe — rather than a onetime blast.
Posted by Adam Kuban, April 16, 2008 at 2:15 PM
This vintage sexist coffee commercial for Folger's instant coffee ... I don't know what to say. I can't believe they ever made ad spots like this. After the jump, the patriarchal percolations.
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Posted by Emily Koh, April 9, 2008 at 6:45 PM
A) Engraving of a twin-tailed siren (15th century); B) First Starbucks logo (1971 - 1987); C) Il Giornale logo; D) Merging of Starbucks and Il Giornale (1987 - 1992); E) Redesigned Starbucks logo (1992 - today); F) Current Starbucks logo, a revival of the original
If you stopped by Starbucks the other day to try their new Pike Place Roast brewed coffee, you may have noticed the cup looked a little different, with the siren's tails displayed more prominently. Actually, this "new" design is a throwback to the original Starbucks logo, which is in line with CEO Howard Schulz's call for the coffee empire to return to its roots.
Brand Autopsy and Brand New both examine elements of the evolution of the logo. Here we present the entirety of the logo's history, from 15th century engraving, to its initial rendering, to the logo following the merger of Starbucks and Il Giornale, and finally, to its present-day return back to the original.
Posted by Erin Zimmer, April 8, 2008 at 2:45 PM
So is the new 'Bucks jolt juice as smooth as they say? We asked some coffee drinkers at the Starbucks branch in Rosslyn, Virginia, and heard a lot of mixed sentiments. Too strong. Smoother. Watery. Worse than Dunkin'. Worse than McDonald's. Free. Old-school. People, make up your minds!
- "No good. Pretty strong. I had to put a lot of cream in it to make it OK. I'd call myself a Starbucks drinker, but not this." —Sam
- "I like it. It's smoother. Normally Starbucks coffee seems to cater to the non-black-coffee drinkers. Too burnt-tasting normally. But this I could take black." —Malcolm
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Posted by Raphael, April 8, 2008 at 9:25 AM
The media ploy and slow-crawl retooling continues. After years of over-roasting coffee for its dark, bitter brew, Starbucks has listened to the people and will switch to what it's calling a "smooth and welcoming everyday blend." Instead of merely opening vacuum-sealed bags of preground coffee, your friendly barista will now "hand-scoop" and grind the coffee in house. Smaller batches! A maximum hold-time of 30 minutes! Ethically sourced! The press release would like you to know that this is an "historic" and "monumental" day. Most people would say it's about time.
Previously
Starbucks Buys Clover, Starts Social Networking Site
Starbucks Barista Reprogramming Successful
Starbucks Discontinues Breakfast Sandwiches
Starbucks Breakfast: Doomed from the Get Go
Posted by Raphael, April 6, 2008 at 4:00 PM
From Make Magazine's "Make a Cylon" contest comes the Cylon Coffee Maker Model 0001:
Posted by Adam Kuban, March 19, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Starbucks, whose stock is flagging as McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts sip away at its business, is announcing today at its annual meeting that it will freshly grind beans in-store for its brewed coffee. The move is only one of several intended to lure customers back into the store (80 percent of orders at the chain are to-go). Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says there may be a customer loyalty card, premium cups from Clover machines, and remodeling in the works.
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If you've always wanted to roast your own coffee at home but couldn't justify the $100 price tag, Cool Tools gives you a helpful step-by-step photo guide showing how you can do it using a hot-air popcorn popper [via Lifehacker]
Posted by Raphael, February 29, 2008 at 6:45 PM
Stephen Colbert handled the three-hour caffeine crisis with great aplomb. Video after the jump.
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The Starbucks media ploy, or the "Great Starbucks Shutdown of '08", imparted the baristas with very important knowledge: make the customer happy, and make the coffee taste good.
Fair warning, coffee addicts: Your local Starbucks will be closed when you go for that late-afternoon cuppa joe. Don't freak. All 7,100 of the chain's U.S. stores will be go dark from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. for employee retraining—all 135,000 baristas. And Dunkin' Donuts knows an opportunity when it sees one; it'll be offering small lattes, cappuccinos, and espressos for 99¢ from 1 to 10 p.m. today.
We're all used to Starbucks expanding, so it's news when the coffee giant resorts to layoffs to bolster the bottom line. None of the eliminated positions were in retail stores.
Previously: Starbucks Discontinues Breakfast Sandwiches
Chemical engineers at Nestlé have invented a machine that can distinguish between good and bad espresso nearly as accurately as trained espresso tasters. The machine is meant to be used as a quality control device in the coffee industry. [via engadget, title from Chris Fredette]
Judith Warner says her attachment to coffee is about the smell, taste, and the gesture. I drink very little coffee (I can't get past the bitterness), though I do love coffee-flavored desserts and chocolate. Yet somehow I know what she's talking about, and I agree with her wholeheartedly.
Posted by The Serious Eats Team, January 30, 2008 at 4:15 PM
This week The Kitchn is covering coffee—how to brew it, what to make with it, and recommendations for coffee-related tools and accessories. Here are some of our favorite coffee-laden posts:
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At least one barista at Starbucks is incensed about having to refer to drinks as "skinny," the term given to drinks made with sugar-free syrup, non-fat milk, and no whipped cream. She supports her stance by saying that the term is politically incorrect, confusing to customers, discriminating, and has a negative effect on people's self esteem. [via Gothamist]
Posted by Erin Zimmer, December 13, 2007 at 2:45 PM
Way back in 2005, my early food blogging days were spent obsessing about the Starbucks red cup phenomenon. Something about the festive tumblers said "pay attention to me." But back then, the little cups were young and naive, with only a few cutesy games online. Definitely not a philanthropic campaign. As an iconic telltale of the season, just like coats or snow, they've become so ambitious that world peace is next on the agenda!
But it's a cup! Oh, but the red cup has spearheaded a nationwide pay it forward-esque campaign called the "Cheer Chain." Basically, Starbucks leaves some buy-one get-one coupons near registers—and has since last year—hoping you'll become BFF with the stranger behind you. Use the coupon on that dude's coffee tab (hoping it's not a venti frap with soy milk, flavor shots, and Ibérico ham shavings), and they'll do the same for another dude.
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Posted by Michael Nagrant, November 8, 2007 at 4:00 PM
I generally don’t like to eat anything that came out the ass of a Civet. Or from the digestive system of any other living thing for that matter. Which is odd, because I have no problem eating the digestive system itself: I’m a connoisseur of natural casing sausage, kidneys, and liver. Still I’ve made this distinction and I’m sticking to it for now. As such, I haven’t had a chance to taste Kopi Luwak, one of the most expensive coffees in the world.
Kopi Luwak, as you can probably guess from my opener, comes from coffee berries which have passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet. The animal’s digestive system works as sort of a defacto depulping mechanism, yielding partially-digested beans coated with various internal essences and enzymes. The beans are harvested, cleaned, lightly roasted and sold.
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Posted by Robyn Lee, October 2, 2007 at 5:30 PM
Lori spotted this cute coffee shop on a recent trip to Yokohama. The potential to have a "delightful moment" and fill myself with "sweet flavor" even makes me—a longtime non-coffee drinker—want to go inside and order a cup of joe. Read more about Lori's trip to Japan in her blog, Dessert Comes First.
Posted by Ed Levine, September 12, 2007 at 7:57 AM
Reading Peter Meehan's terrific piece on "direct trade" coffee, which simply means that high-end, insanely discerning roasters buy their beans directly from growers and their cooperatives, I concluded that coffee has become the third world's version of wine.
Grapeheads make pilgrimages to Napa and Sonoma in the U.S., to Burgundy and Bordeaux in France, and to Tuscany and Veneto in Italy. Coffee freaks head to Nicaragua or Rwanda or Honduras, where the accommodations are not likely to be as luxurious.
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Posted by Erin Zimmer, September 7, 2007 at 4:00 PM
The first sightings of Starbucks' beloved Pumpkin Spice latte have been reported! Though it's barely September, the season of paying $4 for a pumpkin-spiked caffeine buzz is back. And we can't forget the drink's sidekick, a pumpkin cream cheese muffin, also available nationwide.
Just as Labor Day signals summer's farewell to some, the much-anticipated pumpkin latte means fall foliage and Halloween candy for many of us. Seeing pumpkin ale on shelves is equally heartwarming. Over at Whole Foods, they've got Sea Dog-brand and World Market has Buffalo Bill's version of the seasonal ale. Both are amber-colored, supposedly with undertones of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. Saranac is another popular brand floating around out there.
Doesn't all this pumpkin talk make you want to read Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking" and rake leaves? Even if canned pumpkin is available year-round, and technically, we could probably make these drinks anytime, it's only right to slurp them down in mass quantities right now.
Photo taken at Starbucks in Washington, DC at the corner of 19th and M Streets, NW.
Posted by Robyn Lee, August 30, 2007 at 4:10 PM
For people like me, who know almost nothing about the family of espresso-centric drinks, Lokesh Dhakar's illustrated guide to espresso drink composition may be helpful. The illustrations won't help you much if you want to make the drinks, but they're great for providing a simple overview of the ingredients. [via Boing Boing]
Posted by Wan Yan Ling, July 5, 2007 at 3:30 PM
This is how we like our coffee in Singapore: sans violence.
The Chinese-Singaporeans have a phrase, sha ren fang huo, which pretty much means "to murder, pillage, rape, and set fire to" (actually, just literally the first and last, but you get my drift). It’s the kind of thing we say at the Starbucks counter when the grinning teenage barista cheerfully demands all the change in your wallet, pockets, and nether bag regions—and your first-born child to boot. Mostly because we’re utterly spoiled when it comes to the almighty bean, with the average triple-shot cappuccino costing 40¢—and that, for comparison, is in a country where a can of soda costs 75¢.
Of course, the average Singaporean wouldn’t know the difference between an arabica and a robusta bean, and he wouldn’t really be ordering a “skinny cap.” He would, however, be asking for a kopi gow (thick coffee), peng (iced), da pow (to go), and maybe siew nai (easy on the sweetened, condensed milk)—if he were counting calories.
And he would receive it, in the olden days, in an emptied-out milk tin with a hole drilled through the top and cleverly knotted with raffia string for a handle, or more commonly nowadays, in a little plastic bag tied to-go (straw optional).
The coffee-maker’s tool of choice? Not a fancy-schmancy machine with an unpronounceable foreign name but what the French affectionately call “the sock,” and what locals reverently call “grandma’s pantyhose."
Photograph by Shimin Wong
About the author: Wan Yan Ling, Serious Eats's overseas summer intern, is an impoverished grad student and sourdough finger-crosser living in Singapore. She can usually be found in the kitchen procrastinating on "real work," or online tracking down obscure recipes. Ling thinks eating alone is no fun, and she still believes in hand-mixing.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, May 9, 2007 at 6:20 PM
For his master's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, my friend Ben Brown built News Brews, a device that scans news feeds via the internet, and "parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day's news." I'm looking forward to further developments in the new field of beverage informatics.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 10, 2007 at 3:30 PM
"Andy and Angel have been painting with coffee for several years, and have completed hundreds of original artworks. Curious people who view the work are amazed that the artwork is painted entirely in coffee - no additives, just 100% pure coffee."
They have a gallery of coffee-themed paintings, but they really do paint everything with coffee: portraits, wildlife, flowers, scenes from trips to Scandinavia. [via Tastespotting]
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 9, 2007 at 11:25 AM
TGIF and it's almost lunch time but you're still having trouble waking up? $17.75 gets you a monthly subscription from Blue Bottle Coffee Company, named San Francisco's best independent coffeehouse of 2006 by SF Bay Guardian readers. They're so serious about their product that in person even regular drip coffee is brewed to order and their website has ultra precise instructions on how to prepare their coffee. Mighty Goods says all this OCD behavior results in "a cup of coffee so delicious that you feel it in your spine."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 7, 2007 at 5:49 PM
Coffee drinkers, prepare to get jittery on someone else's dime—the NY Sun says you're "in for a lot of free coffee in the next couple of weeks":
The first freebie is tomorrow, when McDonald's will hand out free cups of the stuff to anyone who asks for it, at any location. It's in celebration of being named by Consumer Reports as having the best coffee for the price (compared with other fastfood chains).
Then next Thursday, Starbucks is celebrating its second annual "coffee break" by pouring free 12-ounce cups (tall, not grande or venti) of brewed coffee between 10 a.m. and noon.
And then finally, on Wednesday, March 21, Dunkin' Donuts will celebrate the first day of spring with a free 16-ounce cup of iced coffee all day long.
Our Alaina Browne called McDonald's to check if free coffee will be available at all locations tomorrow; She said, "They say since they're 85% franchise owned, it's up to the franchisees as to whether or not they are participating," so if you'll be stopping by a McDonald's for some coffee tomorrow, have a few bucks in your pocket in case your local franchisee is not feeling the free coffee love.
Posted by Adam Roberts, February 13, 2007 at 6:00 AM
It began in law school when I was miserable and lonely and sick of sitting in my apartment with study guides and hardcover texts splayed about the floor. I needed to get out and I needed to get out regularly. Where I ended up is where many other people end up these days in similar situations: a coffee shop. Specifically, Starbucks. There was one near my apartment so I went there and ordered a froufrou coffee drink, sat with my books, and ogled attractive people while pretending to study.
And that's been the formula ever since. I'm writing in a coffee shop right now: Tea Lounge in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. I'm leaning against a brick wall, I have my laptop on my lap and I'm watching a mother and son play Pac-Man.
A coffee shop is like a greenhouse for my brain. At home I have too many distractions: TV, TiVo, DVD player, DVDs, Netflix movies piling up (Eraserhead on pause because Craig fell asleep). A coffee shop is a vacation for my brain. Despite the people, despite the noise, I can home in on my work and not cave into temptation. Unless, of course, the coffee shop has a wireless Internet connection, in which case I'm in trouble.
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Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 26, 2007 at 10:56 AM
Depending on your perspective, caffeinated doughnuts will either make your day or....explode it.
Thanks Alaina!
Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 25, 2007 at 8:49 AM
Seattle's got its latte artists at Caffe Vita, while the Londoners that jam Monmouth Coffee like their coffees understated.
The coffees in Perth belong to another category altogether, thanks to "cappuccino Michelangelo" Simon Law.
For other latte art, check out the pics at Google Images.
Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 23, 2007 at 8:45 AM
A day in the life of a coffee grower...
I’m pleased to see more roasters making stronger commitments to coffees they like and value as a quality coffee. Not just paying more for a story or for a certification, but for inherent quality. To me, the word commitment describes a relationship, not a transaction.
A day in the life of a coffee roaster...
I arrive at work, fire up the roaster, and do a quick survey of the inventory on the floor. As the roaster warms up, I set up the first few roasts: Colombia Supremo from a cooperative in Huila. As the green beans climb up the lift, I head into the cupping room and pour myself two shots of espresso. One of the nice things about roasting is that my day begins before anyone else comes into the office. Things haven’t had a chance to get hectic; it’s just me, the jet engine sounds of the roaster, and the beans.
Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 19, 2007 at 11:22 AM
Confused by the morass of acronyms and catchphrases on your bag of beans? Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird Friendly, Utz Kapeh, 4Cs, and Starbucks CAFE Practices are explained in this article by Erik Ness.
Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 18, 2007 at 11:40 AM
San Francisco-based marketing experts Meth Coffee have emerged quaking from their lab with a new extra-caffeinated beverage dusted with yerba mate.
This vibrationical catalyst for upstarts, earthquakes, and brain shifts is roasted for you by a master druggist, bionicalbrain chemist, and coffee viscologist within hours of receiving your order to guarantee maximum potency.
Just navigating their website is making me jittery. See the I'd-be-outraged-if-this-actually-made-it-on-television video.
Posted by Nathalie Jordi, January 16, 2007 at 2:34 PM
Here's "Granpa's":
1 hog's head
1 hog's tongue
salt and pepper
sage or chili powder
Clean and scrape hog's head and wash thoroughly. Wash and trim tongue. Cover head and tongue with slightly salted water and simmer until meat falls from the bone. Drain meat, shred, and season. Pack tightly in bowl, cover, and weigh it down. Let stand 3 days in a cold place. Slice. Makes 6-8 pounds.
The site also has recipes for scrambled brains, cheddar coffee ("when the coffee is gone, slurp the glob of melted cheese", and a "banana worm bread" that calls for 1/4 cup of dry-roasted army nuts.
At last, some hors d'oeuvres ideas for my next book club meeting...
Posted by Alaina Browne, December 13, 2006 at 2:30 PM
Not yet available in the U.S., this device takes the Egg Muffin maker concept to the next level with the addition of a coffee maker.
Here's an an ingenious way to make a complete breakfast at home without having to inundate your kitchen with single-use appliances. This new product from Japanese company Chuo Sangyo lets you make coffee, eggs, and toast all in one breath. It only takes 10 minutes and one outlet. Amazing.
–Lisa Katayama
One Machine Makes Toast, Eggs, and Coffee [TokyoMango]
