Versus the Traffic Jam

Catching up on sleep - surrounded by talking people - because I don't really have time to listen when I'm fully awake :P

The most interesting article today, because it was basically look-up table of short definitions for terms in abstract algebra:

Co-finality. That is all. Retiring from FB for the day. Need to get ass into bed, then up for the working weekend... whee... :)

Building A Customised Reading List on the "Internet"

Time to get webby!

1) Most blogging platforms will let you subscribe to an RSS feed, and if there aren't specific RSS feeds for specific tags, you can probably get an RSS client that will do the filtering for you.

2) Search "consolidate rss feeds" and you'll find a bunch of ways to pipe a whole bunch of other feeds into a single feed - kinda like how Twitter lets you make a List of people so that viewing the List shows you all the tweets of the people in the list.

3) (Webzines are) a GREAT place to start crawling for links to good coffee content. (Some webzines leave their entire archive crawlable).

4) "(name of thing or subject that you're interested in) blog" is a good search term.

Happy webbing...

Rao's Book's Model vs. Ristrettos

After a lot of testing, and a lot of bad shots, I have figured out roughly why/how a direct application of the espresso brewing model in Scott Rao's book doesn't work (for me at work).

Rao follows a close-to-current-SCAA definition of espresso: the extraction mass is targeted at 1.5x-2.0x the dry-dose mass. Whereas, at work, we mostly pull ristrettos with an extraction mass within the range of 0.5x-1.5x the dry-dose mass.

Drinking fruit juice concentrate, Pei Pa Koa - 念慈菴, soy sauce, etc. straight-up can be pretty disgusting, whereas many such solutions yield beautiful profiles simply via dilution. A lot of stuff is simply more balanced with added water.

Or you could just extract a less complex solution into what little water you have. Most (not all) of my recent tests (which are rather subjective) have resulted in rather pleasant flavour profiles in shots that fall *short* of the 25-40 second range in Rao's book's model.

Furthermore, a number of roasters we are working with appear to target roast profiles that taste better at low extraction yields - my suspicion is that it's because they too are calibrating their roasts for ristrettos.

All this appears to result in a waste of coffee, but it still tastes nice if you get it right.

:)