In the latest issue of Barista Magazine, Jesse Raub, the newly minted Wholesale Educator at Intelligentsia, offered some thoughts on high volume brew to order. The gist of the article is that, with enough dedication and practice, you can offer a variety of brew to order options as your only brewed coffee choices. A lot of it comes down to efficient workflow, and efficient communication between the register and the barista. Well, ok, but can you make it taste good?

Ok, granted, Jesse is probably a more talented syphonista than I am. And he’s almost certainly a more talented V60ist than I am. That would be true when we can give our full attention to each brew one cup at a time – as in truly full attention, no moving onto the next brew, no expediting to do. And a well crafted cup of syphon or V60 will bring out more nuance than an equally well-dialed brew from a batch brewer like a Fetco. But when a barista is making two cups of coffee at one time, all while sorting out a line of orders, the quality will drop, and hard. V60, the default brew method at Intelligentsia is especially touchy. Without near-virtuoso skill, the cup will be severely underextracted like whoa. It’s hard enough done one by one, but imagine doing two at a time, one in each hand! (Yes, I’ve tasted it. Intelly V60s taste reliably underextracted like whoa).

And yes, I know, batch-brewed coffee can taste awful. But batch-brewed coffee that tastes awful is usually the result of wrong ratios, bad programming, inattention and neglect. How often do old pots of coffee get dumped? (It’d better be every 20 minutes) How often do the shuttles get rinsed? (It’d better be between each brew cycle) How often are the shuttles cleaned with detergent? (It’d better be daily or close) Scrubbed out with green scrubbies? (weekly). What temperature is your brewer set at? Are you using the right amount of preinfusion and bypass? Do you have that new magnetic dispersion guide on your Fetco? If you answered no to any of those questions, maybe that should be fixed before you throw away the Fetco with the putrid coffee?

It’s not as if I’m against slow coffee. Far from it, nothing makes me happy like a good cup of coffee that was made just for me. It’s why I fell in love with espresso in the first place. The problem is when that love becomes unyielding dogma. There is a place for a decent cup of coffee you can get off a tap, in a hurry, in the morning. And it’s not just that sometimes coffee should be fast. I’ll bet you anything that a good cup of Fetco coffee from a shop that does it right tastes better than even the best V60ist pouring two-handed. If you want high volume coffee, make it using the best high volume methods.

If anything, a Fetco is the best thing to happen to a brew-to-order program. Having a very good cup of coffee available at the ready frees your baristas to slow down on their coffee to order, and make a truly excellent cup. The brew to order methods also frees the barista to start deep cleaning the Fetco before close and take care of whatever orders for coffee trickle in with a dripper. There’s a real synergy to be captured by an enterprising coffeeshop.

2010 was such a strange year. I really don’t know what to make of it. I was a barista trainer for a while, I did odd jobs at a coffeeshop for a some time, I drove an old CTA bus for a week across Iowa, I went to law school for the rest of it. See? Strange. So very much was unexpected and new, and so much of it was just how it should have turned out. As much as everything has changed, 2010 may have been the first year where I have felt comfortable in my skin. It is strange to say, because everything up until law school, I knew to be temporary, and ever since law school, I have done nothing but miss everything that has come before. Still, I have never felt more at ease putting one foot in front of the other, and going on.

2010 was the first year I was really good with bikes, too. It helps that it was the first winter I didn’t really stop riding. It was the first time i ever raced (well, if Goldsprints counts as racing). I rode my first two centuries. And it was the first year I really started getting good at working on bikes. I got a road bike.

So. 2011.

I should get better at law school. I should learn to fix everything on my bikes by myself, and maybe race. I should take photographs again. That’s a manageable set of resolutions, so here is one rather awful, unhelpful, possibly unachievable resolution: get down to a riding weight of 138.

So the latest shop in Chicago is Andy Atkinson’s Dark Cloud, at 2122 N Halsted, in Lincoln Park near DePaul University. As you might gather from their equipment (A Slayer, a Robur-E and an Anfim Super Caimano, V60s, and syphons), they are up to some innovative things. They have a solid core of baristas with Andy and Matt and Dex, and I expect some great things.

What really impresses me about the place is how much attention gets paid to the smallest details. There isn’t a roaster underwriting the equipment, so they select a new, seasonal, lineup of coffees from roasters around the country every few weeks. Expect a lot of Intelligentsia, Metropolis and Alterra in summer and winter when ground shipping would treat roasted coffee poorly, and more adventurous selections from the coasts in the spring and fall. They milk from Kilgus, a family farm in central Illinois, which is the best milk to use with coffee that I have ever tasted. They do everything over a scale whenever possible. And they make all coffee to order.

Of course, this would all be meaningless if the coffee didn’t taste good. And the coffee tastes good. It should only get better.

Hi there blog audience. Sorry about neglecting you all semester, I really should write more. But anyway, I came across this neat cooking blog, Hilah Cooking, and thought I might share it. It’s witty, and you have to admire a cook who calls for an egg nog thick enough to stand a spoon in. I used to make egg nog from scratch, but stopped when I discovered that Oberweis is pretty good, and if I drank a glass or two and replaced the rest with bourbon, I could get my whole family trashed out of their minds. Fun stuff.

You know, ever since I started a bicycling club at school, people have asked me why it is that I love bicycling so much.

One of my candidates for my first memory (the other candidate involves a train ride and a cob of corn, although little else is clear about it) was on a tricycle, wherein I tried to chase down a grown up on a real bicycle. I thought I was pretty fast, but he was obviously faster. Fast forward a few years and 8000 miles, first real bike was a Toys-R-Us Huffy – red, white, and blue – with “made in the union” stamped in the pedals. I never had training wheels, something I’m still kind of proud of. That was my first taste of the kind of freedom a bike offered. I had an entire block of a city street to explore, that was mine. Little did I know how much more was possible. I have an idea now.

I never really outgrew bicycling, and it may be the one tenuous strand of continuity I have with my past.

A bicycle means a refusal to go gentle into that good night. There is always the possibility to crank harder, ride faster. A bicycle means flight. Riding a bike makes me happy, and it has, for as long as I can remember.

So last Sunday, I was out riding my bike, and there were these kids having a car wash, and the ones holding the signs and shouting “car wash!” saw me rolling up and yelled “bike wash!!!” and so I got my bike washed. They didn’t have any other business at the time, so four of them washed my bike and asked me all about it, how fast I could get on it, if I ever fall off of it or not, and all of that. That made me happy.

Jack Shafer in his column, Pressbox, Slate has this recurring feature “Bogus Trend Story of the Week.” More often than not, it involves something the NY Times reports. A bogus trend story rolls with a few anecdotal bits masquerading as evidence, pointing to something which may or may not be a trend – one can never tell for all the slop in the reporting.

The latest is this piece, on Blago which interviews four people who think the government hasn’t proven that Blagojevich’s actions are quite criminal, and one who thinks while his actions are criminal, they aren’t quite jail-time-criminal. Let’s leave aside for the moment that he failed to sell the senate seat because was basically caught red-handed. You would think that they would have found someone to say that Blagojevich should do a significant amount of time other than the prosecutor, but no, it’s 4-0-1. As if public opinion really was divided that way.

Well is it? While the article does get a decent answer from an independent attorney about what might be causing the jurors to deadlock (what, the Times couldn’t afford to put a decent trial reporter on the case?) it can’t muster up any poll numbers. Public opinion is divided? Sure it is, but that isn’t news. Latest bogus trend story of the week: people feeling sympathy for Rod Blagojevich.

Plus anyone get the feeling that (other than the topic) the story has all the reportorial panache of a small-town paper reporting peoples opinions of a particularly well-attended garage sale? And why is the Times covering the Blago trial with one of their nationwide features reporters? (Look in her article index, you’ll find a story about lighthouses, gulf seafood, and Michelle Obama’s dress maker.) And why is Slatest running Blago trial stories from the NY Times when there are competent (well…) local papers that run stories with facts?

Of her latest, The Singer’s Gun. here.

So the first time I ever rode a road bike, I was about 17, and it was a red and black Raleigh Record ten-speed of some indeterminate year I got from a garage sale for what must have been $30. It had awful black grip foam, and rust spots everywhere, but it was beautiful. My friends snarked that everyone’s parents had one or two of those in their garages. The cool thing at the time were 21 speed Mongoose mountain bikes from Walmart, and compared to those things, that Raleigh just flew. I wrecked it accelerating out of a corner, the chain caught, or something, and I still wear a scar where the bike chain caught my right leg.

The first thing I did when I went to college was to visit the Blackstone Bicycle Works and get myself a road bike. It was too big, but you can’t imagine how good it is to ride on the lakeshore path before as the sun rises until you’ve done it. That bike got stolen from under me, and then I had a dark blue Raleigh that likewise got stolen. My last road bike was a 1980 Raleigh Super Grand Prix, which I bought at Working Bikes, still before old bikes were considered cool. It had mostly original components, and after a tune up would ride like a dream. My favorite feature of the bike was the TI Raleigh Tour de France sticker on the toptube. A friend and I turned it into a fast boulevardier.

What I love about Raleighs is that they’re really racy, and there’s just speed for days in those old frames. Unlike on an old (say) Schwinn, I never feel like the bike is holding me back. It’s a good feeling, knowing that your bike isn’t going to let you down. And I’ve always just liked the way Raleighs looked, with their skinny steel tubes and that slight taper on the front fork. It looks like a road bike from before EPO, and that kind of matters to me. For a long time, I’ve wanted a steel road racing bike with lugs and modern components. I’d asked around about getting an old frame converted, and it didn’t seem worthwhile considering the price of a modern gruppo, and then Raleigh released the 2010 Record Ace. Reynolds 520 tubing, lugs, and ULTEGRA. Apparently, Raleigh decided to build by dream bike.

At the price range of a new Raleigh Record Ace, I could have gotten basically any bike I wanted. A new Specialized Roubaix costs less (note here, that bike is full carbon). Any aluminum frame cyclocross or timetrial bike would have cost less. I was in striking distance of an entry level Rivendell. But this new bike of mine is just beautiful. They don’t make a prettier road bike (bespoke custom builds not included), and it runs fast. Sure, I can’t quite keep up with the new carbon bikes, but in 30 years, I’ll still be riding this one. It’ll be my old Raleigh road bike, from when they still made such things. It’s beautiful.

Having seen Mike Phillips’s routine get put together, I have to say, the most impressive thing about it is how simple the ideas in it are. Simple as in Escoffier’s maxim, faites simple. It may require fast hands and daring execution, but there no touch of extravagance or complication for complication’s sake anywhere in the ingredients or the routine. It’s kind of stunning to watch, actually.

And you really gotta root for the home team on this one. So one more go Mike. This time, just go and win it.

:::UPDATE::: He did it! Yay! Mikey!