The Horse: Part 2

I'm on the third day (post-roast) of drinking the Horse Harar roasted to city/city plus. Although I can still smell the blueberry in the cup, the coffee did not taste as good to me as it did yesterday.  My taste buds may just be having an off day (it's an allergy thing), or it might really be a degradation in flavour.  I've just had the same roast in a moka pot, and I am not impressed. The blueberry smell is gone, and the taste is no better.

RT was fine with the coffee, btw, but all he looks for in the morning is hot and black. He becomes a bit more of a connoisseur if he is drinking after dinner coffee.

For those non-coffee fans who have gotten this far, I'll toss in some pictures that are linked to more information about the pots. The KMB picture is linked to the Coffee Geeks review, but they have had intermittent server problems, so be patient if you get an error message. The moka pot picture is linked to the wikipedia article on percolators, though it is hardly one of those nasty things. Scroll down to get to the relevant section.

 

I roasted the Harar again this morning, using the same profile as last time, but letting it continue to roast another 25 seconds. It was not truly into second crack as I was getting pops, but no rolling, and I would estimate it at a full city or mebbe a full city +. I'm not really experienced enough with all of this to be positive about such things. There were no visible oil droplets on the beans, but they had a dark matte finish.

For folks wondering about the naming conventions, Sweet Maria's has a great page (with pictures) that explains how they name roasts, and I am following their conventions. They actually have an updated page, but I'm pretty sure the links to the multiple bean pictures are not right.

I bet your eyes are glazing over about now, and you are wishing for another cat story. Oh well.

 

posted by taming at 06:04 | link | comments |
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The Original Bean

This is Beanie. You might think her name came about because of my obsession with coffee. You would be wrong.

Beanie was rescued from a dank, dark basement about 9 years ago, when she was just a baby. Her digestive system was a wreck, and every few minutes she gave off the most amazing farts, the kind that could only come from, you guessed it, beans.

She doesn't even pretend to like coffee (even the amazing city+ Horse Harar I had today, two days post roasting). She does, however, have a real thing for both cantaloupe and Jell-O.

She has gotten exceedingly noisy over the last year or two. It's a Siamese thing. I told RT that if she runs true to breed, we will soon have to wear ear plugs. RT smiled. I think he has been looking for an excuse to do that for some time now.

 

posted by taming at 08:47 | link | comments (1)|
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Gadzooks, I'm a Wife!!!

My husband RT had to go into the office this morning, Saturday be damned. My plan was to go to the Farmer's Market and get some things done at home. I had told RT I would bring him some lunch from home around noonish, so we could eat together.

 I was ready to leave for the market when I realized that I had forgotten to get cash from him before he left. In the age of debit cards, "real" money doesn't pass through my hands all that often. The Farmer's Market doesn't know from plastic. I called RT to tell him I would be stopping at the bank machine and to ask him if he needed anything from downtown. He told me that he had forgotten something he needed, and he would give me cash if I brought it out to him. No problem. I even packed up his lunch, even though it was a long way until noon, and our changed plans meant he would be eating it solo.

I had a great time at the Farmer's Market. We will eat well for yet another week. On the way out, I passed by a stand selling Ukrainian sausage and pierogi plates. Hummm, RT sure loves that stuff, so I bought some, and yup, headed back to his office with it. On my way there, I had an ah ha moment. You see, when I was a busy single mom, with a demanding full time career, I often said that I needed a wife. This morning, I finally realized that I have somehow become the wife I always dreamt of having.

RT grew up in the 50s, in a small prairie town. His mom wasn't much of a cook, but dinner was on the table, regular as clockwork, every evening. The laundry was done on Monday, and the clean clothes were neatly folded and put away the same day. RT's dad earned a good living, and pretty much left anything house-ish to his wife. It wasn't argued, or debated; that's just the way things were back then.

RT went away to the big city for University, where he was exposed to feminism and women who expected to be treated as equals. It was a confusing time, not just for small town prairie guys, but for women like me, who, as we grew up, lived in homes that were traditional, in that 50s way.

When RT married his first wife, and I married my first husband, we joined the ranks of the domestically confused. It was the era of consciousness raising groups and lists. Chores were divided up, not according to gender, but, supposedly, by interest and gender neutral ability. The goal was equality, at least in terms of the time spent doing those things that made it onto the list.

The intent was to create a household where no-one felt enslaved or inferior. The results, at least for both me and RT, were very different. Simple things, like unloading the dishwasher, became tests of our commitment to equality. An upswept floor translated into a lack of respect. In truth, it was still all about power, but this power struggle was occurring between partners who had been awakened to the ideas of liberation and equality before the culture caught on to the notion that lists of chores just didn't cut it.

A whole lot of marriages failed beecause even though our minds embraced the beliefs behind the women's movement, we had been raised differently, and the movement back then required adherence to an orthodoxy that, in retrospect, was just plain silly.

That was a long time ago. For the last 6 years, I have been a full time stay-at-home person (no kids in our house these days). RT has been the breadwinner, and my role has been, in part, to support his career and make his home life pleasant. Could anything be more 50ish?

Well, yup, in fact, the 50s were far more 50ish than this sort of situation turns out to be these days. I don't feel particularly hard done by when I unload the dishwasher or fold the laundry. Our relationship can't be summed up by who does what chore. RT comes home from work and finds a reasonably neat house and dinner on the table because I have time to do it, and he doesn't. Career related problems and decisions belong to both of us, and my sense is that a good part of his success has come from his incorporating my ideas and my skill set into his work life. 

We are absolutely equals, in all the things that count.

The bonus in this is that I get to enjoy all the good things that were true about 50s men, while having in-the-bone knowledge that my husband loves and respects me, even on those days where the most noteworthy thing I have accomplished is making coffee filters out of craft felt. That means that I can feel loved and protected, without feeling guilty for wanting or needing that from my man.

It's a win-win situation. After all, he can come home, plant a big kiss on my face, pat me on the bum, and ask me to get him a beer without having to worry that I'm going to hit him over the head with a rolling pin.

 

posted by taming at 12:13 | link | comments (4)|
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More Fun With Filters

I went to our local Fabric Land this AM and bought .2 metres of 100% polyester craft felt. I got purple, because I'm just that kind a gal. I thought about getting white, but realized that it is no less likely to have been dyed than the purple stuff. It cost $7.99/metre, so this was worked out to $1.60.

I ran it through the washing machine with Oxy-Clean to get out any loose dye, and rinsed the cloth by running it through the machine again. Then I cut my 4 inch circles, with a couple of 1 1/2 inch long tabs for easier puck removal. I just made my first pot of KMB coffee, and the filter worked great--better than the baby wipes.

The felt cuts very easily. I made a template out of card stock. the .2 metre width allows one to get two rows of tabbed rounds out of the felt. I have a feeling that I have pretty much a lifetime supply of filters now. I wet the felt before adding in the coffee.

I grind at 3.5 dots in a Solis Maestro Classic for the KMB. It works very well for that size grind.

 

posted by taming at 10:53 | link | comments |
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With Apologies to My Non-Roasting Friends

Standard Roast Profile 1: 11 Minutes

As I had been warned, the roast was uneven, as compared to my most recent (Central American) beans, and there was a fair amount of variation in size. I weighed out 140 grams, which, in this case, seems to be a bit much for my iRoast 2.  Next time I will go down to 130. I didn't hear the first crack very well, but timed it as beginning with 3:25 to go. I had an isolated  "pop" with 1:40 left, but no real second crack. I stopped the roast when the smoke began to get darker and the smell began to change (with 1:10 to go). The beans are not particularly dark, and I think I achieve the light city+ Tom, of Sweet Maria's, recommends. There were perhaps a dozen beans that seemed very, very light, and I pitched them.

I'll roast another batch later today, when the roaster is totally cooled down. That way I can try this roast profile for about 5 days and see how the flavour changes over time. Who knows, with ten pounds of it in my cupboard, I might even roast a third time, and see what happens with it over an even longer period of time.

 

posted by taming at 10:29 | link | comments |
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