Thursday afternoon, I made about 40 espresso-based drinks for the animators at PDI/DreamWorks!
Someone at DreamWorks wanted to do something special for the animators and the idea of a coffee hour and my name came up. I agreed to do it because it sounded like a nice opportunity to serve the animators as a barista rather than as a software engineer. So, I packed up and took into work: my espresso machine, grinder, a bunch of “The Boss” espresso beans from Barefoot Coffee Roasters, some Ghirardelli chocolate syrup, soy milk and whip cream. Like I said, we made about 40 drinks — lattes, cappuccinos, espressos and a few mochas — in an hour. Whew! Don’t know how good they were but they looked good coming out.
I say “we” because I recruited a couple team mates (Chloe and Vishwa — thanks!!) to steam milk for me which made it possible. I also needed to get an extra double portafilter basket so I could have two portafilters going. It let me prep (grind, dose, tamp) the second portafilter while pulling a shot on the first.
Overall, it was fun but a bit tiring — nothing a little shot of The Boss couldn’t fix 
Now that I read the description of The Boss, I’m not surprised that I like it. It contains some Papua New Guinea, Brazilian and Ethopian beans which is similar to a home roasted blend I’ve recently created and enjoyed which had 3oz of Brazilian, 3oz of Ethiopian and 2oz of Sumatra. Cool!
Posted by bruce as coffee at 5:35 PM UTC
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I’m excited that a fellow coffee junkie mentioned he had caught some of the documentary Black Coffee which is playing in 3 parts on PBS. I’ve got MythTV set to record it and will report back when I get a chance to watch it. Looks to be a Canadian production which pleases me somehow.
Posted by bruce as coffee at 12:22 AM UTC
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Sweet Maria’s has the best description with big pictures of the roasting scale.
A Rough Pictorial Guide to the Coffee Roasting Process
Posted by bruce as coffee at 2:09 PM UTC
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This morning I tried my first shot of Connoisseur Coffee‘s Woodside blend which Terry at CC recommended. He said it’s a blend of sumatra and brazilian which sounds promising to my palate. It was quite agreeable — lots of body and smooth with a great finish. In fact, I’d say it’s my favorite from them so far.
With that nice taste lingering in my mouth, the last thing I wanted to do when depositing a couple checks at Patelco was lick the envelope! A couple weeks ago, with some Blue Bottle lingering, I innocently licked the envelope only to have my taste buds smacked in the head by an offensive adhesive! Like puking on a Picasso — a real tragedy. Today, using my noggin, I spit on my finger then wiped that on the envelope. Worked like a charm. Yeah, and it probably charmed the woman behind me in line, too.
Posted by bruce as coffee at 11:32 AM UTC
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I’ve been wanting a blog for a while now to capture:
- fun memories of the kids,
- notes on animated films I’ve seen, want to create, or am creating,
- trials and tribulations in the quest for the ultimate espresso,
- experiences and lessons related to building my physical vitality,
- observations of an unhappy or happy consumer,
- nerdly activities (struggles and successes) including TiVo hacking, and
- usability yeahs and boos.
I experimented with the more general Mambo CMS system but finally settled on WordPress because it’s really much more streamlined for blogging. I’ll be posting stuff in the past and will move this post back in time so it’s the first post so to be honest, the actual creation date of the blog was Nov. 16, 2005.
Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, animation, coffee, kids, usability, vitality at 12:23 PM UTC
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