busybee Food

I’ve been experimenting again…

As much as I appreciated my Sette 270, there were a few things I didn’t like about it:

• The fine adjustment mechanism is weird and unpredictable (due to the dual-ring thing)
• It is incredibly loud
• Grinding for espresso usually took 3-4 cycles due to popcorning
• The dang felt pretty huge (relative to my tiny kitchen)
• It’s built for keeping stuff in the hopper rather than single-dosing

I was considering a number of other grinders (most notably the Option-O Lagom Mini) but then in April, Timemore announced the Timemore Sculptor series, in a number of sizes and grind profiles. And the requisite Kickstarter had it on a pretty deep discount.

So anyway, I backed the 064s (64mm stepless variant) and expected to wait.

And wait I did! But the lovely new grinder arrived today.

I love the flavor of coffee, but don’t really care much for caffeine. Unfortunately, finding good roasters that treat decaffeinated coffee with respect is difficult, and the ones which are out there tend to either default to a dark roast, or cost enormous amounts.

But with a $20 popcorn air popper you can roast your own coffee at home, and save a lot of money doing it!

I’ve been doing it.

When I first started on my home espresso journey, I had an ancient hand-me-down Krups¹, but it made awful coffee². I donated that to a charity shop, as I thought my Aeropress³ and its “espresso-style coffee” was sufficient. Then I added a Fellow Prismo to the mix to add a bit more pressure (and cleanliness), but this still wasn’t espresso. Then my eye got caught by the Flair Classic, which was much better at making espresso but also much fussier. So I started investigating a bunch of home espresso machines, and I decided I wanted the Breville Bambino Plus… but it was pretty much impossible to buy.

After trying to buy it from a few different places, and trying to order a few other machines, I eventually settled on the Gaggia Classic Pro, which I used fairly happily for about a year and a half.

But there were still a bunch of things I didn’t like about it, such as the lack of preinfusion, a difficult-to-use steam wand, and a water tank design that made it way too easy for fruit flies to reenact Hotel California⁴. So, last November, when the Bambino went on a pretty deep (20%) discount for Black Friday (and when I was already spending large amounts of money getting my kitchen remodeled anyway), I decided to take the plunge and get the machine I’d wanted in the first place.

I recently bought some Colombian EA decaf from S&W Craft Roasting, as well as their sampler pack and a bag of cascara tea. The order shipped immediately and got to me within just a few days, and I am pretty happy with the decaf.

But let’s talk about the cascara!

Tonight, my Kitchenaid Classic Plus stand mixer (13 years old, according to the serial number) started to really heck up in some really obnoxious ways, to the extent that I thought I might need to buy a new mixer. But it turns out that there’s just some simple maintenance tasks that need to be performed, and that all of the issues I was having are very common!

Okay, so, a lot has been said about espresso tonic. But there are other interesting combinations of espresso with carbonated beverages.

One fairly obvious one would be an espresso kola, namely espresso and a cola-type beverage. It’s okay with Coca-Cola but really good when using Q Kola.

Earlier this year, Morgan Eckroth won the US Barista Championship with a signature drink that involved lime extract, mango purée, and orange blossom water (among other things). And those flavors have a profile pretty similar to Q’s tropical ginger beer, so I figured…