On your marks, get set, review 1 day ago

Introduction

I love coffee. As in, my wife is a little worried about me kind of love. I used to hate the stuff, until one day a couple of friends undertook an intervention and forced me to drink a flat-white WITHOUT sugar!

A while later those same friends introduced me to syphon coffee and I have been drinking syphon and chemex (filtered) coffee ever since.

For the last couple years I have been trying a lot of different coffees, from different roasters and I thought it might be fun to start a journal of my tasting experiences.

So, what better way to kick things off than by reviewing some coffees by one of the friends who performed the intervention in the first place!?

Disclosure

Before I give you my early review of Sleepless City Roaster's latest batch of Single Origins, let me first disclose that SCR's roaster, Tim, is a very dear friend of mine and he sent these to me without charge so I could tell him what I thought. But, I've decided to publish my notes here as well.

With that little disclosure out of the way, let's get down to the royal biznik!

The Process

I ran all 5 of these coffees through a syphon, using a medium grind, one after the other until I had all five glasses sitting on the table side by side.

I used 13 grams of coffee and about 250 grams of water.

This is by no means a "scientific" process and I'm sure any true coffee taster would cringe at my methods. But, I wasn't going for what's considered proper; I was going for a process that's a bit closer to what someone at home might perform when making a coffee for themselves.

The Coffees

Tim sent me 5 coffees:

• Ethiopian Yirgacheffe GR2
• Brazil Daterra Sunrise
• El Salvador Finca Suiza
• Kenya Gethumbwini Estate AB
• Guatemala San Julian COE #13

The Taste

Let me say right up-front that these coffees were magnificent drinking (even at just 3 days after roasting). They were all very clean, with no hint of bitterness whatsoever, almost even verging on sweet.

I've had the Guatemala San Julian COE at a well-renowned coffee shop here in Brisbane and I had found it a bit off. I don't know much, if anything, about roasting. But, it seemed to me like the flavours were there and wanting to get out, but couldn't. Whereas, the SCR roast was full flavoured and was surprisingly good. I say "surprisingly" because I don't normally enjoy Guatemalan coffees that much. This one was full bodied, full flavoured and very easy drinking. It was close to the Kenya Gethumbwini in flavour, but slightly less fruity.

The El Salvador Finca Suiza was a nice surprise too. I had previously tried this same coffee roasted by a well known Melbourne outfit. They discribed the taste as "hot strawberry jam and cream". Though, I personally found it to be a much darker flavour than that description. The SCR roast was warmer and much more like "hot strawberry jam and cream".

The Ethiopian Yirgacheffe was just as it should be — acidic and vibrant. It's not a coffee that I'd recommend to people who like lattes — it's a pretty gnarly flavour [read: very acidic].

The Brazil Daterra "Sunrise" was new to me. I haven't really tasted much Brazilian coffee before. But, I found the Sunrise to be a bit more earthy and nutty than the other samples in this bunch. It was a lovely coffee. But, it paled in flavour compared to my favourite of the bunch...

I had first tried the Kenya Gethumbwini Estate AB as a chemex from a well-known Sydney roaster a few months ago and it was just delicious. It is a full flavoured coffee that's bright and ultra fruity. It's possibly my favourite Single Origin coffee, with the only exception being a Costa Rica Finca Las Lajas "Black Pearl", which has a similar flavour. The SCR roast really hit the nail on the head for me.

Side note: I really ought to find some Kenya Cup of Excellence considering how much I enjoyed the Gethumbwini.

The Conclusion

My first experience with Tim's roasting was an unknown Nicaraguan coffee that tasted just like toffee. He and I are both still trying to figure out which one it was and I am getting increasingly excited that Nicaraguan "season" is almost upon us. Needless to say, the anonymous coffee was amazing and I have continued to be impressed with the Sleepless City Roasters product ever since.

SCR recently got an award for their roast of the Costa Rica Finca Las Lajas "Black Pearl" and I have no doubt there'll be more awards to come.

I like filter coffee (syphon, aeropress, chemex, pourover, etc), so it stands to reason that I like Single Origins. They're not for everyone, especially if you have an espresso machine at home. In that case, I recommend you check out SCR's Crowd Pleaser blend.

But, if you are like me and you do enjoy intricate flavours, these 5 coffees are worth running some water through.

Coming up...

I have two single origins from Single Origin (a.k.a What's In The Hopper) in the mail. So, expect another review very soon!

Married Jan 23rd

The last time I posted to this blog was August 2011. I guess you could say I was a little distracted:

James & Tiana Angus — 6th January 2012

No Distraction for You Aug 20th

I’ve been doing more and more photography at work lately, and I’m really enjoying it. But, I’m finding that I’m forgetting to check some essential things while on location — most notably, distractions in the background.

We’re just about to kick off a campaign called "Each One Matters" and I got the job of taking the photos that feature in the campaign. But, it wasn’t until we got back to the office that we noticed a number of things about the shot that we didn’t like.

Fortunately Adobe Photoshop CS5 has some great tools built-in to help remove objects from photos and I spent the afternoon cleaning up the shot.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the content-aware tools in CS5 yet, make sure you read this tutorial

Fluff Generator Aug 19th

There are few things that I find more ridiculous (and hilarious) than marketing fluff. By that I mean the needlessly vague and grandiose language used in many tech sales pitches. It’s intended to get you excited about a product. But, almost always confuses and alienates the reader.

This morning my boss asked me to decipher a 9 page pitch from the "Chief Marketing Officer" of a new venture. I’m going to assume this is probably a couple guys in a garage who spent 9 pages of fluff (and my time) to tell me they’re building a niche online directory and I should be excited about listing our organisation on it.

But, I found it to be a perfect example of marketing fluff and thought that maybe I could post an excerpt with merge-fields ready to go for entrepreneurs who need a quick copy/paste solution to their marketing collateral.

How’s this for shakespearian genius:

[webappname] is an internet based system designed to fill the communication and collaboration void in [industry]. Through innovation in internet and mobile phone based technology, [webappname] seeks to effectively connect, empower and mobilise [businessname] to work together for the advancement of [corebusiness].

Yep, it’s so vague that you can apply it to almost any Web-App, Industry and Business combination.

There’s a lesson here: cut the fluff. If your sales pitch doesn’t get to the point quickly, then you’re probably turning potential customers away.

If you want to boost your reputation, do it through testimonials from existing customers. No one likes the person who can’t stop telling you how great they are — don’t be that person.

Be concise. Be honest. Tell people who you really are and what you really do, and do it quickly.

Coding on Cloud9 May 13th

I had the distinct privilege of writing a guest post for the Uber Global blog this week (They are the parent company of Jumba, who now host most of my websites). The post is titled “Is the future of coding in the Cloud?” and uses the new web-based Cloud9 IDE as a talking point for where web-development could be heading in the future.

I have been playing with Cloud9 for a couple of weeks while developing a new Ruby on Rails web-app for SU QLD. As you may gather from the blog post, I’m pretty impressed by Cloud9 and I’m really excited by what it signals for web development - coding from anywhere, at any time. But, not 12 hours after I submitted the blog post to Uber, Google had a guest blog post of their own, from non-other than the Lead Developer of Cloud9.

In the post, Rik Arends outlines some of the ways they are working to improve the offline capabilities of Cloud9 (so you can code when a web connection is unavailable). This is quite timely, considering Google’s Chromebooks announcement at Google IO this week - any self-respecting developer who wants to build Chrome Apps on a Chromebook is probably going to need a web-based IDE to do it!

But, it does shock me a little that it’s not Google announcing a web-based IDE. I have to admit that I always thought Google would be the first to bring code-editing to the browser. I mean, they have something like 10,000 engineers, who are all working on the next web-technologies. And, as I type this article up in Google Docs, I’m conscious that they know how to build a web-based text editor...

In saying that, I guarantee you Google are paying A LOT of attention to Cloud9, and I think Rik’s appearance on the Google blog is a sign of that. Who knows - and I’m just spit-ballin’ here - but, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google announced the purchase of Cloud9 and the Ajax.org team in the next 12 months. It would certainly fit perfectly into their ever-expanding product portfolio of web-apps.

The web is Google’s space and I doubt they’ll waste much time releasing their own IDE. Whether that’s a freshly painted Cloud9 or something brand spanking remains to be seen. Either way, someone at Google is working on this and I can’t wait to see it.