The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘coffee’ Category

A year ago, I spent far too much money on my cof­fee mak­ing set-up. I say that, sit­ting here a year later, sip­ping the finest cap­puc­cino I’ve ever had.

Since yes­ter­day.

Every day I drink the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted and I have absolutely no regrets on how much money I spent.

I have an Izzo Vivi espresso maker and a Macap M4D grinder as well as var­i­ous acces­sories that help me pur­sue the per­fect coffee.

The Izzo Vivi is on the low-end of the pro-sumer cof­fee maker scale, but is an excel­lent piece of kit. Its been reli­able, depend­able and rel­a­tively easy to use and main­tain. Most impor­tantly, it cranks out shot after shot of deli­cious espresso and has plenty of steam power to turn your milk into light and pour-able mirco-foam.

The espresso maker, as I quickly learned, is not the most impor­tant machine com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing, its the grinder. To really make good espresso, you need a grinder that is up to the task and what­ever you think you should spend on one, its prob­a­bly not enough. Any cof­fee web­site or forum will tell you exactly the same thing.

My espresso maker has no real con­trols on it, except for the lever that oper­ates the pump. You fill the portafil­ter with freshly ground cof­fee, lock it into place and then lift the lever to the pump. When you’re done, flip the lever down and the pump stops. That’s really it.

All of your con­trol comes from adjust­ing the fine­ness of the grind and once you find your espresso range, requires min­i­mal tweak­ing depend­ing on the type and fresh­ness of your cof­fee beans.

Which leads me to what I think is the sin­gle most impor­tant com­po­nent in cof­fee mak­ing: freshly roasted beans.

I’ve read of some­thing called the “rule of twelve’s” when it comes to cof­fee which goes like this:

unroasted, green cof­fee beans stay fresh for 12 months
roasted cof­fee beans stay fresh for around 12 days
ground cof­fee stays fresh for 12 minutes

I buy my cof­fee online, about every fort­night, to insure I have the fresh­est, tasti­est beans pos­si­ble. I grind my beans directly in the portafil­ter, only sec­onds before I brew my espresso. You can’t get any fresher than that.

Cof­fee oxi­dises quickly and releases gasses which break it down and the flavour suf­fers for this. If you’re buy­ing your cof­fee pre-ground, or you are buy­ing roasted beans with­out know­ing the roast­ing date, you are cheat­ing your­self out of the best cof­fee you can drink.

And if you are using those pre-filled cof­fee pods, you are trad­ing con­ve­nience for taste.

You don’t have to spend as much as I have, but you really owe it to your­self to grind your own cof­fee and there are plenty of more afford­able options for grinders than mine.

And freshly roasted beans aren’t that expen­sive, a quar­ter kilo of a decent sin­gle estate or blend costs about the same as a tall cap­puc­cino from one of the high street chains and you’ll get at least 8 dou­ble espres­sos from it.

And it doesn’t have to be espresso, a decent Bodum press-pot with freshly ground cof­fee will make an out­stand­ing cup and if you are only grind­ing for fil­ter cof­fee, you can find some real bar­gains on grinders. I promise you, you will taste the difference.

My grinder is used every day, but the same can’t be said for the espresso maker. When I don’t have the time to heat it up, or clean it down after use, instead I use an Aeropress.

The main fea­ture of the Aero­press is that it will work with the same fine­ness of grind as the espresso maker, so no need to read­just the grinder. The Aero­press is made of plas­tic, very sim­ple to use and clean and pro­duces a very con­vinc­ing espresso-like cof­fee. I heat up some milk in the microwave and use one of those battery-operated hand whisks to froth it and in less than 5 min­utes, have some­thing which approx­i­mates a cappuccino.

But when I have the time, I always make the extra effort to use the Vivi. It takes longer and requires more clean-up, but its worth it.

My daily cof­fee rou­tine is some­thing like this:

Switch on the Vivi
Wait 30–45 min­utes for it to warm up
When ready, brew a dou­ble espresso
do a 2 sec­ond flush to clear loose grounds from the shower screen
back­flush for 10–15 sec­onds to clear oils from the brew path
froth my milk
flush the steam wand to get any milk residue out
build my drink
enjoy

Most days, I have a sec­ond cup as well, after that, I switch the machine off to let it cool. Then I clean out the drip tray, wipe it down and every other day, I refill the water reservoir.

I also back­flush with deter­gent occa­sion­ally, I soak the bas­kets and portafil­ters in the same deter­gent, I soak the tip of the steam wand in milk deposit remover and every few months I descale the boiler. None of this is dif­fi­cult or time consuming.

My acces­sory col­lec­tion includes 2x lined shot glasses to check I am get­ting the cor­rect vol­ume of espresso in the cor­rect amount of time (2 ounces in around 30 sec­onds), a cou­ple of shot pots, a stain­less steam jug for milk froth­ing, a 58mm Reg Bar­ber tam­per, a portafil­ter holder for tamp­ing, and a shot timer. The tamp­ing stand and the shot timer are use­ful, but not essen­tial, every­thing else I couldn’t do without.

I also have 4 portafil­ters; one with 2 spouts and a dou­ble bas­ket, another with one spout and a dou­ble bas­ket, a third with a blank­ing disk for back­flush­ing and a fourth that’s bot­tom­less with a triple bas­ket. The bot­tom­less portafil­ter was use­ful when I was learn­ing how to pack a portafil­ter prop­erly, as it showed me where to look for my mistakes.

I spent a good part of the year sam­pling dif­fer­ent beans and blends, but for many months now, I’ve been stick­ing one par­tic­u­lar bean, called Yemen Mokha Matrar which is the rich­est, tasti­est of all I tried. It works par­tic­u­larly well in milk-based drinks, like my amaz­ing cappuccinos.

You can get Yemen Mokha Matrar from a vari­ety of sup­pli­ers, though the roaster I use, roasts to order. I place an order on his web­site and he roasts the beans for me and ships them out the same day. Its a great ser­vice and they arrive the fol­low­ing day.

If any­one wants the name of the roaster I use, please feel free to email me. I’d like to include a link to his site, but would you want to be known as my offi­cial cof­fee roaster? I’m not cer­tain he would either.

Since I started mak­ing my own proper cof­fee at home, I haven’t had a cof­fee any place else that even comes close, not from the high street chains, not from the cof­fee ven­dor in my office, nowhere!

Life is far too short to be drink­ing sludge and you owe it to your­self to pro­vide your­self with the finest cof­fee pos­si­ble. Put it this way, if I had to pay high street prices for every cap­puc­cino I’ve had at home in the last year, I could have bought three sets of cof­fee mak­ing gear.

And if you are won­der­ing why an old trippy hippy like me digs cof­fee so much, its sim­ple. Cof­fee is a drug, like any­thing else that has an effect on your mood and per­cep­tion. Don’t believe me, read this and learn if you drink too much, you can have proper hallucinations.

Yo.

I haven’t point­lessly ram­bled here in a while. It’s just an observation.

I woke up early this morn­ing, silly early, before 6:30am. Blame a blocked nose, a noisy cat and the threat of a cou­ple of deliv­er­ies for this early morn­ing appear­ance. I had an alarm set for 7:30am any­way, so its not a tragedy that I am up so early.

I’ve got a ship­ment of fresh cof­fee beans com­ing from my online roaster…yes, I am still madly into fresh cof­fee. I had to ease back from it a bit thanks to my thy­roid prob­lems, but I am feel­ing a lit­tle bet­ter, which means caf­feine and I are bud­dies again.

I couldn’t really han­dle cof­fee for a cou­ple of months, which was quite depress­ing for some­one who adores the stuff. For a while, I thought it was down to side effects from my thy­roid med­ica­tion, but my doc­tor told me it wasn’t, it was the actual dis­ease caus­ing the breath­less­ness and heart palpitations.

For about the last fort­night, I haven’t had those symp­toms because around a week prior to that, my doc­tor up the dosage on the thy­roid meds. I’m still not on a high dose and its likely to be increased again in Decem­ber, after my next blood test. I just think the new dose is hav­ing some sort of ther­a­peu­tic effect on me.

I’ve also seemed more ener­getic in the last week or so and I am feel­ing more myself than I have in a long time. That’s a good thing.

My back has been a lot bet­ter too. You might remem­ber that’s how all this health non­sense started, with a crip­pling back prob­lem. I never do any­thing that’s straight­for­ward, so nat­u­rally my thy­roid con­di­tion caused inflam­ma­tion in my back!

I was off from work for about 8 or 9 weeks in the end and my doc­tor offered (or rather sug­gested) that I take even more time off but my bank account couldn’t afford it. I went back for a cou­ple of nights a cou­ple of weeks ago and it was a seri­ous strug­gle, but I had another long planned gap of 2 weeks between shifts and my health improved some­what dur­ing that time.

While I was off, I had the joys of hav­ing builders in, refit­ting my ancient bath­room. I’d been try­ing to get this done for years, but find­ing some­one reli­able and trust­wor­thy was nearly impos­si­ble. In the end, I found a plumb­ing com­pany that was not ridicu­lously expen­sive and did the job fairly well, but it meant nearly two weeks of dis­rup­tion in my home.

The new bath­room is sim­ple and mod­ern, replac­ing a 30–40 year old bath­room that was nei­ther. I’m just happy to have it finished.

Return­ing to work this time was far less daunt­ing because I am gen­uinely start­ing to feel bet­ter. After being part time for Octo­ber, I’m back to work­ing full time in Novem­ber. Trust me, its a wel­come return and not just for the finan­cial reasons.

I like work­ing and I’ve missed it; I’ve missed my work mates too. That said, I am get­ting increas­ingly bored with being asked where I’ve been for the last cou­ple of months and hav­ing to explain all of my health woes. I thought about prepar­ing a writ­ten press state­ment, that I could hand out and refer to when repeat­edly ques­tioned, but peo­ple would think that was weird.

I’m sure some of the peo­ple ask­ing gen­uinely care how I am, but the major­ity are just ask­ing to be nosy. I also thought about mak­ing shit up and giv­ing every­one a dif­fer­ent answer on my where­abouts, like:

- I was on a secret mis­sion for the queen
– I was direct­ing my first fea­ture film
– I was on tour with my band
– I was in a drug induced coma
– I was hav­ing my shin­bones stretched (and it didn’t work!)
– I ran away and joined the cir­cus
– I was on an EU wide thrill-killing spree

And my per­sonal favourite:
– I don’t know where I’ve been, I have amnesia

The only place I ever want to talk about myself is right here on my web­site. In real life, I’d much rather be ignored and not have to explain myself to oth­ers. I’m actu­ally quite a pri­vate per­son, reclu­sive even, but when peo­ple pre­tend to be inter­ested in your life, you have to pre­tend you’re happy for their inter­est. Social niceties have to be respected, even when you know its all bullshit…especially when you know its all bullshit.

But not you, of course. You’re deeply inter­ested in every sin­gle aspect of my blessed exis­tence and you hang on my every word. Online, I’m used to the atten­tion and I crave it like a drug.

Ok, not really like a drug and believe me I know the difference.

It’s more like leav­ing the cur­tains open, while you change your cloth­ing in front of the win­dow. I’m giv­ing you the choice to peep at me, but its up to you if you choose to cast your glance in my direc­tion and if you do, you might see more than you expected.

My life is an open book here on the inter­net, avail­able for you to casu­ally thumb through the more inter­est­ing chap­ters, assum­ing one day I might write some. We can all wait for that day to come, but until then you’ll just have to put up with what­ever dri­vel I post.

Like this point­less entry about my rather point­less life.

You can still win my bub­bler. Go on, take a chance, its not like it costs you anything!

I’ve just fin­ished a mam­moth run of work. I col­lapsed in a heap yes­ter­day and stayed that way for around 12 hours until one of my kit­tens woke me up around 4:30am this morn­ing. Hey ho.

My kit­tens are now 10 months old and the lit­tle boy is already huge. He is going to be a giant, mon­ster cat when he is fully grown. He was the one who woke me this morn­ing, by sit­ting on my chest and star­ing me awake. His lit­tle sis­ter was lay­ing on my legs at the same time, sort of rolling around, also try­ing to get my attention.

And that’s really all they wanted; atten­tion. There was plenty of food and water for them, they didn’t need me for that. They sim­ply required me to pay them atten­tion. That didn’t take very long.

Once up, I had to feed the older cats, a 3 year old and a 16 year old. The 3 year just needed me to pre­tend to feed her, so that she would think it was time for her to eat. Yes, she is slightly neu­rotic, but that’s OK.

The 16 year old, our old­est cat needs tinned food these days, as the dry stuff is a bit too hard for her to chew. She’s nearly com­pletely blind from cataracts, but still gets around the house very well. That’s not true out­side though and as of a cou­ple of days ago, I can no longer let her go out. She went under the fence into my neighbour’s yard and couldn’t find her way back — I had to go and res­cue her and she was car­ried home in my arms. She’s still quite feisty and is doing quite well con­sid­er­ing her age.

After sort­ing out the cats, I parked myself in front of my iMac and did some surf­ing. Between my RSS feeds and sites I visit reg­u­larly, I prob­a­bly vis­ited at least 30 of them before 6am.

I also down­loaded the lat­est episode of Lost. Yes, I know I could wait a few days and catch it on Sky One, but why would I do that? Then I would miss out on all the cool stuff on the inter­net that fol­lows, which is released at the Amer­i­can ABC pace.

I’m really into Lost, I think it is eas­ily one of the best pro­grammes on the box. It’s so com­plex and lay­ered and mostly it does my head in, but I know they are tak­ing it some­where. I am really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the last 2 sea­sons play out, espe­cially as there are only 3 more hours of it left this series, before another ago­nis­ing 10 month wait for more.

I’ve also been watch­ing Mad Men, which I missed when it first aired and was eas­ily down­load­able, but thanks to BBC4, I’ve been able to see the entire series. Wow, its good and Don Draper has got to be the ulti­mate in cap­i­tal­ist anti-heroes. I’ve always liked anti-heroes and secretly like to think I’m one myself. You’re all root­ing for me, even though you know you shouldn’t.

After hang­ing out with the Losties, I made myself my first proper cof­fee of the day with my Vivi. I haven’t used it over a week, because of my erratic work sched­ule and sleep pat­tern, but I haven’t gone with­out excel­lent coffee.

My sec­ondary method of brew­ing fresh cof­fee is now a device called an Aero­Press.

It’s quick and easy to use and it cleans up in sec­onds. What’s not to love?

The cool thing for me about my Aero­Press is that I can use the exact same cof­fee I use in the Vivi, ground the exact same way, so no mess­ing around with the set­ting my grinder. The Aero­Press makes what I would describe as some­thing sim­i­lar to espresso, in strength and vol­ume, but not in tex­ture or com­plex­ity. That’s ok, because the Aero­Press costs sig­nif­i­cantly less than a proper pro-sumer espresso machine.

You can pick up an Aero­Press for as lit­tle as under 20 quid (email me if you want the site sell­ing them that low, they also sell the best freshly roasted beans in the UK) and it will make amaz­ing cof­fee for you too.

By far, the most impor­tant thing you need for mak­ing great cof­fee is freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. When I first started look­ing into cof­fee, this was the most dif­fi­cult thing to get my head around, mainly because of the cost of a decent grinder capa­ble of pro­duc­ing the qual­ity you need for a good espresso machine. Some peo­ple even say the espresso machine is an acces­sory for the grinder and that didn’t really make sense to me until I used my set-up for a while.

An espresso machine basi­cally has an on/off switch; you turn the pump on to force water through the ground cof­fee (at the right pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture) and then you switch it off when you’ve reached the required vol­ume or level of extrac­tion. That’s all the con­trol you really have, on and off. The grinder is what actu­ally gives you any say in how your cof­fee is pro­duced, the coarser the grinder, the faster the pour, the finer the grind, the slower the pour. You aim to pro­duce a dou­ble espresso in around 30 sec­onds, with the colour of the cof­fee stream going tan around that time as well.

Ok, this is tedious to you if you have no inter­est in cof­fee, but as you can prob­a­bly tell, I’ve really got into this in a big way. I’m drink­ing my 2nd cof­fee of the day right now and its every bit as good as my first. Con­sis­tency is what you aim for in mak­ing good cof­fee and I can pretty much repro­duce the same result over and over. That job in Star­bucks is look­ing more and more likely!

It’s just gone 8am, here in north Lon­don, the sun is shin­ing and its expected to be another warm day. I’ve been awake for 3 and 1/2 hours and I’ve pretty much told you every­thing I’ve already done. I’ve replied to a few emails and now I’ve writ­ten this post. You are fully and com­pletely up to date.

All that’s left to do now, is post this on my web­site and you’ll know that’s hap­pened because you’re read­ing it. I’ve got noth­ing left to share with you for now.

A-hoy hip­py­fans, there be hip­pies here!

Well, one hippy, actu­ally and I’m not even a real hippy. Sue me for false adver­tis­ing and then request a full refund!

My month of lit­tle work­ing isn’t pan­ning out as I had planned. Who’s sur­prised? No mat­ter how much free time I have, its never enough, but then it’s never really free either.

How do nor­mal peo­ple do it? You know, peo­ple who work Mon­day through Fri­day, 9–5, every week. How do they man­age to keep it all together with noth­ing but the week­end to do their real life stuff? It bog­gles my mind.

For the bet­ter part of the last 20 years, I’ve man­aged to avoid the Mon-Fri rou­tine. The life of a shift­worker is much more fun and there’s noth­ing I like bet­ter than hav­ing days off dur­ing the week. Except maybe easy sex and hard drugs, but then they go hand in hand with lots of free time and the soul of a junior-satan.

Don’t you have the soul of a junior satan? Guess its just me then!

You see, I under­stand the inher­ent dif­fer­ence between good and bad, I’m just a bit capri­cious when it comes to decid­ing which side of the line to choose. I make up my own mind, using my own moral com­pass for guid­ance and my “true north” prob­a­bly dif­fers from most people’s.

I often choose the path of least resis­tance, but then at my age and so lack­ing in ambi­tion and direc­tion, what else would I do?

I spent an entire day this week swap­ping out my shitty, cheap old stereo for a brand new, shiny sil­ver AV Amp. I bought a Pio­neer VSX-917v and saved 60 quid wait­ing until after xmas. That’s when I first scoped it out, back in Decem­ber, but elected to wait and it was a wise decision.

My old stereo, an 8 year old Tech­nics, was a combo CD player, cas­sette deck(!!) and radio receiver, but all I really used it for is the amp, which had SKY+, a DVD player and my mac mini con­nected to it, all with stereo ana­logue con­nec­tions. For the last cou­ple of months, the sound has been cut­ting out, only restored by a well placed, mea­sured slap on the top of the unit with a flat palm. I’m sure that’s the best way to fix any­thing, anyway.

The cut­ting out was steadily wors­en­ing, so I ordered the Pio­neer unit a cou­ple of weeks ago and finally got around to installing it last week.

I bought some dig­i­tal audio cables, TOSlinks for the mini and SKY+ and a dig­i­tal coax­ial for the DVD player. The new amp was too big to go on the shelf where the old stereo lived, which meant I had to tear down the entire set-up and re-cable it all from scratch. Yawn.

It took me a few hours to rip it all apart and clean out the years of dust trapped in the inac­ces­si­ble bits and a cou­ple more hours to rein­stall, con­fig­ure and test every­thing, but even­tu­ally I had it all work­ing well.

The new amp will sup­port 7.1 audio, but my liv­ing room won’t. I can’t even fit 5.1, because I have no space for the rear sur­round speaker. Right now, it only has 2 speak­ers con­nected, but I have a sub­woofer ordered and the space cleared for it when it comes.

Every­thing worked great the first day it was con­nected and I was very pleased with the sound qual­ity. I kept the Tech­nics speak­ers from the old set-up because they are small, but decent and are bi-amped, which the Pio­neer also sup­ports. I am very happy with the sound and expect the sub­woofer will make it sound even better.

On the sec­ond day, Mrs. Hippy dis­cov­ered a burn­ing smell com­ing out of the amp. It turns out, the amp runs ridicu­lously hot and needs to be well ven­ti­lated. It’s cur­rent home, under­neath the shelf where my TV lives, has pre­cious lit­tle space between the top of the Pio­neer and the shelf. Ut-oh. I have to move the Pio­neer. Yawn.

My house is small, and my liv­ing room is smaller. I don’t have any other options for plac­ing the Pio­neer amp. I have to magic up a 50cm x 50cm space, and I think I’ve found it, all I need is a small table to put the amp on…and IKEA sells one for £7.99. Now, I just have to get myself to IKEA, which is hell on earth with extra-added yuppies.

I don’t want my new amp to burn up, it sounds far too good. Right now, I have a small fan aimed at it, which doesn’t really help with the ambi­ent noise lev­els, but does keep things cooler and smelling less like an elec­tri­cal fire! Hope­fully, I’ll have the whole thing sorted out in the next day or so.

I meant to wake up really early this morn­ing and visit IKEA, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll go later today, if the spirit moves me.

I also need to buy another set of cables…longer ones. Repo­si­tion­ing the amp puts it out of range of all the new cables I bought.

Noth­ing in my life is ever easy, not even the sim­plest of tasks. Swap­ping out an old stereo for a new ampli­fier shouldn’t become a major engi­neer­ing project. And I should be taller, too!

I’m still dig­ging excel­lent cof­fee every day, though, which soft­ens the blow on every­thing. Right now, I am sip­ping a freshly made cap­puc­cino, crafted by my own hand not five min­utes ago, from freshly ground beans that were grown in El Sal­vador and roasted 10 days ago. Yumm.

This week’s cof­fee bat­tle has been over frothed milk. Froth­ing milk prop­erly takes prac­tise and skill and I woe­fully inad­e­quate at cre­at­ing micro­foam, which is the goal of baris­tas. Micro­foam has a vel­vety tex­ture and is pourable, you should never need to spoon it into the cup. It shouldn’t have peaks either and shouldn’t be stiff like whipped egg whites.

I’ve yet to work out the secret to per­fect micro­foam, though I am try­ing all the tricks sug­gested online, from chill­ing the metal jug, to using full-fat milk. Actu­ally, and this makes no sense to me at all, I am hav­ing bet­ter luck with skimmed milk, which defies logic and every­thing I’ve read online. Go figure.

Don’t laugh, one day my cof­fee brew­ing skills may save my life. When TV news finally chews me up and spits me out, Star­bucks here I come!

Happy fuck­ing Feb­ru­ary, fuckers!

Feb­ru­ary is one of my favourite months, because its the short­est. It breezes right by like nobody’s busi­ness, though this year there’s an extra day, because its leap year. Great.

Jan­u­ary was hard­core for me, I worked way too much and slept way too lit­tle. Last night I slept 14 con­tin­u­ous hours. I guess I needed it. Feb­ru­ary is going to be easier.

I’m not work­ing as much this month, par­tially by design. I’ve got to sort out a few things that are only pos­si­ble in the day­light and I want to deal with a few per­sonal mat­ters as well.

Hope­fully this also means that you guys will be see­ing a bit more from me, though I didn’t do that badly in Jan­u­ary, con­sid­er­ing my lack of free time. Maybe its all the coffee!

Since I got my new cof­fee set-up, I am drink­ing lots more of the stuff and I am buzzing on caf­feine like crazy. It means I have to smoke even more weed to stay mel­low, so its like I’m groov­ing on nature’s groovi­est speed­ball. I’m up, I’m down, I’m up, I’m down and then even­tu­ally I’m some­where in the middle.

I’ve been check­ing out dif­fer­ent beans because I need to learn more about them. I was using blends, but now I am try­ing some sin­gle estates, all roasted to order from the cool web­site I’ve been order­ing from recently. Mrs. H prefers the sin­gle bean cof­fee and I think I do too. I’m try­ing a dif­fer­ent one every few days or so.

My brother and I have been toy­ing with the idea of revamp­ing my web­site again. This design’s been up for 2 years now, maybe it is time for a change. What would you like to see me do differently?

How about a forum? It would solve my com­ment prob­lem. I miss hav­ing peo­ple com­ment here, but I don’t miss the 1000s of spam-comments I was receiv­ing day after day. Besides, if any­one is going to punt coun­ter­feit via­gra on my web­site, it’s going to be me, dammit! Coun­ter­feit via­gra is prob­a­bly just as effec­tive as the real thing, any­way, because its all just a placebo effect. Swal­low this blue smar­tie and have the increased con­fi­dence in your erec­tion, or chew it for a nice choco­lately treat!

Or how about a stream­ing web­cam show­ing you my life 24/7? You could watch me order take­aways and roll spliffs and that’s just at work! At home, you would get to see me clean­ing out lit­ter boxes and brew­ing espres­sos, often at the exact same time!

Maybe the stream­ing web­cam is a bad idea, since I’d never be able to have another wank again, unless I did it in pub­lic and there are far too many CCTV cam­eras to get away with that, so I might as well just do it at home in front of my stream­ing web­cam and all of you.

There’s not going to be a web­cam and there’s not going to be any wanking.

With­out the web­cam, though, you’ll never know for sure!

I men­tioned recently that I bought a brand new cof­fee mak­ing rig. It’s true.

Before xmas, I decided it was time to get a proper espresso maker. I’d rid myself of my old mon­stros­ity; a com­bi­na­tion steam dri­ven espresso maker and 8-cup drip pot together in one ugly, black plas­tic casing.

I never used the drip pot and the espresso maker churned out drink­able, yet not quite right cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes and I’m a bit of a cof­fee obses­sive, espe­cially now.

I started doing what I usu­ally do when I’m inter­ested in some­thing, I surfed the inter­net and I found three really good websites:

www.coffeegeek.com

www.homebarista.com

www.toomuchcoffee.com

Each site is chock full of extremely use­ful infor­ma­tion about cof­fee, from equip­ment reviews to bean rec­om­men­da­tions and tips and tricks on how to get the best from your cof­fee. I learned loads, but still have lots more to learn. If you look care­fully, you might even find some posts from me on one of the forums.

Grow­ing up, I wasn’t into cof­fee. My par­ents either drank instant, or weak and watery fil­ter cof­fee and all of it decaf.

It wasn’t until the early 80s that I had my first proper cap­puc­cino. From then, I was hooked.

It wasn’t as easy as it is now to get a good cof­fee, this was in the days before there was a Star­bucks on every cor­ner, you had to look around to find places that made them right.

My Ital­ian grand­fa­ther, my mother’s father, who came from just out­side Naples, used to make espresso using a tra­di­tional stove-top, Moka pot and I can remem­ber my par­ents say­ing that it was far too strong and bit­ter for their taste. I never got to try any, even though I wanted to. They said I wouldn’t like it. At that age, they were prob­a­bly right, but I’ll never know. Grandpa’s been in heaven for a very long time.

I’ve owned a cou­ple of steam dri­ven espresso machines, besides the old one I recently binned. I bought my first one in the early 90s and used it for sev­eral years before it gave up the ghost. Another one fol­lowed and that lasted a few more years, but now, I own a proper machine.

It turned out, before I started my manic online infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing exer­cise, I knew less than did­dly squat about coffee.

For starters, the online cof­fee com­mu­nity refers to those steam dri­ven espresso machines as “steam toys” as they don’t make real espresso. By steam dri­ven, what I mean is that the water is heated to the tem­per­a­ture of steam and the steam pres­sure forces the over­heated water through the ground cof­fee. That would make the water far too hot for brew­ing coffee.

Cof­fee should be brewed at just below boil­ing point; steam is water heated to beyond boil­ing point. That’s not good.

Proper espresso machines come in three vari­eties, all of them pro­duce water at “brew tem­per­a­ture” plus steam for froth­ing milk, but each accom­plishes this in dif­fer­ent ways.

The most basic machine is called a sin­gle boiler-dual use machine and it works like this: Inside it is a a sin­gle boiler, with two user con­trol­lable ther­mostats, one heats the water to brew temp, the sec­ond brings it up to steam temp. The catch is, you have to wait for the machine to tran­si­tion from one temp to the next, which can take a minute or so, depend­ing upon the machine. You have to time what you are doing very care­fully to get the most out of this machine. These are the least expen­sive as well and include most Gag­gia home mod­els and the Ran­cilio Sil­via I con­tem­plated buying.

At the other end of the scale are dual boiler machines; one at brew temp and a 2nd at steam temp. With this sort of sys­tem, you can pull shots and steam milk at the same time, with­out any wait­ing or tran­si­tion­ing. Most pro­fes­sional machines work this way.

And in the mid­dle, the third cat­e­gory is what I bought, a heat exchanger (HX) machine. These are clever devices, they use one boiler which only comes up to steam temp, and the brew water is flash heated via a heat exchanger that passes through the boiler. This set up gives you con­tin­u­ous steam and brew capa­bil­ity, but with­out the extra com­pli­ca­tion of 2 boilers.

Have I bored the bejeezus out of you yet?
I’ll stop being tech­ni­cal now.

All of these machines are fairly sim­ple to oper­ate, but it takes a cer­tain amount of knowl­edge and as I am learn­ing, expe­ri­ence to max­imise their potential.

By far the most impor­tant info I picked up from my new found cof­fee web­sites con­cerned beans and grinders. You need a seri­ously good grinder and you need freshly roasted beans.

Decent grinders, like any­thing good, aren’t cheap and my cof­fee expert pals all sug­gest you bud­get 50% of the cost of your espresso machine, for the grinder. Espresso machines can be quite finicky about how finely ground the cof­fee is, too fine and the machine will choke and you’ll get noth­ing out of it and if it is too coarse, your shot will pour too fast and you’ll have a cup of sour tast­ing swill.

Being a com­plete begin­ner at this, it took me a cou­ple of hours of exper­i­men­ta­tion before I got my first drink­able shot from my new kit. Thank­fully, the peo­ple I bought it from sent me a free kilo of roasted beans because I burned through half it on that first day and all but the last 2 shots went down the drain.

A proper espresso, sin­gle (1 oz) or dou­ble (2 oz), should take approx­i­mately 20–25 sec­onds to pour. Using lined shot glasses, marked at the 1 oz level and a stop watch, you aim for this magic tim­ing and amount by adjust­ing the fine­ness of your grind. It took me a while to get a feel for all this, but since then I have used dif­fer­ent beans, which required adjust­ments and have been able to fine-tune the grinder to improve my results. Today, I’ve made myself two cap­puc­ci­nos and the espres­sos that went into them were the best I’ve made so far. They weren’t per­fect, but I’m on my way!

By far, what has made the biggest dif­fer­ence to my cof­fee is fresh beans. I really wish some­one share this key fact with me ages ago. Cof­fee beans need to rest for about 2 days after roast­ing, to allow for the CO2 gasses to be released, don’t ask me why. After that, its fresh for around 2 weeks, before it begins to go stale. Oh and it needs to be ground just prior to brew­ing, as its starts to go off within min­utes of being turned to brown dust.

I didn’t know any of that shit! And its all true!

For the last few years, I’ve been using a cafetière, or press pot or French press, if you pre­fer, but I’ve been putting pre-ground, super­mar­ket bought cof­fee into it. Drink­able, but noth­ing like the cof­fee I’ve been enjoy­ing since I bought the new set-up.

Freshly ground beans are a rev­e­la­tion, with flavours so rich and com­plex that I don’t have the vocab­u­lary or knowl­edge to really express it in any mean­ing­ful way. I can say, with­out ques­tion, that in the last week or so, I’ve had some of the best cof­fee I’ve ever tasted, anywhere!

Even Mrs. H noticed when I switched to the freshly roasted beans, that it tasted bet­ter. The place I’m get­ting them from is an online shop, which roasts them to order and ships them out, the same day. You receive them the next day, well pack­aged, with the date of roast­ing printed on the pack. And it’s not that expen­sive, either.

The espresso machine I bought is an Izzo Vivi, which is made in Italy, and is very shiny and heavy. The orig­i­nal design of this type of machine was patented in 1961 and it has a very dis­tinc­tive group­head, which if you visit cof­fee bars, you would prob­a­bly recog­nise. It’s called an E61 group­head; the group­head is the bit they lock the portafil­ter into, just before brew­ing. Oh and the portafil­ter is the handle-thing which holds the fil­ter bas­ket, filled with ground cof­fee. I bet you know what I mean!

It took me ages to decide on which machine to buy and while my deci­sion was guided and informed by those web­sites I men­tioned, the per­son who helped me the most was the sales­per­son I spoke to at the online com­pany where I bought it.

I spent nearly an hour on the tele­phone with this sales­per­son, ask­ing as many ques­tions as I could, includ­ing “which one do you own?” and “which one has the least returns?” The Izzo Vivi was the answer to both ques­tions and I was sold. It was one of the mod­els I was con­sid­er­ing, any­way, so it wasn’t a com­plete sur­prise. Actu­ally, the one I was lean­ing towards was sig­nif­i­cantly more expen­sive than the Vivi, but my sales­per­son friend said it wasn’t as well con­structed and it was made of infe­rior components.

The Vivi is based on a com­mer­cial design and uses many of the same parts and com­po­nents as its big­ger, pro­fes­sional broth­ers. That means if and when it ever needs repairs, the new bits won’t be that expensive.

The place I bought it from is really cool, they give you a 2-year war­ranty plus they unbox, check and cal­i­brate the machine, before ship­ping it to you. I was very impressed. They also dou­ble box it, which meant it arrived in pris­tine condition.

I also bought my grinder from this com­pany, a Macap M4D, but I won’t bore you with too many details, except to say it is a pro­fes­sional piece of kit and should last for years, as should the espresso machine. They told me with care and main­te­nance, the Vivi should keep going for at least 20 years.

I’m not going to post a link to this com­pany, as I don’t know if they would appre­ci­ate being asso­ci­ated with some drugged up weird-o like myself, but if any­one is inter­ested in find­ing out more, please email me and I’ll gladly pro­vide you with the link; just don’t tell ‘em the hippy sent you! I am very impressed with them and would heartily pro­vide them with my seal of approval and rec­om­men­da­tion. I don’t think I would have bought a machine in this price range, from any­one else.

Like­wise for my source for cof­fee beans; I would love to throw some busi­ness their way, the cof­fee from them has been orgas­mic and the ser­vice has been first class too, but I don’t want to piss them off because of who I am. I’m happy to pro­vide the link pri­vately, should you wish to try some for your­self and they’ll grind it for you, if you wish.

Some com­pa­nies, like my good friends at EDIT are happy to be asso­ci­ated with me, oth­ers might find me a bit too con­tro­ver­sial. That’s fair enough, I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, or rather coffee.

In my world, cof­fee is a drug, just like any­thing else that effects your mood or cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem. Caf­feine is a seri­ous stim­u­lant and I am very sen­si­tive to it, always have been. That means I have to stop drink­ing cof­fee fairly early in my day, or sleep will be elu­sive come bed­time. It doesn’t mat­ter, because I really love the stuff, never more than I do now!

My cof­fee jour­ney? The title of the this entry, comes from a phrase I’ve seen often repeated, to new­bies such as myself on cof­fee forums and it refers to the route you take to get the best cof­fee expe­ri­ence imag­in­able. With fresh beans, my new grinder and my new espresso machine, my jour­ney has moved sev­eral light years ahead in a very pos­i­tive direction.

Bot­toms up!