Posts Tagged ‘Coffee’
The Battle of the Brewers…
There are just over 11,100 Starbucks locations in the U.S; Dunkin’ Donuts has 7,200… and Boston.com has mapped them all for us, nationally (green dots for Starbucks, red for Dunkin):
… and in major cities (as here, New York):
Find out what it all portends in “Split country: Dunkin’ vs. Starbucks.”
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As we choose sides, we might spare a well-caffeinated thought for the wise and witty George Carlin; he died on this date in 2008. The Grammy-winning comedian is probably best remembered for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” (originated on his third album). When it was first broadcast on New York radio, a complaint led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ban the broadcast as “indecent,” an order that was upheld by the Supreme Court and remains in effect today. Not coincidentally, Carlin was selected to host the first Saturday Night Live.
“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all”*…
Hot or iced, drip, French press, espresso, Chemex or Keurig, each of us downs about 23 gallons of joe a year on average. It’s in our blood. It’s also on our streets, where Starbucks outposts outnumber hospitals and colleges. And even on our resumes: 161,000 people list “coffee” as a skill on LinkedIn.
But the truth is, our cup is half empty. We could be drinking a lot more coffee and, in fact, we used to. In 1946, when America’s thirst for coffee peaked, each of us swallowed about 48 gallons a year on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — more than twice current consumption. “We’d drink coffee with breakfast, coffee with lunch, and coffee with dinner,” says John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest. “And mostly, we’d drink it at home.”
The whole dark-roasted story at “America’s coffee cup is half full.”
* David Lynch
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As we reach for another soft drink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Paul P. Harris, a Chicago attorney, met with three friends– Gustave E. Loehr (a mining engineer), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor)– to found The Rotary Club, the world’s first service club. It was so named, as the friends intended to rotate the site of their meetings among members’ offices. Now known as Rotary International, the organization has 34,282 local clubs and over 1.2 million members worldwide.
[coffee photo sourced here; Rotary founders, here]
Reproducing excellence?…
Even the most perfect reproduction… is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
– Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Julian Baggini recalls a taste test of coffees:
…With me were a coffee shop owner, two coffee obsessives, and a coffee-drinking friend. We were going to blind-taste three coffees: Nespresso capsule coffee, which is served in the restaurant; the traditional espresso that the hotel provides for room service; and a third unmarked coffee I had brought with me to be made the same way, just to see if the whole thing was nonsense and coffee is coffee is coffee. It was the artisan versus the machine…
In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine. The traditional house espresso scored 18 points, and was the favourite of one taster. But the clear winner with 22 points was the Nespresso, which both scored most consistently and was the favourite of two of the four tasters…
His account becomes a meditation on authenticity:
The key descriptors for Nespresso were ‘smooth’ and ‘easy to drink’. And from the point of view of restaurateurs who use it, the key word is ‘consistency’. It was far from bland, but it was not challenging or distinctive either. It’s a coffee everyone can really like but few will love: the highest common denominator, if you like…
And humanity:
We are not simply hedonic machines who thrive if supplied with things that tick certain boxes for sensory pleasure, aesthetic merit, and so on. We are knowing as well as sensing creatures, and knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them. Chocolate made from cocoa beans grown by people in near slave conditions should taste more bitter than a fairly traded bar, even if it does not in a blind tasting. Blindness, far from making tests fair, actually robs us of knowledge of what is most important, while perpetuating the illusion that all that really matters is how it feels or seems at the moment of consumption…
Read this eminently-interesting essay in its entirety in Aeon.
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As we accentuate the artisanal, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that ukelele sensation Tiny Tim set a new world record for non-stop professional singing– two hours and fifteen minutes– at Luna Park in Sydney, Australia.
The second most traded commodity on earth…
From The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman),
click image, or hereDo visit the site, and check out such gems as “How to Use an Apostrophe” and “Six Reasons Bacon is Better than True Love.” (Tip ‘o the hat to our friends at Laughing Squid)
As we add yet another sugar, we might recall that it was on this date in 1307 that Wilhelm Tell, or we Anglos tend to know him, William Tell, shot an apple off his son’s head.
Tell, originally from Bürglen, was a resident of the Canton of Uri (in what is now Switzerland), well known as an expert marksman with the crossbow. At the time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri. Hermann Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village’s central square, hung his hat on top of it, and demanded that all the local townsfolk bow before the hat. When Tell passed by the hat without bowing, he was arrested; his punishment was being forced to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter– or else both would be executed. Tell was promised freedom if he succeeded.
As the legend has it, Tell split the fruit with a single bolt from his crossbow. When Gessler queried him about the purpose of a second bolt in his quiver, Tell answered that if he had killed his son, he would have turned the crossbow on Gessler himself. Gessler became enraged at that comment, and had Tell bound and brought to his ship to be taken to his castle at Küssnacht. But when a storm broke on Lake Lucerne, Tell managed to escape. On land, he went to Küssnacht, and when Gessler arrived, Tell shot him with his crossbow.
Tell’s defiance of Gessler sparked a rebellion, in which Tell himself played a major part, leading to the formation of the Swiss Confederation.
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