Tag: Coffee

Coffee is Life

Everyone who knows me knows I love my coffee. Black and lightly sweetened (Stevia in the Raw). I like Lattes and the French Press. Every week, I purchase a pound of freshly roasted Ethiopian Harrar from a local retailer, Buy the Cup, in Rocky Hill, a borough in Montgomery Township. The owners, Dale and Roy Gwin are talkative locals who are also very knowledgeable about coffee.

Buy the Cup
130 Washington St
Rocky Hill, NJ 08553-1020
(609) 430-0576

Although I get my beans freshly ground each week, according to Nathan Smith, author of the CoffeeNate blog, ground coffee is only fresh for 18 minutes while roasted whole beans will last 10 days. That means I have not been getting the best out of cup-o-joe! Nate and I exchanged a few more tweets after I asked him which grinder he recommended. He pointed me to a video on his web site and his own favorite grinder, the Breville BCG450XL Conical Burr Grinder. According to Nate, a burr grinder will grind the coffee to exact specifications. I've added this to my Amazon Wish List and expect to have a new appreciation for my Harrar after my tax refund arrives.

Roaster: Rockaffe

Your boss is killing you

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.

(Via -You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss.)