2012 On the road - Portland Oregon - Coffee food and drink · Tuesday April 24, 2012 by colin newell
There are few American cities more friendly than Portland Oregon. We have been there twice in the last ten years and this April 2012 we returned for the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s big wing-ding – the SCAA 2012 convention. And what a show it was. Even better was the fact that it was being held in one of the most progressive, beautiful, accessible and liberal cities in America.
Portland, Oregon (for Canadians and Canadian lovers) feels more Canadian than many Canadian cities; super friendly and chill people, liberal, free thinking and socially progressive communities – art, culture, amazing food and drink…
And coffee? Enough great java to drown in.
And for a resident of the North West (up here on Vancouver Island) a very easy weekend get-away destination.
Getting there: Yea, you could drive, but why? Time is money. From Vancouver Island, the 2 hour Ferry ride, hour to the border and 3 – 4 hours South on the crowded I5 to Portland… not my idea of good times. Better yet: Alaska Airlines daily service from Victoria via Seattle – total of 55 minutes in the air (if that) and you are there. From the airport, light rail downtown $2.40 – or a 35$ 35 minute cab fare. The train takes a whopping 40 minutes worse case scenario. So, 32 dollars more gets you there 5 minutes sooner.
Staying: There are lots and lots and lots of great hotels – of every stripe and price point. We stayed at the Coast Paramount Hotel. 3 star luxury at a 2 star price. Moderately opulent, spotless, full service, free wi-fi, great bar and Asian themed restaurant, walking distance from all the main downtown shopping and a brief stroll to some of the best food carts in North America. Sadly, we did not sample any of the cart food but the plan is to head back in August (if we don’t go to Chicago… – another story). Anyway, top marks to the Paramount Hotel! If you are feeling hip by all means stay at the ACE (they have a Stumptown Coffee place off of the lobby…) Here is the thing: I am not that hip.
Eating: Portland has more restaurants and more culinary genres than any other city or town in North America. Fact. The food cart scene is like no other. Portland and Oregon is a tax free place – and for whatever reason, eating and drinking out is way cheaper than it is in Canada (and a few other American places) I could not get over the quality of the grub and the absurdly low prices; burgers and beers: $7 and $6 for buns and beers. $6 to 9$ for great pasta entrees at a local Italian place. Great breakfast items at the ritzy “Mother’s” a 10 minute walk away. The Paramount Hotel did a great all morning standard bacon and egg kind of breakfast for around $8. Loved it.
Getting around: Light rail, street cars, buses – all free in the downtown area. All zone travel to the airport: $2.40. That is crazy. If you are ready to explore (a GPS or iPhone or Android or B.B. with some Apps are handy and freely available) there is lots to see; galleries, art, music, industrial areas, cafes and brew pubs scattered hither and thither.
Summary: If you want to explore beer, food, coffee, great people watching, arts and culture, there are few places more eager to please and cooler than Portland Oregon. Give it a whirl. It will not let you down!
Colin and Andrea write and edit the coffeecrew.com blog and travel whenever and where ever possible…
2012 explosion of coffee flower power · Tuesday April 24, 2012 by colin newell
I cannot be happier for my little coffee “farm” in my living room in Rockland, Victoria B.C. Canada – one of my plants is on its second bloom this year – which is wild.
This is not Hawaii. This is not Costa Rica.
This is Victoria.
I guess I still have a green thumb.
Click on any photo for the bigger view.
Coffee plant background: Many folks who love coffee would like to have a coffee plant to admire – here is the skinny on coffee plants. They are not dramatic. They are not colorful. They are largely green and, if you are lucky and treat them right, they will bloom once a year and produce a few “cherries” – these cherries you can pop in your mouth and chew the fruit off – and then spit them out and dry them.
Most people I talk to say, “Hey, do you roast your beans?”
Well no. I have had some pretty good harvests but roasting coffee is way more complicated than picking the beans and tossing them in the oven or in a frying pan or popcorn maker.
Coffee is a very labor intensive crop – from the ground up – and if you have any inclination to grow some plants and create your own steady supply of java…
Well, you might be better off moving to Hawaii.
Coffee plants require special care – they are moderately fragile. They like a certain amount of light and the right amount of “food” and water – and soil with really good drainage.
Cultivation: Abbreviated explanation A coffee plant from a seedling, if raised in your home can take 5 years before it blooms. I speak from experience. And when it blooms, the flowers appear for around 1 – 5 days. There is a lot of waiting for a brief explosion of color. The flower are white, small and moderately fragrant.
When the flowers fall off, the small seed buds soon appear – the Cherry.
They start green, become yellow and then Red over a period of weeks or a month or so. When they are ready you can gently pull them from the stem.
Coffee fruit: Every coffee cherry contains 2 “beans” covered in slimy mucilage after you remove the fruit. OK, so you can clean that off in cold water. Then they need to be dried until there is a certain percentage of moisture in the bean. How do you do that? You could use a low oven – but you also need a method of measuring moisture content – fairly accurately. We won’t go into those tools here because I am sure that I have almost lost you.
The silver skin: Coffee beans have a flak jacket type coat called the silver skin. You need to remove this before you roast. You can do this by hand.
But wait, there is more! Coffee beans have one more coating – called chaff – yet another layer that comes off when you roast – and it floats in the air landing where you cannot get to it. Cool huh? In bigger roasters, there are chaff collection gizmos that handle this.
Roasting: Coffee roasting is smokey, fussy, messy and maddening. I know, I have done my fair share. There are lots of online resources and You-Tube tutorials about coffee roasting. Go look.
A better idea: Grow the coffee plants. Feel good about them. You are better off raising a coffee plant than having a pet or getting a rabbit or kitten for your children. Coffee plants are kind of like teenagers. They need care and feeding and do not seem to do anything – and you need to wait an eternity for anything interesting to happen. They seem to be at their most productive and fecund when they are teenagers – which for coffee plants can be a good thing. For teens, not so much.
Still interested?
2nd day of Spring 2012 wonderful pizza · Wednesday March 21, 2012 by colin newell
Colin and Andrea’s Amazing Pizza
Fresh dough from Ottavio.
Out of the fridge for 20 minutes minimum.
Caramelize 2 medium onions in olive oil/canola oil/butter mixture for 1/2 hour.
Roll dough on counter lightly dusted with flour.
Prepare pizza pan with PAM anti-stick product & light dusting of oil.
Transfer dough to pan.
Add 1/2 cup to 3/4 cup of your favorite organic pizza sauce.
Add onions
Add 2 cups of grated good quality Mozzarella cheese.
Add rings of sliced Chorizo sausage (in our example, a great sample
from Oyama, Vancouver.
Oven pre-heated in advance at 450 degrees.
Drop oven temperature to 425 and Put pizza in oven for 20 minutes.
Remove pizza from oven and gently add Bündnerfleisch cured meat (It is like proscuitto) – do NOT bake the pizza with super-thin Bündnerfleisch charcuterie – it will “kill it” – not good.
To be honest folks: This is the single best pizza I have ever had in my life! What a great day!
One Spring day in 1995 coffee site is born... · Wednesday March 21, 2012 by colin newell
It was on a warm Spring day in 1995 that I was fooling around with an IBM PS/2 running Windows for Workgroups. On other boxes I would soon install and play with early versions of Slackware Linux, Windows and OS/2 (WARP). And on those boxes I would start out with a gopher server server playing with something that would soon turn the World on its ear — The World Wide Web HTTP protocol.
Working in what is now called “Systems” at UVic, I was lucky enough to be at ground zero when the World Wide Web was first flashed up. I tested GOPHER on several machines before running an HTTPD server on a ethernet enabled PC workstation – that would have been as early as the Spring of 1991.
The original domain name, espresso.ts.uvic.ca (which I used for some work related stuff, electronics, radio and so on…) would briefly be the platform for the first version of “The Coffee Experts Group…” (on or about 1994) and this would soon depart for an ISP downtown called Octonet as well as a relative newcomer to Victoria, Islandnet.com
The coffee themed pages become so popular so quickly that I hastily moved it all onto Octonet.com and mirrored it at Islandnet.com where it lives to this very day.
The coffee websites first official domain name was coffee.bc.ca (which is this blog you see today!) The coffeecrew.com (Coffeecrew) [a more modest moniker than “Experts”] was adopted in the late nineties.
17 years on. Happy Birthday to us! Click on the photo below for the bigger view.
Thanks to our our readers for hanging in all these years…
