Great for the rest of the world, but last I checked, the American scene was hardly Europe's groupie. We are still stuck with hip. Noah

Yes, small in relation to Starbucks, Peets, etc. We think of the favorite 3rd Wave joints as huge forces in the coffee world, because they are for us, but isn't their success really much more on the scale of successful local restaurants, bakeries, etc? I don't know if significant commercial success ...

With a legal contract, in writing, of course. C'mon. Its easy to get carried away and dispute a person's point by taking literally some verbage which clearly is not literal. If there are cafes without coolness that are successful, then by all means, I would love to know where they are. Not to single...

I think Ken hit the nail on the head here. If you took out all of the "hip" from a successful local shop, and ran it with a normal, clean cut, shirt n' tie barista, without music and couches, but served only the very best coffees available, I guarantee you would have an empty shop. But the "hip" is

Perhaps it is a silly question, but my Poppery II roaster is now dead (the kids spilled applesauce into it), so I got a P1 to replace it. With the P2, I had the whole unit hooked up to a variac, but this time around, I would like to have the fan going at full power the whole time. Is

How reliable an indicator of sufficient drying, if at all, is the force and duration of 1st crack? In other words, if a roast has a very muted and short first crack, how often can I assume that insufficient drying is the culprit rather than a coffee with a low moisture content? If the correlation is...

Real city roasts that scream with flavor are the one roast that I am struggling the most to achieve. I am perhaps confused about something. When roasting very light, should one still try to achieve the full amount of development time from the onset of first crack to the end of first crack, or does r...

Sounds like you have the double basket. Actually, the Caravel double is a 12 gram basket, I believe

{link}

I agree. I spent my first few years of espresso making with a low-end (translation: affordable on a college budget) pump machine. Getting decent straight espresso was a very special event with this machine (using a hand grinder) and rarely happened. I may be wrong, but it seems that one advantage to...