A Nice Cuppa

I overheard the owner Elspeth say, “Don’t outsource your soul”
It’s a sassy tea room in the East Village, NYC sporting a sort of slang Colonial tea gone into the wilderness with 1940’s Jazz. There is an invisible shroud of incense which can ignite a sort of “cronos dysphoria”. Cronos meaning “time”, I […]

Every week, I find myself in the coffee aisle of my grocery store, all sense of time lost, gazing at the wall of fresh coffees. I try to find a new bean or blend every week, and have really enjoyed all my new findings. But some days, I???m just tired. I have […]

I was so excited by my new arrival of Peruvian Swiss Water Processed Decaf beans from The Merchants of Green Coffee that I toasted these babies up almost to the point of ash. Oops. Apparently, these beans don’t tolerate much heat and while they didn’t even get to the second crack (my usual […]

With last weekend???s holiday, I felt a yin for a summery coffee treat. Having only recently discovered that I do in fact enjoy good espresso (as opposed to the BAD espresso I???ve tried in the past), I was tempted by a pint of Ciao Bella Espresso Gelato.
Always a sucker for web research, I […]

Love of craft beer and excellent coffee go hand in hand. Almost all the craft beer enthusiasts I know are just as nuts about their coffee as they are about their beer. And almost one hundred percent of the people who are fussy about both their beer and their coffee insist on eating […]

I love a good latte. When I???m drinking an honest-to-goodness, properly crafted latte, I am likely to get caught up in the cup and wax poetic about the delicate balance of flavors ??? the symphony of milk and espresso that waltzes on my tastebuds. Yet, sadly, the latte has become a lost art […]

I???m not a big tea drinker. I dig the herbal tea when I???m feeling ill, but standard black tea was never my thing. A friend introduced me to Chai Spiced tea a few years ago, and that was tasty, but I realized that I was pouring so much sugar into the drink; it was […]

I???ve been waiting for my green coffee place to send me a nice fat bag of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, quite possibly the best coffee ever, but seeing as the Yirgacheffe is out of season right now, I was happy to have the Djimmah instead. My coffee preferences run to Africa and Asian as opposed to South […]

Unless you are a seasoned craft beer appreciator, the combination of coffee and beer might sound a little strange, but the two flavors work together and make a nice pairing.
My first experience with mixing the flavor of beer with coffee was when I was in graduate school. At the north gates of the […]

West Oakland is not exactly hopping. The nearest place to get a cup of coffee is the mini-mart around the corner. Not exactly my idea of a decent cup of coffee. (More often than not the brew is so old and tasteless, that when you have no other options, you find yourself […]