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Finally, the stars aligned and I was able to go visit Fabrice Moschetti at his coffee roasting business. Took a while to taste the dozen or so coffees he had brewed, and added to my morning buzz. Some interesting flavors from the Indonesian, Ethiopian, Free Trade Organic Mexican etc. It’s fun and fascinating to taste so many coffees in one sitting.

Saturdays from 9-12 is open house at Moschettis’, where Fabrice brews up a bunch of coffees for folks to taste, and to offer up great deals on his fresh roasted beans. This day, he offered $8 a pound coffee. It really is a fantastic for really good coffee that is freshly roasted.
Fabrice and I visited in between all his other free coffee day visitors. The place was hopping, with folks coming, tasting and taking off with bags of coffee in their arms. Today there was live music with two guitarists jamming on some tasty tunes. There are seats at tables and umbrellas to make it a comfortable and friendly. And folks tended hang out, talk about Vallejo, local, national and international politics, home gardens, chickens, social issues etc. I am amazed that Fabrice is bringing together a diverse group of folks from the local community and fostering free speech and exchange of ideas. He is doing something very important for our community.

Fabrice suggested that perhaps I’d like to do a “Steve Roast”, and I giddily agreed! He asked what I’d like to roast. Since I had Sumatra and Uganda on my mind I said how about Sumatra, Uganda and a bean for mid tones. Fabrice suggested Brazil, which is a mellow and mild flavored bean. I agreed, and Fabrice’s right hand man Mario gathered up the coffee and loaded it into the roaster.

I said I’d like a lighter roast just for espresso, and Fabrice said, “it’s your roast”, you say when! I’m like a little kid in a candy shop.

The process is to dry the coffee a bit, and then increase the heat to the target temperature of about 475 degrees. The beans are roasting and rotating in the drum, and go through a color change from a pale green / ivory color to an interesting shade of orange. Soon we get to first crack where you can hear the beans cracking and snapping, and Fabrice says we should turn the fire down and coast through the second crack using the residual heat in the drum. Second crack the color is almost correct. We keep pulling samples and comparing them in both warm tungsten light and then natural sun light. Finally I proclaim the roast almost there and Fabrice pulls the lever of the roaster door and the beautiful coffee cascades out into the cooling bin, where it spins around and is stirred while it cools.

Freshly roasted coffee has a pleasant but subtle aroma of popcorn, and as the age of the coffee increases the aromas mature and become the familiar bouquet of high quality fresh coffee. The aroma changes depending on the bean(s), amount of roast and age. I have learned that there is a prime age of coffee that seems to range from a few days old to two weeks tops. My favorite time is about day four of a roast where the beans mellow and flavor is at it’s peak. Before this the beans are a bit green in flavor, a bit acidic or even citrus like and difficult to control in pulling shots. The first couple days, the crema is immense.

I thanked Fabrice for taking the time to roast with me, and I headed home to pull a first shot.

Day 1. The first 24 hours the coffee is green and very difficult to control. The grinder is dialed in after a few shots, but I’m struggling with a sharp and super bright shot. Eventually, I am able to dial in the grinder more, the amount of coffee, and my tamp and I end up with shots that almost behave. I sample half a dozen shots to dial it in, and finally pull some shots for my lovely wife’s morning latte. They are over extracted which made for a somewhat ashy flavor. I redo the shots and this time the shots are not over extracted and my lovely wife is happy.

Day 2. The second day the espresso is mellowing. There is still the gentle aroma of popcorn and the flavor is less green but still rather boiled peanut. All ash flavor is dialed out, and there is still mountains of crema.

Day 3. Continued mellowing, and less green flavor. Other earthy notes are really starting to come through and the shots are much more delicious. Crema overflows with goodness!

Day 4. Today and tomorrow is perhaps the peak of this roast. Will be interesting to taste over the next week, if my bag of coffee lasts that long. Actually, I fear I’ll run out before the weekend! I started with five pounds on Saturday and I’m down to less than half of that.

I think the roast is right on. I’d hesitate roasting any darker. Keeping in mind that I really had this roast, and blend in mind for my equipment, Miss Silvia, and Monsieur Mazzer, as well as my own general taste preferences. I’m thinking that the next time Fabrice lets me blend and direct roasting I’ll reduce Brazil, and perhaps drop in a tiny bit of Ethiopian or another fruity coffee bean. I like a complex shot with a journey of flavors.

Flavor is big, earthy with dark chocolate. Holds up really well in milk drinks. I generally start out with a couple shots for the Home-Barista (me) and then make lattes with two double ristrettos each for my lovely wife and myself. Lately however my coffee consumption appears to have gone up and I’ve woken up several times this week with my heart pitterpattering. I suppose there is such a thing as too much caffeine.

Day 5 & Day 6. Most of the green-ness has dissipated, but lingering is a bit of a boiled peanut flavor I’m not crazy about. This morning I pulled shot after shot to try and drive out that peanut flavor. Increased and decreased temperature, increased and decreased grind, but the peanut still lingers. This blending and roasting business is hard. Will consult with Fabrice about the roast. I suspect he’ll say we are a tiny bit under roasted on one or more of the three beans. Since we roasted all three together then all three beans would require an increase in roast. That seems reasonable to me. I wonder if roasters bother to separate their beans in roasting and then combine.

Interestingly, the peanut flavor does not exist in milk drinks. This emphasizes the fact that milk tends to mask flawed shots.

Hope to roast another batch soon. I’m down to less than a pound of coffee from last week.

Ran out of coffee yesterday and so I stopped by Blue Bottle at the Ferry Building on the way home and paid the premium for a pound of Giant Steps. This is a dense bodied, choc full of choco flavors blend of Sumatra and Uganda coffees. It is advertised as a press pot / french press sort of blend, but I’m here to tell you that Monsieur Mazzer Mini and Miss Silvia dig it as much as I do.

Had to reduce the grind a full notch on Monsieur Mazzer Mini since the crema was honey dense and once I had done this the shots were picture perfect with only one of six having any hint of channeling. No bitterness, only the rich creamy choco goodness. I had two double ristrettos straight up and has as happy as a pig in mud. Then I pulled four more double ristrettos for a latte for my wife and a latte for myself.

Giant Steps is now my favorite blend. Well, my favorite until the next one. Will have to go visit Fabrice Moschetti and beg him to roast me up a big batch of his organic goodness. I much prefer to get my beans from Moschetti since Fabrice is the nicest fellow this side of the Bay, and his coffee is extra fantastic, and because I’m of the mindset of supporting my local Micro Roaster of Organic Coffee.

I got sick of my LeLit grinder, with it’s noise and it’s intolerance for darker roasted coffees. And lately I’ve been struggling with clumping coffee and the resulting channeling.

Have been on the lookout for an espresso grinder with more substantial, quieter, and larger burrs. Last week while using http://www.allofcraigs.com/ I came across a used Mazzer Mini way up in Minnesota. It was claimed to have been owned by a church as their decaf grinder in their own little cafe. It was sold as being virtually new. Well, I’ve seen enough “virtually new” things in my life to know not to hold my breath.

A week later the Mazzer Mini arrived and I unpacked it from it’s used fan box. Wrapped in bubble wrap and surrounded in foam peanuts, it survived the trip unharmed, other than a small scratch on one side. My UPS guy made a point of dropping it from about two feet up onto the concrete steps in my house, and then he high tailed it away before I could open the package and check for damage. The box was not in good shape at all.

But I lucked out and the grinder was in fantastic shape! I noticed that while unpacking, it had a major heft to it. The MIni was remarkably clean, though I took a few minutes to wipe everything down. I had a partial and older bag of coffee that I considered beyond it’s useful life to use for dialing in the grinder. I tried the setting the previous owner had, and it was a bit coarse. I ran a shot anyway to test it and of course I had about a five second pull. Way too coarse.

Changed the grind a full two numbers and that was way too far. I fiddled for a while and it turns out this grinder is very sensitive to even slight changes in the grind setting. The LeLit by contrast has a worm gear adjustment that requires a number of turns to make a difference. The Mazzer Mini would be easy to return to a setting since there is a number scale as reference. The LeLit has no scale, and you just turn the knob until you find a setting that works. The LeLit is more adjustable, but if you wanted to grind a coarse drip coffee ground it would be very time consuming to get back to your old grind. The Mazzer will be easy.

After dialing in the Mazzer Mini on old coffee I realized I had nothing to actually drink. So off I went to the NorCal Moschetti Coffee Roaster and picked up a couple bags of coffee to taste. Think I’ll get a bag of Blue Bottle on my way home tonight so I have plenty of coffee to sample in the new grinder.

Need a Mazzer Mini Owner’s Manual?

Have run about two pounds of coffee through the Mazzer Mini, and I have a few observations.

1. The Mazzer Mini is Quiet. The difference in sound volume between the LeLit and the Mazzer is night and day. The LeLit will wake up the neighbors, but the Mazzer is whisper quiet in comparison. The doser is louder than the grinding with it’s thwack, thwack, thwack.

2. The Mazzer takes a bit of getting used to. The LeLit did not have a doser, rather you hold your portafilter up to the switch on the front of the grinder and release it when you have enough ground coffee. The Mazzer has a timer that you advance to start grinding. It deposits ground coffee in the doser hopper, and then you pull the lever (thwack, thwack) to deposit coffee in your portafilter. Both grinders are messy, but the Mazzer has the potential of wasting a lot more coffee due to the hopper requiring a certain amount of coffee to be present for semi-precising measuring.

3. The LeLit has suffered from clogging of the grinding chute. The Mazzer has not yet suffered from that though I’ve read of folks having this problem.

4. The LeLit very often suffers from clumpy coffee, and the Mazzer does also. Maybe it’s a static electricity thing. All I know is that it’s a annoying. Clumps in your espresso grind do not allow perfect pulls. You end up with channeling and imperfect shots. Since the Mazzer sells for almost three times as much as the LeLit you’d think that it would perform light years ahead of the LeLit. But in my mind, so far, the Mazzer does not live up to it’s reputation. I see a zillion reviews that give it very high marks. And yet this grinder is giving me clumpy espresso. Why?

As I read some of the grinder reviews on some heavily visited coffee centric websites I am starting to wonder about the honesty of these reviews. High-end Espresso Grinder Reviews, Mazzer Mini Grinder Detailed Review. All this praise for a “high end grinder”, and yet I find it to be an imperfect machine.
More to come….

Every night after washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, I set up Miss Silvia for the next morning’s Shots of Espresso and Lattes.

I have a timer I use that has 3 pronged male and female plugs. I set it so Miss Silvia comes on a good 45 minutes before I expect to use her.
Miss Silvia is much happier when her temperature and temperament is hot and stabilized.

The portafilter is clean and inserted into the group head over night, though it is not fully tightened down. Rather it is fairly loose. The portafilter should be up to temperature so that the shots don’t cool down as you are pulling them.

On top of Miss Silvia awaits the demitasse cups and a 2 ounce shotglass. They should be warm. Sometimes I pour hot water in them right before I pull a shot so that they don’t cool the shot down also.

The milk steaming pitcher goes in the freezer overnight. This way when I start to steam the milk in the morning, I have more time to create that magic microfoam before the milk has come to 145-150 degrees Fahrenheit. Other wise you might be up to temperature and zippo foam.

For my first grind of the morning I like to dump the very first bit of ground coffee to ensure I’m getting only fresh coffee in my espresso and not a 24 hour old grind. There is a huge difference in flavor. Stale coffee is not worth our time.

Went by Fabrice Moschetti’s NorCal Coffee Roasting Business on Saturday and got to shoot the breeze with Fabrice, and taste some coffee, and get to see the new Bunn Trifecta machine he just got.

Up first was the coffee. Fabrice must have had ten or more variety of coffees to taste. I started with his 100% Kona which was it’s characteristic smooth chocolately flavor, and I followed with a taste of Yirgacheffe. This is the blue berry bomb. For some reason I tasted the fruitiness but not the blueberry. Could be my taste buds were tired. Anywho, went on to taste a few other coffees.

Then Fabrice showed me his new Bunn Trifecta, a high-tech single-cup coffee machine. It’s essentially a programmable French Press with three modes: preinfusion, turbulence and press-out. Very, interesting machine.

It was fun to watch and the Yirgacheffe I tried was delicious. It had that typical French Press, cloudiness, and richness. I then had a cup of Kenyan, that absolutely blew me away with the rich complex flavor. I fell in love with the Kenyan.

Then Fabrice said I should then re-try the Yirgacheffe, I did and once again I was blown away. The Blue Berry Bomb returned in all it’s glory, only this time it was a simple cup of coffee rather than an espresso. It’s as though the Kenyan reset my taste buds.

Wow. Now I wish I’d bought a couple bags of Kenyan Coffee, and a couple bags of Yirgacheffe to get me through the week with the most incredible coffee flavors ever.

What a marvelous visit. Do yourself a favor, if you love coffee, then go by Moschetti’s for the Freshest and Tastiest Coffee in Northern California. Moschetti has free coffee tastings most Saturdays from 9-1pm. You can also buy Fresh Slow Roasted Gourmet Coffee Online. I’m a huge fan.

Take two double restreto shots of espresso, pour over 3 1/2 teaspoons of brown sugar. Stir to dissolve. Pour over ice in a tall glass, top with half and half.

Drink, be cool, and feel good.

Your grinder will build up all sorts of interesting coffee oils and residue. Eventually it will taint your espresso and coffee. Clean your grinder by running some uncooked rice through it until you no longer get brown, ground rice.

Now your coffee and espresso will taste fresher and not have that taint.

Oh the horror of taint.

As an experiment, run a shot, without coffee in your espresso machine into a clean cup. Smell it. Taste it. Smell or taste anything? You shouldn’t. Clean your machine so your espresso will have a pure, clean, unadulterated flavor.

Take your shower screen off as well as any other pieces that come apart in this area, and scrub it clean and maybe use some citric acid or vinegar to get all those old coffee oils off. Rinse, dry and reassemble.

Descale your water tank using any commercially available coffee pot cleaners or you can use citric acid.

Run lots of clean fresh water through your machine. Now repeat the shot of water with no coffee. Smell. Taste. Now isn’t that better?

At long last I have a Cummins diesel powered Dodge Ram for hauling my boat. There’s a magical sound these diesels make that gives me goose bumps and makes me smile long after I’ve climbed down from the driver’s seat.

I’ve been looking at these trucks for quite a while now and lusting after them. But I’ve found it difficult to justify spending a wad money on a new or newish used one, since the truck will primarily be used to towing my 22′ Tolman Skiff Jumbo (a wooden boat). The old 2000 Dakota towed the boat fine with it’s 4.7 liter V-8, but it tended to get pushed around by the boat. And long runs up the hills in the heat of summer tended to tax the Dakota.

And so I looked for a truck. Then my friend Bruce A. in Santa Barbara said he had a buddy, Bill, who was thinking of selling his 97 Ram CTD (Cummins Turbo Diesel). He thought about it for over a year, but finally agreed that once he had a new replacement vehicle, he’d sell it to me. At times it seemed like the Cummins Gods were trying to keep the truck in Bill’s driveway. But finally everything came together, and I bought a plane ticket, shortly thereafter flew out of Sacramento and landed in sunny Santa Barbara. Picked up the truck, and headed back to Northern California. I attempted to stay in the sweet spot of 60mph for the 300 mile trip home, but after an hour I got bored and sped up to 65mph. And once I got close to San Jose, I sped up to 70mph.

This is a big and heavy truck with lots of windage. And yet I still managed to get 18 mpg. The Dakota on the other hand would have been hard pressed to get 15-16mpg, and it’s half the weight and has half the towing capacity.

The Truck.

This is a 1997 California Dodge Ram 2500 (3/4 ton) 4×4 truck with automatic transmission, Club Cab, and 8 foot bed. It’s big, and it’s long. The truck came with a camper shell, Goodyear BFG tires, and Edelbrock shocks. Other than this the truck is stock. The truck has 180,000 miles on which sounds high, but for a Cummins diesel this is actually low miles. I think Cummins claims these motors on average will go 350k miles before requiring overhaul. Many folks who take good care of these motors see 500k, 750k, and even 1million miles. This truck came with all the maintenance records and it’s clear it’s been well taken care of.

As I drive the truck I find a few irritating things. Number one is this truck suffers from a wandering, less than precise steering. At one point in it’s life it had the front end completely rebuilt. That was perhaps 80k miles ago, and it’s obvious it needs attention again. It’s also on it’s third set of shocks, and so far has seen a seen a set of Rancho shocks and now the current Edelbrock shocks. I think they’ve seen better days also. I’m sitting on the fence as to what shocks to get next. I’ve had KYB’s on my old Chrysler, and on the Dakota, and they gave new surefooted feeling to both vehicles. The ride is not so comfortable though. The Dakota actually felt like a truck after installation of KYBs. Before this it had a rather squishy or flabby ride. The Ram has a rough 3/4 truck ride but still feels a bit skittish with the wonky front end, and questionable shocks. When I picked up the truck it felt as though it had pillows on all four tires. I found tire inflation to be around 50-55psi. Max inflation on these D rated tires to be 65psi. The stock tires on a Ram are E rated tires and typically use 80psi in the rears and 65psi in the fronts. Big difference. I inflated the tires to 61psi and the truck no longer feels squishy, but it still feels like it needs suspension help.

The California model of this truck is different in that it has an EGR valve, and a catalytic converter to meet California emissions. While the EGR may mean cleaner emissions, the trade off is lower diesel mileage, and introducing soot into the engine. The Catalytic converters on these trucks are known to get clogged up with age, and I wonder how clogged up it is on a truck with 180k on the odometer. I’m thinking of going to a muffler shop and having this removed for inspection. I want to be a good citizen and keep the truck emissions down as designed by Cummins and Dodge, but at some point you have to consider that the trade offs might not balance out. At the same time I’m contemplating the EGR and Catalytic Converter I’m also looking for a steady source of bio diesel, which in my mind counters removal of any emissions equipment. Maybe I’m wrong.

Update: I changed out the Edelbrock shocks with a set of Bilsteins. It turned into over day of wrenching to get the old ones off and the new ones on. Problem number one is that the mechanic who installed the Edelbrock’s must have used an air gun to tighten the bolts. I used a 26″ x 1/2″ breaker bar to loosen the rear shocks and I needed both legs pushing on the breaker bar to finally break them loose. Finally got them off, and then found that it was impossible to install the new shocks because the old mounts had been crushed by the extreme tightening, and I also, found that the mounts on the shocks themselves had been ground down to fit the crushed mounts. I ended up beating the hell out of mounts on the truck with a 5lb sledge hammer to open them up. What a pain. All bolts got a liberal coating of anti-seize to help then next person who changes out shocks.

Up next were the front shocks. These were overtightened as well, but the persuasion bar worked fine here. The top mounts were fun because the two nuts on the passenger side were cross threaded. Joy. The driver’s side wasn’t so bad for the nuts, but there wasn’t much room to use a wrench. Ended up buying some crummy Harbor Freight ratcheting box wrenches. Sigh. Wonder how long they’ll last.

Installing the front shocks were just as painful for the bottom mounts since they too were crushed, and the lower mounts on the shocks themselves had been pretty severely ground down to fit in. I beat on the mounts forever and tried using a big pry bar to spread them. Finally gave up and took a large bastard file to the mounts on the shocks and took off a little bit of steel. They dropped right in and I was on the final journey to finishing the shocks.

While laying under the truck smashing the mounts with Thor’s hammer, and finally my hand, twice, I thought of tool that is a shock mount spreaders I would invent. It would just be a heavy steal bar welded on to a tapered piece of steal that would be just slightly wider than the spec’d mount inner dimensions. You’d just stick it in the mount and the tapered end would guide the tool in. After reaching resistance you’d just hammer the tool in the rest of the way, and then put a wrench on the tool to turn it and help break it lose. A more sophisticated version would have an expandable mount expander. You tighten up a bolt to spread the mount, and loosen to retract the tool.

Up next: Upper and lower ball joints. I’ve decided to let my mechanic friend, Dario, take the truck to his work place and have him to the ball joints. I’m tired of hurting myself with big hammers. When he’s done with the truck then I’ll be doing the rest of the front end. This will involve using Luke’s Links to repair the TrackBar, Tie Rod ends etc. It’s the least I can do, as I bond with my large white Dodge with the mighty Cummins Turbo Diesel.

Near future: My first trip to Lake Berryessa of the year and the first official towing job for the Dodge found me fearing that we might not make it back home. Crawling up the hills on the approach to the lake, the transmission, with overdrive off, would shift from what I think was 2nd to 3rd, and then make a rather unsettling grinding noise. This was after the shift, and while under power and still climbing. I think it slipped a bit also. Several weeks before, when I wasn’t towing but while I was climbing a really tight and steep road in Santa Rosa, I heard a similar sound and felt slippage. I thought at the time that the rear tires were breaking lose. But now I’m not so sure. And so I think that the good folks at LeftCoastDiesel.com will be getting a visit from me. They have a good reputation for building some super heavy duty Dodge transmissions to handle enormous amounts of horsepower. And who knows, perhaps I’ll have them breath on the mighty Cummins and coax some more horsepower and torque to help me on the towing climbs I plan on making to Lake Tahoe, Lake Berryessa and beyond.

I’ve noticed that my favorite baristas tend to give me Feminine or Masculine Shots of Espresso.

Charlie (gal) almost always makes sweet, complex and velvety shots with no bitterness.

Brian (guy) almost always makes rich, dark chocolate,and complex earthy shots with no bitterness.

The other guys and gals tend to follow the same path depending on their gender.

Very, very interesting.

I like both kinds of shots, and I suppose more than anything, I like to be pleasantly surprised by new flavors.