Halloween Chili

As much as I love coffee,there are some things that it does not go with. Chili and taco bell are too good examples. I do not know how many times I have done the latter to myself and have suffered the dire consequences of out of control bladder explosions. Thankfully, my seven years of working two blocks away from a Starbucks and Taco Bell (7 fucking years now, really?) have made me a bit immune to the old taco buck cha cha's.

Chili is another story. Especially my special Halloween chili, which is a bubbly oozing mass of beans, meat, spices, and five different peppers, including the ultra rare scary pepper that comes from deep within the jungles of a whole other continent somewhere. Too much of the scary pepper can make you shit yourself, like you just saw a ghost, hence its name. I only add one or two of these bad boys to a whole pot.

I know better than to ever mix my coffee obsession with a bowl of my Halloween chili. I know that if I do, I might end up looking like my friend Pierre here. Pierre just did not want to listen to me. I told not to mix the two, but the motherfucker was too lazy to cook up some eggs and toast. It had been a crazy night of trick or treating and sacrificing virgins to the goat god, and Pierre might have been just a little hung over to realize the danger he was getting himself into. He should have fucking listened to me.

I guess i could have gotten off the couch and swatted the bowl of bubbling death and liquid acid out of his hands, but I was also a bit wrecked from a evening of overindulging in the big batch I had brought over to the sacrifical rites pot luck that our neighborhood was having. The cup of El Salvadorian Wet Process I had brewed up in my Chemex was doing a number on my guts, and it had taken several bong hits to calm it. Still, I should have done something other than yell, "Pierre, what the fuck are you doing? That combination is going to make your guts explode dude," without barely looking away from the Wii game that I was halfassedly playing.

I will have to live with that forever.

I will also have to live with Pierre for a while. His exploding bits got all over my kitchen and it is going to be a nightmare to clean it all up. I might even have to move now. I just hope the cops do not ask me about the hefty trash bags I left on the curb.

Happy Halloween everyone.

Like some cokehead on a family outing, I nearly drove myself up the wall  when I ran out of my Chemex brewing filters the other day. My favorite coffee oriented (Sweet Marias) business was  out of them when I made my big monthy purchase last week.  Curses, it was back to French Pressing.  Thankfully, when I checked back this Monday, they had gotten some more in so I bought some, along with a few more pounders that looked good enough to sample

Two were Costa Rican  something or the others ( Helsar and Herbazu) which, until recently, were being stored in some air tight vault like some disney masterpiece. I figured if a coffee is worth putting away for a rainy day, then it gotta be good. I also got a Brazilian Ipanemian  dry tree process. I had a taste of some other girls from Ipanema and was not to impressed, hopefully this tastes a little better. 

This time I got myself two packs of the filters, vowing that I will never run out of chemex filters again. Coffee from anything else just does not taste the same. Once you go Chemex, you can never g.... ummm  Shit. I guess that saying just does not work unless you can think of something to rhyme with chemex. I can't think of anything. Can You?

Anyway, sorry this post does not have any "porn" theme, next one will, I promise. I got myself a new FoodSaver to help keep my coffee fresh. I know I can think of something dirty about that. 

Hot steamy Ethiopian DP action

I guess you can say that I have a sort of a thing for Ethiopian grown coffees. To me, they just taste better than anything that comes out of South America. You might also say I have a little thing for dry processed coffee beans. I guess I enjoy the complex underlying flavors that a dry processed coffee has when compared to the clean taste of the wet process. I cannot, however, claim to have any sort of a thing for organically grown coffee. Even though I have tasted some pretty damn spectacular organic coffees, I cannot claim to have a preference for them. I think this has to do with some bland taste experiences I have had with some so-called premium organic coffees some years back. This initial experience turned me off of organic coffee for quite some time, and only now am I willing to once again delve into the big O. So anyway, one of the coffees that I recently obtained from good old Sweet Maria's happens to Ethiopian, dry processed and organic, which totally brings this introductory paragraph together.

The beans of this Ethiopian Organic DP -Dale Yirga Alem, are quite small. They seem to almost look like peaberries as opposed to regular coffee beans. I decided to roast them at my usual 24 minute roast, which is I like to start all the beans out at and then tweak from there. The beans got to a nice full city roast, becoming dark brown with a slight amount of gloss. The next day, I brewed a nice pot of the stuff in my Chemex brewer and was blown away by how good it turned out. It had strong earthy undertones and a pleasant berry aftertaste that left me yearning for more. There is just something about a DP that I love. I guess, I like my coffee a little dirty, in contrast to clean and bright like other people and this Dale Yirga Alem us definitely a little dirty. But, just like my GF, it is dirty in a good way.

This coffee has now become my new favorite coffee in my stash, which is not a surprise since I have a tendency to pick a new favorite coffee every week. When compared to the the Colombian "perros bravos" it comes out as the winner, hands down. The comparison verdict is still out between it and the Yeman Moki, that I still need to explore, by have a feeling that it will remain undefeated until at least next month. After this coffee, I guess a cannot be dissing the organics anymore.

Further notes: The second day pot of the stuff was not as mind blowing as the first day. This is unusual since most coffee tends to get better on the second or thrd day of rest. Perhaps this coffee is an exception and has a flavor peak of just a day. I think I need to look into this a little more before, I render a full verdict.