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TX-Coffee.com… now in Barista Magazine
With the TX-Coffee.com Mug. (yyyup)
For those of you who are familiar with Barista Magazine probably already know about his little blurb we got.
If you’re NOT familiar with Barista Magazine, you should be!
It’s the only trade magazine with content that actually matters for folks serious about their business (or barista skills.. or just hands-on coffee in general).
If you’ve seen it, you probably also know that the Champ is on the cover.
Congrats James!
I hope this FOAM section helps bring new readers and new enthusiasm for great coffee in Texas.
Happy Halloween
Be Safe! And have fun.
Pumpkin Pie and a great Cup of Coffee make great table pals.
Buna Bean Coffee – Ennis, TX
Buna Bean Coffee
http://www.bunabean.com/
I received an email yesterday from a gentleman named Jess from Ennis, TX. He wanted to inform the community of the birth of a new roasting outfit in TX!
Mr. Haupt wrote,
My name is Jess Haupt and I am starting a coffee roasting company in Ennis, Texas called Buna Bean Coffee. We should be roasting within a month.
We will be offering custom blends for indivduals in 1# bags. You will be able to order on line. The customer will be able to choose from 4 single country origins to make their own blend.
We will also be offering 9 different single country origin coffees.
I am raosting on a Diedrich IR 12.
I am looking forward to roasting the best beans and (to) educate my community on specialty coffee.
This is not the first roasting outfit to offer custom blending, and not the first in Texas, but it’s very cool to see it so blatantly put forward as an available product!
I’d like to wish Jess all the best in his entrance into the coffee industry, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Buna Bean has to offer!
G.W.Bush and C.Rice: An Abbott and Costello Parody (coffee?)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHMPGZkp-tk]
(originally found in the TX-Coffee.com forums)
Big Bend Coffee Roasters – Marfa, TX
I received an email today from Jeanne Sinclair at Big Bend Coffee Roasters with some information about who they are and what they do. Jeanne says,
Big Bend Coffee Roasters is small, independent coffee roastery located in Marfa, Texas. We roast only the finest coffees that are both 100% ORGANIC and 100% FAIR TRADE certified and we roast to order. That means we only roast your coffee after we receive your order, and we ship within one business day of order placement.
We have built our business on offering exceptional quality at a reasonable price. For information, please contact us at your convenience: Monday – Friday, at (866)731-1811, or jeanne@bigbendcoffee.com. Let us know what we can do to earn your business, and come visit us in Marfa!
And all this time, I never knew. Has anyone tried any of their coffee?
Fall, Coffee, and Blends
While I am not generally such a fan of blends, sometimes a skilled blender can throw together a combination of coffees that direct the senses to relish in the cooler weather, diminishing daylight, and the dying of leaves.
How common are seasonal blends?
I can think, off the top of my head, of quite a few roasters who will offer flavored coffee as a “holiday blend”.. although the coffee itself is not a blend. In my mind, this is the wrong approach. We want to taste the coffee, not the flavoring. If we wanted brownie flavored liquid, we’d order a hot chocolate, or just stay at home and whip up some Swiss Miss.
Every year, Starbucks has a Christmas blend. They start it a little early (November) and let it run until usually around mid January.
My question, dear readers, is how many of you like the idea of a seasonal blend?
Are there any TX roasters putting out any seasonal blends worth noting?
I’m genuinely curious to know. Even as someone who generally doesn’t like the idea of the blending of individual coffees, I quite like the idea of an annual blend to commemorate the season. If nothing else, it’s something to look forward to every year to keep customers coming back out of curiosity, if not anticipation.
Welcome, Cafe Gallo!
Grand Opening in San Antonio!
Cafe Gallo, in the Gallista Gallery
1913 S. Flores Street, San Antonio, TX
Google Map and Directions
Just a quick note here that tomorrow, Saturday 13 October, is the grand opening of a new espresso bar on San Antonio’s up and coming South Flores corridor.
Cafe Gallo, tucked inside one of the area’s avant galleries known as the Gallista Gallery, is headed by Jason Garcia, a former culinary boundary pusher with the luminous likes of La Reve and Biga on the Banks on his resume. The grand opening will coincide with a new South Flores area visual and performing arts event known as Second Saturday Smart Fair, with events for all ages such as visual art, live music, theater, film and video, poetry, workshops and food. The area is adjacent to the hip Southtown area of San Antonio and is a haven hole for chic and trendy artists and scenesters alike.
The staff at Cafe Gallo have been trained by Texas Coffee People’s very own Jason Haeger of Espresso Trainer.com and will feature a small lineup of espresso beverages, single-origin drip coffee created via manual pour-overs, and a focused menu of homemade Mexican pastries and sandwiches.
While Jason Garcia and his small crew are very excited to be opening, they are viewing this as a very first step in what promises to be an ever-evolving coffee and culinary experience that takes advantage of the blossoming South Flores loft and condo corridor on San Antonio’s southside.
Grand opening events at Cafe Gallo will kick off sometime around 1pm. The cafe and gallery is located at 1319 S. Flores Street.
Let’s Keep It Rollin’
Piggybacking on Jason’s last post about sustainability, I was reading today about a new book raising lots of interestingly difficult issues about our (humans’) presence on this earth.
The book is called The World Without Us, by a fellow name Alan Weisman, and it is, as the title implies, a work of educated speculation about what the world would be like at some distant point in the future, uh, without us. It’s basically the usual humdrumage of self-promotion wrapped in “thought provoking” attire, complete with their current New York Times ranking on the best-sellers’ list. (Ah yes, the New York Times. The paper of record, of course. Now it’s officially a good book.) It also has some cool interactive pieces that give you a visual of the stunningly shameful way we have impacted our environment. I had to remind myself it was a book they are selling, after all, and not a enviro-religio fatwa to pack up and move to the mountains to get off the proverbial grid. 40 years ago it was, “Our planet is becoming overpopulated. There are almost one billion people here now.” 30 years ago it was, “The earth is cooling rapidly. We’re heading into another ice age.” Recently that was replaced with, “Uh-oh, the earth isn’t cooling; it’s actually warming up!” Today, it’s, “Plastics will be around for a stinking loooong time and eventually little tiny microbes will be all that’s left on the planet; but it’s okay, they’ll figure out how to eat plastics.” That’s the summary of the book, as best as I can tell from the web site’s synopses and preview clips.
Anyways, at this point in this blog post, if you’re still with me, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with coffee. Not much. Except…except to say that we are guilty of our own environmental foibles as an industry, despite all our window dressing to the contrary. We need to fess up to the fact that many of our retail stores don’t have separate receptacles for plastic, newspapers, aluminum and glass. Or that we are still just realizing that paper cups don’t biodegrade so well in sealed landfills but ceramic uses the equivalent resources to make as some 35,000 paper cups. (A good tradeoff?) Or that we waste electricity by leaving our espresso machines on overnight because we don’t want to have to get to the shop that much earlier in the morning to let it warm up.
And so forth. My point is not to cast aspersions on us as an industry. I’m just saying skimming through this book’s website got me thinking a little bit about doing my part to reduce the size of my environmental footprint in the industry in which I work.
Here’s a YouTube teaser:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBpWHHZ2eME]
Let’s Keep It Rollin’
Piggybacking on Jason’s last post about sustainability, I was reading today about a new book raising lots of interestingly difficult issues about our (humans’) presence on this earth.
The book is called The World Without Us, by a fellow name Alan Weisman, and it is, as the title implies, a work of educated speculation about what the world would be like at some distant point in the future, uh, without us. It’s basically the usual humdrumage of self-promotion wrapped in “thought provoking” attire, complete with their current New York Times ranking on the best-sellers’ list. (Ah yes, the New York Times. The paper of record, of course. Now it’s officially a good book.) It also has some cool interactive pieces that give you a visual of the stunningly shameful way we have impacted our environment. I had to remind myself it was a book they are selling, after all, and not a enviro-religio fatwa to pack up and move to the mountains to get off the proverbial grid. 40 years ago it was, “Our planet is becoming overpopulated. There are almost one billion people here now.” 30 years ago it was, “The earth is cooling rapidly. We’re heading into another ice age.” Recently that was replaced with, “Uh-oh, the earth isn’t cooling; it’s actually warming up!” Today, it’s, “Plastics will be around for a stinking loooong time and eventually little tiny microbes will be all that’s left on the planet; but it’s okay, they’ll figure out how to eat plastics.” That’s the summary of the book, as best as I can tell from the web site’s synopses and preview clips.
Anyways, at this point in this blog post, if you’re still with me, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with coffee. Not much. Except…except to say that we are guilty of our own environmental foibles as an industry, despite all our window dressing to the contrary. We need to fess up to the fact that many of our retail stores don’t have separate receptacles for plastic, newspapers, aluminum and glass. Or that we are still just realizing that paper cups don’t biodegrade so well in sealed landfills but ceramic uses the equivalent resources to make as some 35,000 paper cups. (A good tradeoff?) Or that we waste electricity by leaving our espresso machines on overnight because we don’t want to have to get to the shop that much earlier in the morning to let it warm up.
And so forth. My point is not to cast aspersions on us as an industry. I’m just saying skimming through this book’s website got me thinking a little bit about doing my part to reduce the size of my environmental footprint in the industry in which I work.
Here’s a YouTube teaser:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBpWHHZ2eME]
Let’s Keep It Rollin’
Piggybacking on Jason’s last post about sustainability, I was reading today about a new book raising lots of interestingly difficult issues about our (humans’) presence on this earth.
The book is called The World Without Us, by a fellow name Alan Weisman, and it is, as the title implies, a work of educated speculation about what the world would be like at some distant point in the future, uh, without us. It’s basically the usual humdrumage of self-promotion wrapped in “thought provoking” attire, complete with their current New York Times ranking on the best-sellers’ list. (Ah yes, the New York Times. The paper of record, of course. Now it’s officially a good book.) It also has some cool interactive pieces that give you a visual of the stunningly shameful way we have impacted our environment. I had to remind myself it was a book they are selling, after all, and not a enviro-religio fatwa to pack up and move to the mountains to get off the proverbial grid. 40 years ago it was, “Our planet is becoming overpopulated. There are almost one billion people here now.” 30 years ago it was, “The earth is cooling rapidly. We’re heading into another ice age.” Recently that was replaced with, “Uh-oh, the earth isn’t cooling; it’s actually warming up!” Today, it’s, “Plastics will be around for a stinking loooong time and eventually little tiny microbes will be all that’s left on the planet; but it’s okay, they’ll figure out how to eat plastics.” That’s the summary of the book, as best as I can tell from the web site’s synopses and preview clips.
Anyways, at this point in this blog post, if you’re still with me, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with coffee. Not much. Except…except to say that we are guilty of our own environmental foibles as an industry, despite all our window dressing to the contrary. We need to fess up to the fact that many of our retail stores don’t have separate receptacles for plastic, newspapers, aluminum and glass. Or that we are still just realizing that paper cups don’t biodegrade so well in sealed landfills but ceramic uses the equivalent resources to make as some 35,000 paper cups. (A good tradeoff?) Or that we waste electricity by leaving our espresso machines on overnight because we don’t want to have to get to the shop that much earlier in the morning to let it warm up.
And so forth. My point is not to cast aspersions on us as an industry. I’m just saying skimming through this book’s website got me thinking a little bit about doing my part to reduce the size of my environmental footprint in the industry in which I work.
Here’s a YouTube teaser:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBpWHHZ2eME]
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